Many of us began praying in childhood, but as we matured into adulthood, our prayers did not. The Lord’s Prayer was the model prayer that Jesus taught because it reflects a mature theology for the grown up world we live in. What do mature prayers look like? The goal of this series is to to transform how you see the Lord’s Prayer and how you can pray it everyday with passion and meaning.

The challenge of prayer is that many of us aren’t exactly sure how the whole thing works. Jesus uncomplicated prayer by inviting us to frame up prayer in a new and different way. He invited us to pray to “Our Father”. Because of Jesus, we pray as children of God. Jesus gave us a familial relationship with God. He wants us to come to him as children of a loving father who don’t care about the right words and don’t care about bugging him too much.

There’s an assumption that most of us carry into prayer. We assume that the purpose of prayer is to get stuff from God. But what if that weren’t the purpose of prayer at all? Or, what if that’s just one of the purposes of prayer, but not the main one? When Jesus taught us how to pray, he taught us that there’s a critical step to take before we ask God to move in our direction and do something for us. It’s to move in God’s direction and willingly submit to whatever he wants to do… and to be fine with that.

Now that we have learned to align our hearts with the glory and will of God, we are ready to bring our requests to the king. Now that our hearts are aligned it is safe to receive his blessings. The temptation of the human heart is to put our trust in God’s blessings, rather than in God who blesses us. By praying for daily bread, we train our souls to see the reality that we are daily dependent on our good Father to provide our every need.

What’s wrong with us and why is it so hard to change? The answer to that question is found in the Lord’s Prayer. “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” The key is repentance.  Resentence is the key that gives access to canceled debts, and the freedom to cancel our debtors. But repentance is often misunderstood. It doesn’t grow out of shame. It doesn’t grow out of frustration. Repentance only grows out of love. Only when you see God’s love can you repent. And only when you repent that you can be free.

Prayer is not just a way to deal with guilt and shame after a lapse or failure. It is also a way to avoid their occurring. In this psalm, the narrator tells us that his feet almost slipped because of his self pity and the discouragement that followed when his heart turned away from God. But through prayer, he experienced a reorientation of his heart that rescued him from the spiritual peril he place himself in. This message will show how to use prayer in a specific way to avoid temptation and find deliverance from evil. 

Now we have the Jesus template for prayer, but there’s one more aspect to prayer that we want to learn from Jesus. He didn’t teach us to have dignified prayers. He taught us to pray in a way that it real, raw, authentic, and – well…obnoxious in its boldness. He told us to relentlessly pray until God is so annoyed by your prayers, he finally decides to answer.