The Lord’s Prayer Meaning: Our Father Who Art In Heaven

So Jesus hit upon an ingenious solution. He told his followers that he came not to do away with the prophets but to complete them.¹ This gave him plenty of breathing room to teach the gospel of Christ. Unfortunately, the people of Israel again took his words at face value. They viewed it as evidence that their earthly messiah had arrived. Thus we find the Gospel writers continually trying to neatly package Jesus’s life as the culmination of Jewish prophecy.²

Jesus’s difficulty was that while he needed to speak in terms that his followers could understand, he also wanted to break away from religious orthodoxy.³ Therefore, it is likely that he chose to call God a father (rather than a mother) for reasons other than simply following Judaic tradition. But what are they? Well, if we stop to reflect on the bonds between parent and child, we often recognize two distinctly different (but equally important) kinds of love—which in turn give rise to two different kinds of relationships.

Although the roles of mothers and fathers are often in flux, and have changed in recent decades, the larger archetypes of what motherhood and fatherhood represent remain the same. As the earth gives birth to life, our mothers give birth to us. They suckle us at their breasts and teach important life lessons along the way. After we leave home, we expect them to always offer encouragement, unconditional love, and our old rooms should the world get too rough. Our fathers’ love is a different matter. There we find the firmer hand. The kind of love that encourages us to action, to get up off our butts and do something!

Just as the “mother’s” love presses us to her bosom, the “father’s” pushes us out the door. As children, we often don’t go willingly, but crying and grinding our teeth,⁴ because we were so happy playing indoors. Then, as the years pass, we venture outside more and more. We want to please our dads and make them proud. We want to live up in some way to their high expectations. This is the reason Jesus calls out to our “Father” in heaven at the beginning of The Lord’s Prayer. It’s his reminder to us that God’s love is a call to action:⁵ a call to live up to our divine potential, to experience life more abundantly, to make his kingdom come.

Read Chapter 2: Hallowed Be Thy Name (Understanding God’s Identity)

You have been reading Chapter 1 from the book The Living Hour: The Lord’s Prayer for Daily Life (with New Testament Gospels). This faith book on life and the power of the The Lord’s Prayer is available for purchase in trade paperback below.

If you appreciate the work of LivingHour.org, please support us today by linking to our website. We also welcome your financial support. You can make your secure online donation via PayPal by clicking the following icon:

 

Buy the Trade Paperback for $15.99

1. “Do not think that I have come to do away with the law or the prophets; I have not come to do away with them, but to complete them. – Matthew 5:17 [↩]
2. This happened in fulfillment of these words by the prophet: 5 ‘Say to the daughter of Zion: Behold, thy King is coming to thee, Gentle, and riding on an ass, and on the foal of a beast of burden.” – Matthew 21:4-5 [↩]
3. So the Pharisees and the teachers of the law asked Jesus this question: “How is it that your disciples do not follow the traditions of our ancestors, but eat their food with defiled hands?” 6 His answer was: “It was well said by Isaiah when he prophesied about you hypocrites in the words: ‘This is a people that honor me with their lips, While their hearts are far removed from me; 7 But vainly do they worship me, For they teach but the precepts of men.’ – Mark 7:5-7 [↩]
4. Then the king said to the attendants: ‘Tie him hand and foot, and ‘put him out into the darkness’ outside, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.’ Matthew 13:41-43 [↩]
5. But those who act upon the truth come to the light, that their actions born in God may be made manifest. – John 3:21 [↩]