Theopedia

Lords Prayer

“Pray then like this: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

— Matthew 6:9-13 (ESV)

Definition

The Lord’s Prayer is the pattern of prayer Christ gave his disciples in answer to their request, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1), recorded in full at Matthew 6:9-13 and in shorter form at Luke 11:2-4. The Westminster Shorter Catechism calls it “the special rule of direction” for prayer: not the only words a believer may pray, but the pattern every other prayer should follow.1 It consists of three parts, a preface (“Our Father in heaven”), a series of petitions, and a concluding doxology (“for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever, Amen”).2

Confessional Witness

The Lord’s Prayer belongs to the Reformed catechetical tradition more than to any single confession’s own chapters, and the Westminster Shorter and Larger Catechisms, together with Calvin’s Geneva Catechism, treat it at comparable length and in the same way: a dedicated question for the preface, one for each petition, and one for the conclusion.123 The Shorter Catechism opens by defining prayer itself, “an offering up of our desires unto God, for things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgement of his mercies,” before turning to the Lord’s Prayer as the rule that governs it.4 The Larger Catechism’s preface question adds that praying “Our Father” also teaches believers “to pray with and for others,” since the prayer is addressed throughout in the plural, not the first person singular.5

Biblical Basis

Calvin observes that the prayer’s six petitions divide into two unequal groups. “In every part of the prayer the first place is assigned to the glory of God,” but this is “more especially the object of the three first petitions, in which we are to look to the glory of God alone, without any reference to what is called our own advantage.” Only “the three remaining petitions are devoted to our interest.”6 The first three petitions ask that God’s name be hallowed, his kingdom come, and his will be done; the last three ask for daily bread, forgiveness of sins, and deliverance from temptation and evil.

The Shorter Catechism works through each petition on this basis. The first petition, “hallowed be thy name,” asks that God would enable believers “to glorify him in all that whereby he maketh himself known,” and that he would “dispose all things to his own glory.”7 The second, “thy kingdom come,” prays that “Satan’s kingdom may be destroyed,” that “the kingdom of grace may be advanced,” and that “the kingdom of glory may be hastened.”8 The fourth petition, “give us this day our daily bread,” asks not for riches but “a competent portion of the good things of this life.”9 The fifth, “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Matthew’s wording; Luke’s parallel reads “forgive us our sins,” Luke 11:4), asks that God would “freely pardon all our sins,” an asking made bolder, not more anxious, by the reminder that believers are already enabled by grace to forgive others.10 The sixth, “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” asks that God would either keep believers from being tempted to sin or sustain them under temptation.11

Historical Development

The prayer’s own wording has occasioned little Reformed dispute, but its exposition became a fixture of Reformed catechesis almost from the Reformation’s beginning. Calvin’s 1545 Geneva Catechism works through the prayer in a long sequence of questions and answers as part of its own instruction in prayer, and elsewhere in the same catechism returns to the first petition to make a point about worship generally: “when we pray that his name may be hallowed, we pray that he may be duly glorified in his works, that he may be regarded as great and excellent… in a word, that no wickedness may tend to lessen or obscure his majesty.”3 The Westminster Assembly, a century later, built its own catechisms’ Lord’s Prayer questions on the same petition-by-petition pattern, in both the brief Shorter Catechism and the fuller Larger Catechism.12

Puritan preaching carried the same exposition further still. Thomas Watson’s A Body of Practical Divinity (1692), itself a series of sermons on the Shorter Catechism, devotes an extended sequence of sermons to the Lord’s Prayer alone, unpacking each phrase at a length the catechisms themselves only summarize. On the first petition, Watson explains that to “hallow” God’s name is to hold “an high appretiation and esteem of God,” to “set him highest in our thoughts,” conceiving of him “as the most super-excellent and infinite good.”12

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Shorter Catechism (London, 1648), Q. 98-99. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. The Larger Catechism (London, 1648), Q. 187-188. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. John Calvin, Catechism of the Church of Geneva (1545), Q. 299. ↩ ↩2

  4. The Shorter Catechism, Q. 98. ↩

  5. The Larger Catechism, Q. 189. ↩

  6. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 3, chap. 20, sec. 35, 184. ↩

  7. The Shorter Catechism, Q. 101. ↩

  8. The Shorter Catechism, Q. 102. ↩

  9. The Shorter Catechism, Q. 104. ↩

  10. The Shorter Catechism, Q. 105. ↩

  11. The Shorter Catechism, Q. 106. ↩

  12. Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity: Consisting of Above One Hundred and Seventy-Six Sermons on the Lesser Catechism (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1692), 447. ↩