Prayer Tip--The Lord’s Prayer

I took a wonderful class years ago focused on the prayer we will read about in the GPS this week. The purpose of this class was to help us look at the prayer Jesus taught and reflect on exactly how we could live out this prayer every day.

There were rules about our reflections, the main one being that we could not add anything or subtract anything, and nothing we claimed as actions to live out this prayer could be even a little bit contrary to the simple and powerful words Jesus gave us.

As the enthusiastic pastor said at the time, “You do not riff* off of the Word of God!”

There are still some notes from this class in the notebook I kept at the time:

Your kingdom come come, your will be done – how we live, how we treat each other – with understanding, with love. Later on, with a different pen, I added and how we treat ourselves.

Give us this day our daily bread – what we really need, how we fill our days, focus our lives
Forgive us as we forgive those to act against us – forgiveness without judgement just as God forgives us… (Wow…that’s a hard one!)

And on it goes. You get the idea. It’s a pretty good exercise for reflection on prayer and our connection with God. Try it out!

In the end, that’s why Jesus gave us instructions for our conversations with God. So we would connect and reflect and get out of our own heads to make room for God’s word.

* riff – “To speak or improvise at length on a particular subject or theme, often in a humorous way.”