How NOT to pray
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . . (Matthew 6:9) How many lips have formed these words since the Lord Jesus first taught them? How many languages have uttered them? How many different people, in how many different circumstances, have bowed their heads and hearts to pray as Jesus famously instructs? The dying has prayed it. The uneducated have prayed it. The unbelieving and villainous have even prayed for it. Children have prayed for it. The great and wise have found room for it. Every continent on earth has heard it whispered. Tribes in remote villages and kings in tall palaces have bowed and repeated after the Jewish prophet from Nazareth. Has there been a prayer more prayed; have there been words more often spoken? “For some of our wandering prayer lives, the best thing for us to learn is how not to pray.” And yet, for as many as have repeated our Master’s teaching on how to pray, how many can repeat what words come directly before them — namely, the ones teachi