The Lord’s prayer is a beautiful example of how Jesus taught us to focus on the goodness of God and His care as a loving father. It shows how important it was to Jesus that we declare the coming of God’s Kingdom and that His perfect will come to pass. There is power in our declarations. Even science is catching up to what the bible has been telling us all along. Our words have power, not only over ourselves but over our environment. This should have been obvious, of course. We can see in our own lives how negative, angry words cause damage and positive words are uplifting and bring peace.
Speaking words of worship and prayer is what Jesus taught. When He showed His disciples how to pray, He told them to, first of all, magnify God. We do this to remind ourselves, not Him, of His greatness. It makes a huge difference to us if we recognize that God is bigger than our problems. Our words should be used to elicit the Kingdom of God and God’s perfect will on earth.
Jesus also demonstrated God’s heart for mankind when He was on earth by forgiving sins, healing the sick, driving out demons and accepting all those that society rejected. This song also carries the reminder that it is not God who tempts us or as James 1:13 puts it: ‘When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me’. For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone’. Blaming God for our faults is not only ridiculous, but it also takes away the chance that acknowledging our faults gives us to grow and change into a better version of ourselves.
The most mind-blowing thing for me in starting to get to know God’s heart was to finally understand that the God, who created everything, hears my prayers and responds to my faith. The closer we get to God and His heart, the more we want to pray His will because when we understand that He only wants good for us and He knows all things, it only makes sense that His will for us would be better than anything we could come up with for ourselves. This changes our prayer life. How much better would it be to ask God what His perfect will for us in any given situation is and then listen to the answer and pray for that, rather than follow our own limited information and pray for our own will to come to pass.
