Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

Sometimes prayer becomes a laundry list.  “God, please help me get this job.  Please heal John’s gout.  Please help Marie with her sciatic pain.  I’d love to have good weather for Sunday’s picnic.  Also…peace on the earth.”  And so on. We all have stuff we’d like to have from God.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with […]

The Lord’s Prayer: Parallel Petitions

I’ve never considered myself to be especially strong as a poet.  I love to write, but I’m far more prosy than otherwise.  But I can appreciate poetry, and the Bible is certainly full of loads of it.  The Psalms take a poetic form, obviously, but so too do the wisdom books, huge swaths of the […]

Thy Will Be Done

One of the biggest problems we have in prayer is that we have horrifically bad practical theology.  We pray as though we understand God to be a genie and ourselves to be his master.  We present God a laundry list of stuff we want from him, then get annoyed if we don’t get what we […]

Thy Kingdom Come

The greatest theme of the teaching of Jesus was not love.  Nor was it forgiveness.  Not heaven.  Not salvation.  The central theme of Jesus’ teaching (and whatever comes in second isn’t even close) is the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God (or the kingdom of heaven in Matthew’s gospel) occurs at least 81 times […]

Hallowed Be Thy Name

An athlete focused on things other than training isn’t going to be a very good athlete (at least not for too long).  A musician who doesn’t devote her primary energies to practicing will never be a great musician.  Devote the scraps and leftovers of your energies to your relationship with your spouse and you will […]