Monday, August 6, 2012
The Lord's Prayer Part I - Talking to the Father about the Father, Part 1 of 50
TEXT: "In this manner, therefore, pray:
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 forgive our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For Yours in the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, Amen" (Matthew 6:9-13).
IDEA: The Lord’s Prayer can be used as liturgy or as a model for prayer.
PURPOSE: To help listeners appropriate the Lord’s Prayer.
Do you use the Lord’s Prayer in your life with God?
I. In many churches the Lord’s Prayer is used as part of the liturgy. The injunction, “This then is how you should pray” is interpreted as “pray this prayer.”
In the latter first century there is evidence that the Christians used "The Didache of the Twelve Apostles" when they worshiped.
In the Didache (1) there is the full working of the prayer with the instruction, “Pray thus three times a day.”
It is the prayer of a community. It is not in the first-person-singular, but in the first-person-plural. So what?
How is the Lord’s Prayer used in some Christian congregations today?
II. What are the dangers of using the Lord’s Prayer in a liturgical setting?
We may not pray it; we may merely say it.
What we experience too often we may not experience at all.
As a visitor to Ireland, I could see what my Irish cousins could not see.
Does this danger make it wrong to pray this prayer? How might we guard against that?
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(1) “The Didache of the Twelve Apostles” had been written and widely disseminated by about the year 100, and became increasingly important in the second and third Christian centuries. It is an anonymous work not belonging to any single individual, and a pastoral manual "that reveals more about how Jewish-Christians saw themselves and how they adapted their Judaism for gentiles than any other book in the Christian Scriptures." The text, parts of which may have constituted the first written catechism, has three main sections dealing with Christian lessons, rituals such as baptism and eucharist, and Church organization. It was considered by some of the Church Fathers as part of the New Testament, but rejected as spurious or non-canonical by others, eventually not accepted into the New Testament canon with the exception of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church "broader canon" which includes the Didascalia which is based on the Didache. The Catholic Church has accepted it as part of the collection of Apostolic Fathers (from Wikipedia).
