Make the Lord’s Prayer Your Own

Where does prayer come from? How did prayer become a thing?

Canonically, prayer seems to trace back to Genesis 4:26, after the death of Abel and the banishment of Cain. Eve had another son, Seth, whom she saw as God’s gracious intervention to redeem Abel’s death. “At that time,” the story goes, “people began to call on the name of the LORD.” If we define prayer as a conversation with God, we see prayer represented in Genesis 3, at the birth of sin, when Adam and Eve try to justify themselves to God. If we define prayer as God’s conversation with us, we see prayer even earlier in Scripture — in Genesis 1, at the creation of the human race.

However we understand it, prayer goes all the way back. Prayer is inherent to the human condition. We are all hard-wired to do it. But prayer is a practice, which means it can be done by instinct and it can be learned and developed as a skill.

Practicing Prayer

We see the disciples seeking to tone and strengthen their prayer muscles when they ask Jesus to teach them to pray. As Pete Greig writes in How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People, the capacity to pray robustly and persistently “wasn’t automatic” for Jesus’ disciples (nor is it for us):

Prayer didn’t get beamed down on them from heaven. It wasn’t a guaranteed perk of the apostolic job. Prayer had to be learned the hard way, and their schooling was to begin on a particular day with this simple, touchingly vulnerable request: “Lord, teach us to pray.” And so, of course, he did.

From there we learn the Lord’s Prayer, the “Our Father” as it is often called.

I grew up in a faith tradition that prayed the “Our Father” together every week, and the tradition I’ve spent much of my adult life in has a similar practice. Reciting the Lord’s Prayer, I’ve heard it said, joins our voices with those of Christians scattered across the world, demonstrating our family ties as followers of Jesus and proclaiming forcefully to the world that the God of all is glad to intervene for all.

And yet, that common recitation takes various forms. It’s not only spoken in different languages and dialects, but from different angles and with different focuses. Some churches leave off the “kingdom/power/glory” coda of the prayer; some Christians ask God to forgive trespasses, while others seek forgiveness for debts. And because different Bible translations render Jesus’ teaching to His disciples differently, even our source texts can vary widely.

The Lord’s Prayer in Daily Discipleship

I’ve occasionally run across iterations of the Lord’s Prayer by people who are invested in the discipleship of others. The one I think of most often is from Christian philosopher Dallas Willard. It begins with “Dear Father always near us.” It ends with an especially folksy coda:

Because you are the one in charge, and you have all the power, and the glory too is all yours — forever — which is just the way we want it!

For Willard, the power of the Lord’s Prayer is in its structure. Following its basic flow we can personalize its language, reminding ourselves in particular ways of the scope of God’s concern and the scale of God’s care. “Preach the gospel to yourself every day,” Navigator staff member and author Jerry Bridges famously advised. Willard and others have found that personalizing the Lord’s Prayer is one way of doing just that.

I was walking through my workplace one day, mulling over some urgencies I was struggling to make sense of. “God, I’m going to need your help today,” I muttered. Then I stopped, realizing that I had essentially paraphrased the central line of the Lord’s Prayer: “Give us this day our daily bread.” 

I’d prayed it weekly for decades of my life, but I’d never fully metabolized the idea: Here, on this day, in these circumstances, are the needs I need to bring to God. 

I’ve since drafted a personal paraphrase of the “Our Father” that I recite every morning, and more recently a parallel prayer for the end of the day, thanking God for listening and responding. It’s been grounding, centering. It’s helped me to keep my chill and act on faith, remembering that God is a provider, gladly drawing near to those who draw near to him.

Prayer is primal. It’s also a discipline. We are born good at prayer, but we also grow into it — and in so doing we experience the caring curation of God’s direct involvement in our lives.

Discipleship Tip:

David’s story offers a helpful example of how to meditate on Scripture: paraphrasing it in our own words, then incorporating it into our prayer life. What’s one of your favorite passages from the Bible? Think about how you might personalize those verses and use them to guide your conversations with God this week.

Meet the Author

David A. Zimmerman is publisher of NavPress. He and his wife, Kara, live in Colorado Springs.