Our Father

The Lord’s prayer – part 1

The Lord’s Prayer is known in some circles as the Our Father, especially by Catholics, Paternoster, their liturgical name for the prayer is ‘Our Father’ in Latin.

The thing to note about the Lord’s prayer is that there are two versions of it in the Bible. The one in Like’s Gospel is much shorter than in Matthew’s Gospel. It would appear that the Matthew version appears more liturgical, it is the version used in churches to this day, and may already been in use in worship when Matthew wrote it down. One on the differences is that Luke has Jesus starting the prayer with the salutation Father. The word our only appears in the Matthew version.

But the word our is important. It tells is that:

God is not remote.
We are interdependent.

God being our father means that we are loved individually. God is a loving father who longs to spend time with his children. We can approach God our father for all our needs … but I’m getting ahead of myself, that is later in the prayer.

We are interdependent. The prayer says OUR Father, not my Father. God being our father makes us brothers and sisters. We are a family. When we come to worship God we worship as a family, together. There is truth in the ‘God and me’ part of a relationship with God, I am not knocking that, but save that for your private time with God. Corporate worship is just that, corporate. Our relationship with each other as much as our relationship with God.

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