DEATH NEVER A CHOICE UNTIL TOO LATE: Lord's Prayer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Matthew 6:9–13

The Lord's Prayer

Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name.

""Understand what you're talking about when you're talking about God, this is serious, this is the most wonderful and frightening reality that we could imagine, more wonderful and frightening than we can imagine."

Your kingdom come,

"Operative Greek word, basileia, means both kingdom and kingship (i.e., reign, dominion, governing, etc.), but that the English word kingdom loses this double meaning.  Kingship adds a psychological meaning to the petition: one is also praying for the condition of soul where one follows God's will."

your will be done,

on earth, as it is in heaven.

 “Many people think our job is to get my afterlife destination taken care of, then tread water till we all get ejected and God comes back and torches this place. But Jesus never told anybody—neither his disciples nor us—to pray, 'Get me out of here so I can go up there.' His prayer was, 'Make up there come down here.' Make things down here run the way they do up there.” The request that “thy will be done” is God’s invitation to “join him in making things down here the way they are up there.”

Give us this day our daily bread,

"Those Christians who read the Lord's Prayer as eschatological view epiousios as referring to the second coming—reading for tomorrow (and bread) in a metaphorical sense. Most scholars disagree, particularly since Jesus is portrayed throughout Luke and Matthew as caring for everyday needs for his followers, particularly in the bread-related miracles that are recounted."

and forgive us our debts,

as we also have forgiven our debtors.

Anthony C. Deane, Canon of Worcester Cathedral, suggests that the choice of the word "ὀφειλήματα" (debts), rather than "ἁμαρτίας" (sins), indicates a reference to failures to use opportunities of doing good. He links this with the parable of the sheep and the goats (also in Matthew's Gospel), in which the grounds for condemnation are not wrongdoing in the ordinary sense but failure to do right, missing opportunities for showing love to others.^"

"As we forgive...". Divergence between Matthew's "debts" and Luke's "sins" is relatively trivial compared to the impact of the second half of this statement. The verses immediately following the Lord's Prayer, show Jesus teaching that the forgiveness of our sin/debt (by God) is contingent on how we forgive others. Later, Matthew elaborates with Jesus' parable of the unforgiving servant.  In this parable, forgiveness from the king (God) is conditional on the servant's forgiveness of a small debt owed to him."

And lead us not into temptation,

"Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am being tempted by God', for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire."

but deliver us from evil.

"Translations and scholars are divided over whether the evil mentioned in the final petition refers to evil in general or the devil in particular."

Lord's Prayer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: The Lord's Prayer, also called the Our Father and the Pater Noster,^[1] is a venerated Christian prayer that, according to the New Testament, was taught by Jesus to his disciples. Two forms of it are recorded in the New Testament: a longer form in the Gospel of Matthew^[6:5–13] as part of the Sermon on the Mount, and a shorter form in the Gospel of Luke^[11:1–4] as a response by Jesus to a request by "one of his disciples" to teach them "to pray as John taught his disciples".

The context of the prayer in Matthew is a discourse deploring people who pray ostentatiously: Jesus instructs his listeners to pray in the manner prescribed in the prayer. Taking into account its structure, flow of subject matter and emphases, one interpretation^[2] of the Lord's Prayer is as a guideline on how to pray rather than something to be learned and repeated by rote. The New Testament records Jesus and his disciples praying on several occasions, but never this specific prayer, so the application and understanding of the prayer during the ministry of Jesus is unknown.

On Easter Sunday 2007, it was estimated that many of the two thousand million (or two billion) Catholic, Anglican, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Christians who were sharing in the celebration of Easter would read, recite, or sing the short prayer in hundreds of languages.^[4] Although theological differences and various modes of worship divide Christians, according to Fuller Seminary professor Clayton Schmit, "there is a sense of solidarity in knowing that Christians around the globe are praying together..., and these words always unite us."^[4]