Lords Prayer, or Our Father, the principal Christian prayer that
Jesus in the New Testament (Mat. 6.9-13; Luke 11.2-4) taught his
followers, beginning, "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be
your name." It summarizes Jesus' teaching and stresses the
concern of honoring God before that of meeting one's own needs.
It also reveals Jesus' sense of a filial relationship with God.
After the Second Vatican Council, Roman Catholics added a version
of the doxology ( "For thine is the kingdom," etc.)
to prayer when used in the Mass; the doxolgy was already current
in Protestant liturgies and is present in some manuscripts of
Matthew. In Latin the prayer is called Paternoster. It also occurs
in the Didache. The first three phrases of the prayer parallel
the opening words of the ancient Jewish Kaddish.
Let's say that the woman and her sons gathered 100 vessels and
the oil poured out to fill all 100 pots and then stopped when
she ran out of pots. What if the woman had gathered 500 pots or
1,000 pots? Then the oil would have filled 500 or 1,000 would
it not? We too, control the flow of the Lord's blessings by what
we're willing to allow into our lives and receive.
How many blessings are you and I missing out on because we have
never asked, because we never set out enough pots, or were too
scared to borrow pots from our neighbors? With God, nothing is
impossible (Luke 1:37). We control the blessings we receive by
our willingness to be obedient, to ask, to seek, to accept help
from others, to act on faith, and to prepare to receive. |
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