Lord's Prayer: Our Father in HeavenSample

Our perspectives shape us. What do I think should happen? What do I think I deserve? What do I hope for? What do I choose to focus on? What do I value? How we answer these questions affects how we think, live, and feel. They impact our expectations.

Christians have strange expectations. It’s a different kind of hope flowing from Jesus’s posture and perspective on things. You can find it in the Lord’s Prayer. The values and hopes it expresses can be strange to the average person, even to Christians when they’re used to the values, hopes, and expectations of the world. The Lord’s Prayer contains the attitude, perspective, and point of reference Jesus invites us to take. It becomes a filter through which we see life and the future. Jesus wants these strange expectations to motivate you.

This plan and other related plans are going to use the Lord’s Prayer as a vehicle to show Jesus’s perspective, posture, and point of reference for interpreting life. This week starts by pointing us to the one Jesus wants us to look towards for the answers to those questions mentioned above: “Our Father, the one in heaven.”

Consider this today…

Read the Lord’s Prayer as it appears in the Bible. Ask yourself what it’s focusing on, and what it’s not focusing on. What kind of window does that give you into God’s areas of focus versus your own? How can you pray it today?