Some of you may remember in the early 2000’s when a book called The Prayer of Jabez stormed onto the Christian literary scene. Taken from an obscure verse in the Old Testament the author explicated each portion of the prayer in order to motivate the praying lives of readers. Following up on this idea of taking examples of prayers from the Bible to serve as teaching us how to have better prayer lives, Hank Hanegraaf wrote, The Prayer of Jesus which takes the Lord’s prayer (Matthew 6:9-13, “Our Father…”) and explicates each section to give us principles on how Jesus modeled prayer for us.
I’ve never considered the implications of the Lord’s Prayer. I’ve said it church and with my family, but I’ve never each section and looked at what Jesus was trying to model. Mr. Hanegraaf does a good job of finding the principle and relating it to our personal prayer lives. For me it showed me what Jesus was attempting to teach his disciples. Now I wonder why we recite it as if it’s valuable in and of itself. If it’s supposed to be used as a model, shouldn’t we consider it as such and not as something of value just because Jesus said? For example, some parents use the “now I lay me down to sleep…” prayer as a model for their children but we don’t say it church or use it as adults when we have our own prayer lives.
My one critique of the book is that it introduces these deep ideas but doesn’t really unpack them all the way. Maybe this is an introduction to praying and isn’t for those who already pray. I think he could’ve done a better job supporting his ideas.
