The Lord’s Prayer is the Gospel

I’m working on a short essay in which I want argue that the Lord’s Prayer contains the essence of the gospel. It is a gospel prayer that shapes (creates really) a gospeled people.

As I see it the Lord’s prayer is the gospel. It is the prayer the Jewish Messiah taught his disciples to pray, a prayer rooted in the story of Israel containing both elements of the kingdom and the cross, explicit and implicit respectively. The unity of heaven and earth is the telos of the gospel and it is the dream and yearning of the gospeled.

In addition, the Lord’s Prayer contains the demand of discipleship in its vision of a life that is socially just (“daily bread”) and reconciled (“forgiveness”), a life that perseveres through the trial, both ordinary (lower case “t”) and eschatological (upper case “T”). The gospel is a message of rescue from evil and its perpetrator.

The Lord’s Prayer strikes a tone of both present realization and future consummation. Ultimately it is God the Father who acts – this is not behavioral modication, but it is also no less true that as we absorb the prayer, as we make his prayer our own, we “become the answer to our prayers” in the words of Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers: Prayer for Ordinary Radicals).

Praying back to God the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray, we get used to saying God’s words as our words. We form habits of hoping that our lives will look more like God’s life . . . We become the kind of community that is the answer to our request (31).

Gospel Elements

1. The Messiah
2. The Story of Israel
3. The Kingdom of God
4. The Cross
5. The Demand of Discipleship