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The Lord's Prayer Essay

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The Lord's Prayer

Our Father in heaven,

Hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Your will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts,

as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And do not bring us to the time of trial,

but rescue us from the evil one.

Matthew 6:9-14 NRSV

The Lord's Prayer is the most widely used prayer in the Christian community. Almost all Christian traditions accept and practice the Lord's Prayer. This universality reasons that this prayer is of great religious importance. The appeal of the Lord's Prayer is that it functions as the "perfect" prayer. Taught by Jesus himself, this …show more content…

Also, the context in which Jesus meant to Prayer to be used.

We will touch briefly on the literary elements surrounding the Lord's Prayer. The Lord's Prayer appears in only twice in the gospel, once in Matt 6:9-13 and again in Luke 11:2-4. There has been much controversy as to why both the context and the contents of each version are different. The shorter version appears in Luke, where the context is Jesus was seen praying, after which the disciples ask Jesus to "teach them how to pray". In Matthew, the teaching of the Lord's Prayer is grouped with a variety of other Jesus teachings. This group of teachings focuses around the shortfalls of the Pharisees and what the corrections would be. In the case of prayer, Jesus denounces the empty prayers of the Pharisees and teaches them the Lord's Prayer instead.

The composition is almost identical, such that the entirety of the Lucan version is included in Matthew's account. Therefore one school of thought is that the version in Luke is the original, and that Matthew later expanded it, adding phrases to clarify (Stevenson, 2000). Phrases such as "in heaven", or "your will be done…" both serve to clarify, the first to clarify that this prayer is for the God of heaven, and the second to clarify what it means for God's kingdom to come. Others

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