A prayer of Jesus
The Lord's Prayer
Jesus gave this prayer twice. In Matthew it belongs to the Sermon on the Mount, where He taught the crowds on a hillside in Galilee not to pray for show or with empty repetition. In Luke, one of His disciples watched Him finish praying and asked Him to teach them, as John had taught his followers. This is not a prayer recorded of Him praying, but the pattern He handed to His people to shape all their asking.
“After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.”Matthew 6:9
What he prayed
He taught us to begin not with our needs but with the Father, naming Him as ours together and as holy, seated in heaven. First come three longings for God: that His name be hallowed, that His kingdom come, that His will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Only then do our own needs follow, and even these are simple. We ask for bread enough for the day, not a hoard for years. We ask forgiveness of our debts, and He binds our pardon to the pardon we extend to others. We ask to be led away from temptation and delivered from evil. The whole prayer moves from His glory to our need and back to His kingdom, power, and glory, teaching us the order of a rightly turned heart.
What it teaches us about prayer
This prayer teaches us that prayer is first about God and only then about ourselves. Jesus corrects two errors at once, the pagan hope that many words compel God, and the private assumption that prayer is mostly a wish list. He gives us a shape wide enough to hold every real need yet ordered so that God's name, kingdom, and will come first. It is startlingly plain. Daily bread, not luxury. Forgiveness we must also give. Rescue from the tempter. Notice how He teaches us to say Father, and to say our, so that no one prays alone or only for himself. To pray this way is to be slowly reshaped, our fevered wanting cooled into trust, our clenched hands opened toward God and neighbor alike.
What it reveals about Jesus
It is worth pausing that Jesus does not pray this prayer with us. He teaches it. He never asks for His own sins to be forgiven, because He had none. He stands as the Teacher and Lord who gives His people the very words to speak to God. Yet He also invites us to call God Father, a nearness that flows from His own eternal sonship. Because He is the Son by nature, we may become sons and daughters by grace, and pray as family. Every petition He taught finds its yes in Him. He is the bread from heaven, the one who bore our debts, the one who was led into the wilderness and delivered us from evil. The prayer is His gift, and He is its answer.
Questions people ask
Is the Lord's Prayer meant to be recited or is it a pattern?
Both. Jesus said pray after this manner, giving a pattern to shape all our praying, and He also gave actual words His people have prayed together for centuries. Reciting it is good when the heart follows the words, and using it as a model keeps every other prayer rightly ordered. It was never meant as a magic formula, since He warned against empty repetition just before giving it.
Why do some versions add for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory?
That closing praise appears in many later manuscripts of Matthew and in the King James Version, but not in the earliest copies, which is why some translations set it in a footnote. Its words are thoroughly biblical, echoing King David's praise, and the church has long prayed them. Whether or not it stood in Matthew's first text, it fittingly returns the prayer to where it began, with God's glory.