Pray then like this: “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 lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Jesus teaches his followers to pray by calling God "Father" — not ruler, not judge, not distant deity, but a word borrowed from ordinary family life. That's a deliberate choice. Whatever else this prayer is about, it opens by reframing who exactly you'd be talking to.
The requests that follow are strikingly unspiritual in the everyday sense: daily bread, forgiveness, protection from temptation. Not lofty abstractions — the actual, practical stuff of getting through a day. It's a prayer that assumes you have real needs and real failures, and treats both as reasonable things to bring up.
And there's a hard clause tucked in the middle: forgive us, as we forgive others. Not a side note — it's built directly into the structure of the prayer, as if receiving forgiveness and extending it were never meant to be separated. If prayer has always felt like a performance you don't know the rules to, this is closer to a template for saying what's actually true.
If you've never prayed this simply, it might be worth trying these actual words as your own this week.
A short video on this is coming soon — for now, read on.