The Lord's Prayer as Pattern
As taught in the Reformed / Presbyterian tradition
Using Christ's model prayer to structure our petitions and praise to the Father.
The question that stands at the heart of the Reformed understanding of the Lord's Prayer is not merely "How do we pray?" but "How does God command us to approach His throne?" In the Reformed tradition, prayer is understood as a "means of grace," a divinely appointed instrument through which the Holy Spirit nourishes the faith of the believer and aligns the human will with the sovereign purposes of the Creator. To the Reformers, and those who follow in their theological lineage, prayer was never intended to be an exercise in religious performance or a technique for manipulating the divine. Instead, as John Calvin noted in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, prayer is the "chief exercise of faith," a vital communication that flows from a heart already humbled by the Gospel.
By the end of this lesson
- **Identify** the structural divisions of the Lord's Prayer as defined by the Reformed confessions (Preface, Petitions, and Conclusion).
- **Distinguish** between using the Lord's Prayer as a "prescribed form" for recitation and as a "functional pattern" for spontaneous prayer.
- **Explain** how the Preface "Our Father which art in heaven" grounds Christian prayer in the doctrines of adoption and divine transcendence.
- **Articulate** the theological priority of the first three petitions (Thy name, Thy kingdom, Thy will) over the final three petitions (Our bread, Our debts, Our temptation).
- **Trace** the relationship between God's sovereignty and human petition as expressed in the Reformed understanding of the "Third Petition."
- **Defend** the inclusion of the Doxology ("For thine is the kingdom...") as a necessary theological climax to the pattern of worship.
- **Apply** the categories of the Lord's Prayer to reform and expand their own daily prayer life, moving beyond narrow personal requests.
- **Compare** the Reformed "pattern" view with the Roman Catholic and contemporary "spontaneity-only" views of prayer.
Scripture
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