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What has been the most quoted Bible passage of all-time? The most quoted passage of Scripture today is probably John 3:16. But when considering the scope of human history since Christ walked the earth, I believe the Lord’s Prayer found in Matthew 6:9-13 is likely it! The model prayer taught by Christ to his disciples has been memorized and quoted by so many.
Early church history indicates that Christians prayed these words before celebrating the Lord’s Supper in their worship assemblies. An early church document called the Didache counsels Christians to quote the prayer three times a day. The prayer has served, not as a comprehensive prayer for Christians, but as a model that demonstrates the core tenants and focus of all of our prayers.
Church history records parents being imprisoned and put to death for teaching their children the Lord’s Prayer and Ten Commandments in English during the Middle Ages. It was known and memorized by Sunday school students and taught in many of our schools for decades. Parents taught their children to pray the prayer before they went to sleep. As Gary Holloway stated, “It is the best known prayer among Christians and until recent years was known by practically everyone in the Western world.”¹
This leads me to this important question for our present times, “How many people know and say the words of this prayer today?” How many parents are teaching their children this prayer? How many kids are being taught to pray?
This prayer was often used to begin school days or to be read before ballgames prior to 1962 when public prayer was taken out of our schools.
We have removed this prayer as a “model” of what prayer should be for our citizens and for our children. We have stripped them of considering daily “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name!” By neglecting this prayer we have become negligent in doing the will of God on earth. By not teaching our children this prayer as they sit down to a meal, we have failed to teach them to be thankful for their “daily bread.” By not knowing this prayer, we have failed to teach our need to forgive and be forgiven. And thus in the end, we have a culture consumed with the ways of Satan because we don’t pray “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
Don’t you think it is time we returned to using the Lord’s Prayer? I surely do!
““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.”
(Matthew 6:9–13 ESV)
¹. Gary Holloway – Praying Like Jesus: What the New Testament Teaches about Prayer
