Lord's Prayer

The Lord's Prayer is the name given to the model prayer Jesus taught his disciples when they asked him to instruct them in prayer (Matt. 6:9–13; Luke 11:1–4). Though it is more properly called the Disciples' Prayer—Jesus himself did not need to pray it—the name has been traditional since the early church. The Matthean version, set within the Sermon on the Mount as a corrective to hypocritical public prayer, is the longer and liturgically dominant form. It consists of an address (Our Father in heaven), three petitions for God's glory (hallowing of the name, coming of the kingdom, doing of the will), and three petitions for human need (daily bread, forgiveness of debts, deliverance from evil).

The doxology (For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever, Amen) found in most traditional uses does not appear in the oldest manuscripts of Matthew and is absent from Luke, but is found in the Didache (c. A.D. 100) and became standard in liturgical use. Jesus's teaching on prayer in John 17 provides the deeper theological context of prayer as communion with the Father—the unceasing intercession that grounds the disciples' own praying.