What Are We Really Praying? A Journey Through the Lord’s Prayer
The Lord’s Prayer is one of the most familiar passages in Christianity. Many of us learned it early enough that we can recite the words almost automatically. But familiarity can sometimes keep us from stopping to consider just how much Jesus packed into this short prayer.
Over the past several weeks, we’ve been taking a closer look at the Lord’s Prayer during Sunday Live Online Church—slowing it down phrase by phrase and exploring what these familiar words actually ask us to believe, trust and live out.
From “Our Father” to “forgive us our debts,” each phrase opens into a much larger conversation about our relationship with God, His holiness, His Kingdom, His will, our daily dependence on Him, and the difficult work of forgiveness.
Below, you can follow the series from the beginning. We’ll continue adding each new message as the series continues.
Our Father, Who Art in Heaven: Where Prayer Gets Its Authority
The series begins with a question that reaches deeper than the words themselves: what gives us the authority to pray?
Jesus begins with “Our Father.” Before asking for provision, forgiveness, guidance or protection, He establishes relationship. Robert connects those words to the New Testament language of adoption—the promise that through Christ we are not approaching God as strangers, but as children who can call Him Abba, Father.
That changes the posture of prayer. “Our” places us within the family of God. “Father” speaks to relationship, love and belonging. And “in heaven” reminds us that the Father we approach is not limited by the circumstances and limitations that shape our earthly lives.
The message closes by turning toward Revelation’s picture of God enthroned in heaven, bringing together two truths that will continue throughout the series: God is near enough to be called Father and great enough to be worshiped as Lord of heaven and earth.
Watch: How to Pray With Authority — Part 1
Hallowed Be Thy Name: Coming Before a Holy God
The next phrase introduces an important tension.
The God Jesus tells us to call Father is also holy.
“Hallowed be Thy name” means that God’s name is to be regarded as holy. Robert uses that phrase to explore the biblical importance of the names of God and then turns to Joshua 24, where Joshua confronts Israel with the seriousness of serving a holy God.
That raises a difficult question: if God is holy and human beings are not, how can the children who have just prayed “Our Father” enter His presence?
The message ultimately moves from Joshua to Jesus—Yeshua—and to the grace made possible through Christ. Robert’s point is not that we somehow make ourselves flawless enough to approach God. It is through Christ that sinful people are brought into the presence of a holy God and received as His children.
The first two phrases of the prayer therefore belong together. We approach God with the confidence of children, but never casually. He is our Father—and He is holy.
Watch: How to Pray With Authority — Part 2
Thy Kingdom Come: Living in the Presence of the Future
With “Thy kingdom come,” the prayer moves from who God is to what God is doing.
In this message, Robert draws on theologian George Eldon Ladd and the idea of “the presence of the future.” The Kingdom of God is not simply another name for heaven or something Christians experience only after death. Through Jesus, the future Kingdom has already begun breaking into the present.
Jesus healing the sick, confronting evil and announcing that the Kingdom had drawn near are presented as signs of what that Kingdom looks like. Yet suffering, sickness and death remain because the Kingdom has not yet reached its final fulfillment.
That is why Robert describes Christians as living between two great moments: Christ has come, and Christ will come again. To pray “Thy kingdom come” is to ask for God’s promised future to invade the present.
But the message does not leave the Kingdom as an abstract theological idea. Robert brings it into ordinary life. When hatred gives way to love, despair to hope and bondage to freedom, the Kingdom becomes visible. When we forgive, feed someone who is hungry, comfort someone who is grieving, choose honesty when dishonesty would be easier, or pray for those who have hurt us, we become instruments through which God’s Kingdom touches the world.
Watch: How to Enter God’s Kingdom Today
Thy Will Be Done: How Do We Know What God Wants?
Few questions are more personal than: How do I know whether something is God’s will or simply what I want?
That is the question at the center of the next message.
Robert challenges the idea that God intends to dictate every ordinary decision we make. He uses deliberately practical examples: God is not necessarily going to tell us which car to buy or which investment to make. We are given freedom to make decisions rather than being treated as puppets.
The deeper issue is the kind of person making those decisions.
Romans 12 becomes central to the message: do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Robert connects discernment with transformation. As our minds, character and priorities are increasingly shaped by God, we become better able to recognize what is good, pleasing and consistent with His will.
Jesus provides the ultimate example in Gethsemane. Facing what was ahead, He prayed, “Not my will, but Thine be done.” The words He taught His disciples were also words He lived.
So “Thy will be done” is not simply a request for God to reveal a hidden plan. It is also a prayer that our own minds, motives and choices will increasingly come into alignment with His.
Watch: How to Find God’s Will for Your Life
Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread: Learning to Live One Day at a Time
When the prayer reaches “Give us this day our daily bread,” the focus shifts toward dependence.
Donna leads this message by returning to the Israelites in the wilderness and the story of manna. God provided what they needed, but He taught them to gather provision for the day rather than trying to secure tomorrow through fear and hoarding.
That becomes the foundation for a broader message about the way we live.
Daily bread is not only about food. It is about learning to receive what we need today rather than allowing tomorrow’s uncertainty to overwhelm the present. Donna connects that idea to the habits we develop in our minds and spirits—the things we repeatedly think about, practice and consume.
Drawing from her background in health and nutrition, she discusses the difficulty of establishing healthy patterns even when we already know what is good for us. She connects that struggle with neuroplasticity and the brain’s ability to develop new patterns through repetition. Prayer, Scripture and intentionally replacing destructive thought loops with God’s Word become part of that daily practice.
Even the ordinary process of maintaining a sourdough starter becomes an illustration: something living must be fed.
The larger point is simple but demanding. Faith is not sustained by one spiritual experience that carries us indefinitely. We return to God again and again—receiving today’s bread, today’s grace and today’s strength.
Watch: God Provides — One Day at a Time
Forgive Us Our Debts, As We Forgive Our Debtors: When Forgiveness Feels Impossible
The sixth message reaches one of the most difficult lines in the prayer.
It is easy to speak positively about forgiveness until we are dealing with something that actually feels unforgivable.
Robert places “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” alongside Peter’s question to Jesus: how many times must I forgive someone who has sinned against me? Peter suggests seven. Jesus answers seventy times seven.
Robert then spends a significant part of the message exploring the number 490 and a connection he draws with the Hebrew word tamim—a word associated with completeness, wholeness and an undivided life. In the material he shares, tamim is less about flawless performance than about integrity: a life in which the inner and outer person are not divided by competing loyalties.
That leads into the heart of the message: forgiveness is not simply counting offenses until we reach some numerical limit. And some wounds are too deep to resolve through sheer willpower.
Robert speaks personally about two painful periods in his own life—his divorce and his departure from the Crystal Cathedral. In both cases, he says forgiveness took years. He describes feeling deeply hurt and, in the latter experience, betrayed by people he believed he should have been able to trust.
That personal admission gives important context to what follows. Forgiveness does not mean pretending that the injury was not real. Robert describes it as releasing the debt and refusing to allow the hurt to continue occupying the same place in the heart. When forgiveness feels beyond our own ability, the prayer becomes more direct: “I cannot forgive. Heal me, Lord.”
The words Jesus gave us connect two things we might prefer to separate: the forgiveness we ask God to give us and the forgiveness we are asked to extend to others.
Watch the latest message in the series
The Journey Continues
Six messages into the series, the Lord’s Prayer begins to look less like a short passage to recite and more like a remarkably concentrated vision of Christian life.
It begins with identity: Our Father. It immediately places that intimacy beside holiness: Hallowed be Thy name. It teaches us to desire God’s Kingdom, submit to His will, depend on Him one day at a time, and confront the difficult relationship between receiving forgiveness and extending it.
And the prayer is not finished yet.
We’ll continue adding each new message here as the series moves forward.
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