The Lord’s Prayer Explained: How Jesus Taught Us to Live, Pray, and Bring Heaven to Earth

Hi.

Today on the podcast we're going to talk about how the Lord's Prayer is key to living a life like Jesus and how it can help us recenter our lives around what matters most and really partner with God to bring heaven on earth.

Welcome back to Faith Fueled Living.

This is your host, Kristen.

Today in the podcast I have guest Brad Gray and Brad Nelson of Walking the Text joining me.

They've recently released a documentary called the Lord's Prayer.

Brad Gray is the president and CEO of Walking the Text.

He and he has a business management degree from Cornerstone University, Master Divinity from Western Theological Seminary, and he has done additional graduate work at Jerusalem University College and he lives in the Nashville area.

Brad Nelson is the content director at Walking the Text.

He curates the teaching series, a bi weekly podcast and video series and is a co creator and writer of the Sacred Thread.

He's national speaker, writer and served in the local church as a pastor for 17 years.

He has a Bachelor of Arts in History from Cornerstone University and a Master's Divinity from Western Theological Seminary.

He's also done graduate work at Jerusalem University as well and he lives in Greensboro, Georgia.

And I'm so glad they're joining me today to really walk us through what the, what's the crux of the Lord's Prayer and why is it so central to Christianity into our lives?

Hi.

Today in the podcast I would like to welcome our guests and Brad Gray and Brad Nelson and we are going to talk about how the Lord's Prayer is really the key to living like Jesus.

And we're going to talk about it, how it can help us recenter our lives around what matters most and how we can really partner with God to really bring heaven to earth, how we can really, you know, be helpers in the world just like Jesus is asking us to do.

So I want to welcome the day and I hope that what we speak about today will help us just apply Lord's Prayer to our own lives.

And so welcome Brad and welcome Nelson to the show.

It's great to be part of it.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you so much.

Absolutely.

So just a little more background obviously in the intro I shared a little bit about their project, but you guys have done this, the Lordspur documentary, you have a book that's just come out and around Easter you have a series coming out as well all around this concept though.

So can you both just share with us a little bit about what the journeys look like in your lives and then why you decided to do this particular series and focus.

Yeah, well, Both Brad and I, we actually met in college, so we've been best friends for over 25 years, which is also just kind of made this whole project and approach fun to be able to do together.

And both of us have pastoral backgrounds.

Both of us actually study at the same seminary.

Both of us have spent time in the Middle East.

And I know for me, the journey into the Lord's Prayer has been one that's just been very deeply personal.

Like, it never started off that we were going to create, you know, a feature film and a television series and a book on the Lord's Prayer.

But where, where Brad and I's passions align is helping people to understand the Bible in its original context.

So we basically just say everything the writers of the Bible assume their audience knew and therefore did not include.

We create resources to include those details so that when people go back and read the Word of God, they understand it at a much deeper level and therefore can apply it, you know, in a more seamless manner of understanding, you know, what was this intended for in the first place and what does that mean for us today?

And so it's been really out of our passion for helping people to understand the Bible that we set out six years ago to create initially the highest quality documentary series that's ever been done on the Bible.

And we got a pilot episode, it's a seven episode season.

And then early last year, Mark Burnett, who is Shark Tank, the voice survivor, saw our pilot episode and came on as a lead executive producer for us and said, y' all really need to do like a first, like give people a foray into how you're approaching the biblical story.

And so we, we said, okay, we're going to, you know, switch gears a little bit and focus in on getting the film done first.

The television series will come a few months later and as you mentioned, will be coming in the springtime.

And then in the midst of all of this, Brad, who is a writer for the film and the television series with me, we were discussing, and because my focus has been more on the movie media side as the host of the film and the television series Nelson and I were talking about, oh, there's so much that we would want people to know about the Lord's Prayer that you can't handle in a film and in a television series.

So we also want to write a book.

And so we co wrote it together.

Nelson really spearheaded that project so that we could provide as much helpful content around the Lord's Prayer, which we just contend is the most powerful thing that Jesus ever gave.

That is the most underutilized generally across the board.

And so that's what led us to doing the Lord's Prayer film Bringing Heaven Here book.

And then soon the television series is called the Sacred Thread, with season one being on the Lord's Prayer and just a much deeper journey through each phrase of the Lord's Prayer than what we do in the film.

Nelson, was there anything that you wanted to add to that?

Just kind of the beginning intro here.

Yeah.

Just to say, for me, my introduction to the Lord's Prayer was really through the doorway of tragedy.

And in the aftermath of that grief and loss, I just ran face first into this wall of, you know, I got a really well meaning community of faith around me, but they just don't know what to do with pain.

How do you honor pain?

How do you walk with people in pain?

And I happened to be reading a book by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner at the time, and it was the only thing that was speaking to me.

And so I looked him up online.

I found his synagogue in California.

I left a message, expecting never to hear back.

And 30 minutes later, he called me back and heard my story and said, you need a rabbi.

And it just so happened that a really close friend of his from school lived in my hometown, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

And so he connected me with this Rab who spent a year teaching me Jewish ritual mourning.

And what is fascinating about Jewish ritual mourning, it's this very sacred, structured approach to grieving that for the full year, you pray the Kaddish or the Mourner's Prayer.

And if you were to read that prayer, you would see some immediate connections to the Lord's Prayer.

In fact, Scott McKnight sees maybe a connection that Jesus has shaped the Lord's Prayer out of the bones of Kadish.

And so for me, it became this.

This was the thing that held me together when my life fell apart.

And so when there was a chance to take people deeper into the significance of this prayer and to show them the centrality of it in the story of scripture.

It was like, oh, I'm.

I'm in.

Let's do that.

That's so good.

So, yes.

So, Brad, thank you for sharing all that backstory and background and sort of how things have been reordered.

But it's all just to kind of get this.

This message out.

And I do agree with you.

I was sharing before we started recording that.

I agree.

It's an underutilized part of Scripture.

Right.

I mean, it's just.

So we're going to get into that.

And then, Nelson, I love that you shared that story.

And I also love that you weren't afraid to look, you know, a little further, be beyond what somebody might say is the Christianity, you know, construct.

And because I also often find encouragement and sometimes what rabbis say, the way they say it, you know, different things like that.

So sometimes that helps my faith, you know, walking as a Christian by listening sometimes to what rabbis have to say, too, about, you know, what we'd call the Old Testament, I guess.

But anyway, so I love that.

Okay.

So I guess first and foremost, I think one of the things that I thought was most interesting is, like you said, you break it down kind of line by line.

And so, you know, you started off with, you know, our Father.

So what would you just tell us?

Right.

Let's just start there at the beginning and why that's so important.

Yeah, I mean, if you're going to engage in the vulnerable nature that prayer is, you want to make sure that you know who you're praying to and just even how you approach God in prayer.

For a lot of people, I mean, I always not jokingly say, because it's so true, if.

If I stand up and I'm speaking to 3,000 people, I'm dealing with thousand different theologies.

Right.

Everybody's got their own kind of understanding of who God is to them or how they think about God or what they think God thinks about them.

And so one of the things I just love about how Jesus frames the Lord's prayers, even just beginning with the phrase Our Father, is an incredibly grounding moment to launch the prayer.

The problem is, is that because most people haven't ever thought about the Bible in its orig context, which is what our passion is, they immediately are like thinking about God in connection to their relationship with their own earthly father.

And if they have a good relationship, that's not problematic.

You know, it's not as problematic, you could probably say, but for those people who have a terrible relationship, their dad hasn't been there, Their dad was abusive, their dad was distant, their dad was whatever.

It's like you already have a hurdle into the prayer because you're dealing with what you are running God through is your lens of who your earthly father has been or has not been to you.

And one of the things that we say very quickly in both the film and the book is the good News is God was never intended to be defined by what your experience is with your dad.

God wanted to be defined based on what he did, not on what somebody else did or did not do.

And so the great thing about this is we're already getting into context.

We want to ask the question like, what did it mean for them then?

And then when we have that understood, we can now ask better questions about what does it mean for us now?

And that is actually in the Exodus story, the Israelites are making mud bricks, they're building Pharaoh's kingdom, they're enslaved, they're crying out.

And God comes to Moses in the burning bush and has this conversation.

And that conversation concludes with God saying to Moses, I want you to go back to Egypt, I want you to talk to Pharaoh, and I want you to tell Pharaoh, israel is my firstborn son.

And I'm telling you, let my boy go.

And it's the first time that God identifies himself as a father.

And so the beautiful thing about that is that the idea of father in the Jewish consciousness and understanding of the first century world is God showed up as a father when the people were in need, when they were crying out.

It demonstrates that God is aware of our circumstances.

He's hearing our cry.

He makes a promise to do something and he follows through.

And so it's this very warm understanding that this is a God who cares, this is compassion, this is the God who parents us as the perfect parent.

This is a God that wants to be in a familial relationship with us and has worked to provide that, to make that a reality.

And so even just from the moment of our Father, the rich history throughout the Hebrew scriptures would have grounded Jesus's audience in reminding them, this is the best person you could possibly be speaking to.

Yeah, it's such a, it's such a primal aspect of what it means to be human, you know, Author psychiatrist Kurt Thompson says every one of us comes into this world searching for a face that's searching for us, and it's a mode of search that we never grow out of.

And you just read across the spectrum, you know, rock legend T Bone Burnett basically said that rock and roll is one long cry of daddy.

You know, give me, give me some attention, pay, pay me some mind here.

There's even research that's been done related to like eating disorders in young girls and it's been termed father hunger.

And so this longing for a wisdom and a presence that can look into the pain and confusion of our lives and know us better than we know our own selves is so deep in our bones, it cuts right to the core of who we've been made to be.

Absolutely.

Well, yeah, as they say, I forget who said it, but you know, we, we have a God, God sized hole or a hole in our heart that only or only God can fill.

Right.

We try to fill it as humans with everything else under the sun, but yet we keep seeking and looking for something and the only thing that's going to fill it, right.

Is that relationship with the one who made us so.

Absolutely.

So good.

Okay, so I know then you dig into.

Yeah, I know it's said it different ways, but basically who is in heaven, right?

And to tell us about, you dig into kind of how can he be both, you know, far away and everywhere, but also very close.

Because I think that was interesting kind of conversation you had about that.

This is one of the one part when people are hearing kind of the version that we've included in the film, in the book, that they're like, oh, that's a little different than what I learned, you know, I learned, you know, our Father who art in heaven, or our Father in heaven who.

What's fascinating about it being recorded in Greek, which is obviously, well, maybe not obvious for a lot of people, but our New Testament is recorded in Greek, is that in the prayer, the first time the word heaven shows up, it's actually in the plural.

The second time it shows up, your kingdom come, you will be done on earth as it is in heaven is actually in the singular.

And so literally it reads our Father in the heavens.

And this is one of those just again, great cultural realities around the context of the Bible.

It's just speaking into how the ancients thought about the world or what we call cosmology.

And they did not have the Hubble telescope, they didn't have the James Webb.

They, they knew that there was earth under their feet.

They had, you know, and they're looking up and they just looked up and said, that's the heavens.

And we just see this in different ways throughout Jewish literature.

But they, they defined different tiers or levels of the sky or the heavens to the point that the general consensus is, is that there were three levels.

The immediate air above you, where the birds fly and the clouds roll by.

I mean that's, that's like level One, level two is you have the sun, the moon, the stars, which to an ancient that doesn't have any other understanding of how the universe works, it looks like all of these lights are caught in this dome.

And so level two is kind of where the dome is holding all the stars and the moon and the sun that's traversing through it in place.

And then level three is the highest heavens or the heaven of heavens.

And that's where God's throne is, which was a Jewish way of saying this is where God rules and reigns the entire cosmos from.

So you immediately recognize, okay, he's not just a father who's the perfect parent, who's compassionate.

You're dealing with the cosmological creator of the universe that governs and runs all things and holds it in place.

And so it's speaking to God's power.

But as you also mentioned, Kristen, is that all throughout the Scriptures, God is not some far off, distant God.

He's moving through the levels of the heavens in order to be among his people.

And so it's a beautiful reminder of not only God's power, but also of his presence that he sits above it all.

And yet he is as near to us as the air we breathe.

That is kind of what we're centering ourselves around when we're, when we're understanding who our Father is and what that means to be in the heavens.

Okay, so, all right.

From there, what would just be the next thing as, you know, we're list some, you know, people are listening this conversation and you want them just to understand how we can really use the Lord's Prayer in our own lives, how it can be applicable.

So what would be the next thing that you just want to share with us and sort of break down for us to maybe think about a little bit deeper, if you will?

Yeah, I think probably it would be this idea of kingdom.

And kingdom sits at the heart of the prayer.

And one of the things that's really interesting when you look at the way Matthew has structured his gospel, you know, you've got the Sermon on the mount in Matthew 5, 6, and 7.

And that really is Jesus's kingdom manifesto.

If you want to know the life that he's inviting you to, this is what it looks like.

And you know, we are, when we build arguments or structure films, we often will save the very best for last.

You know, think the grand finale at the fireworks show or the culminating scene at the end of a film.

But biblical writers would bury, they would place the most important thing in the dead Center.

And when you look at the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer is at the center of the center of the center of the Sermon on the Mount.

And then the prayer itself, it breaks down into seven lines.

And that center line is your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

So the kingdom is everything to Jesus.

It was his main message.

And when you pull all of that apart, what you see is that the work Jesus came to do is not to sweep us away from here and take us there, but it is to partner with God to bring there here, and that that is the real work of the kingdom that he invites us to join him in doing.

And so Dallas Willard has this explanation of kingdom that says we all have a kingdom.

And a kingdom is the range of your effective will.

It's whatever you have say over, right, your influences, your finances, your relationships.

And when you align what you do with those spheres of influence with God's will and God's way, what you're doing is you are partnering with him to bring the power and the goodness of heaven here.

And that is the kind of nuclear core of the Lord's Prayer.

And so it just gives people, I think, an imagination for.

Wait a second.

This following of Jesus is really about reimagining everything that I'm doing to see how am I joining Jesus in that work.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's so powerful and also well said, you know, and, yeah, I think that's a thing.

I mean, you hear people talk about it different ways, you know, about giving your time, treasure, and talent right over to God, that kind of thing.

But to hear it and tie it back to, you know, the Lord's Prayer, I think is, like you said, so powerful.

It's kind of like that navigation map, if you will, that, you know, there's certain scriptures like that right in the Bible about different areas.

But, yeah, so that's so powerful.

And so what would you just say as people are walking through, you know, writing down, speaking, looking at the Lord's Prayer in the Bible?

What do you guys.

Is there anything that you guys recommend that people do with it?

Is it like just the lecto divina?

Is it, you know, is there any little things that you guys say just makes it kind of more applicable in your own life, more powerful in the way that we're actually showing up and understanding this or deepening our relationships with Christ?

Yeah, that's a great, great question.

There, you know, there's so much to the Lord's Prayer that once you've Seen what's there.

You can't unsee it, you know.

And so part of us putting together a full immersive, cinematic journey through the Lord's Prayer, you know, via film, and then also with the book, is that it's going to give people new depth and new understanding as to what the prayer is actually saying.

And this was even just for me.

My journey to the Lord's Prayer was a rediscovery for me.

Seven years ago, I was literally just sitting down, reading the Sermon on the Mountain, got to the Lord's Prayer section, and Jesus begins, and he says, this then, is how you should pray.

And I just had this moment where it was.

I think he meant it.

But for whatever reason, it just caught me anew.

It was like, man, I've been a pastor for a long time.

I've been leading these study trips.

I've been like, I.

But I don't pray the Lord's Prayer on a regular basis.

Like, it had become so familiar that it became unfamiliar.

Which is the big problem that we just see with something that people know really well is then you begin to go, I've mastered it.

Or I got it.

Now I'm going to move on to the next thing.

And yet it was really fascinating because an archeological discovery was made of a late 1st century, maybe early 2nd century AD discipleship training manual called the Didache, where it actually has the Lord's Prayer in the discipleship training manual.

And it's the first place outside of biblical manuscripts that we have the Lord's Prayer.

And after they give the Lord's Prayer, they conclude with, and you shall pray this way three times a day.

So at least for this early church Christian community, they saw the Lord's Prayer not just something to be prayed even once a day.

Like, literally, they had three times a day that they would pray this prayer.

Because what they realized and what I was awakening to was, this is the blueprint for life.

This is the blueprint for daily living.

And so when we started to realize, oh, there is way more here than we knew, and then it started to transform our lives.

It was, we want to create things that's going to help people to be transformed by the Lord's Prayer, to rediscover the power and purpose of it, that they would implement it on a daily basis.

And so to go back to your question a few minutes ago, Kristen, is like, what do you guys do with it?

Like, what, what's a helpful way of being able to navigate it?

And we actually give a number of options in the book.

Hey, here's how you can use the Lord's Prayer.

But when you mentioned even the idea of like lectio divina, for me, that ends up being the most powerful way in which the Lord's Prayer speaks back to me is literally just breaking it down phrase by phrase and saying that phrase and then just sitting in silence and just on the one hand recounting everything that this phrase is talking about and then on the other hand, listening for how God is going to speak into what that phrase is supposed to do for me on that, you know, on that given day, you know, so if I start off with our Father, since we've unpacked that, okay, God, you are the one who is aware of our circumstances.

You rescue and redeem people in their time of need.

You are the perfect parent who knows exactly what we need today.

Where do I need to trust that that's true?

You know, you are aware and I am going through some challenges and to be reminded that you know what's going on, you know, so it's just for me, at least one of the ways is, is for me to be able to work through it and just pause at each phrase and, and different phrases pop on different days based on what I'm going through.

So it feels very dynamic, it feels relational, it's deeply personal and it's really powerful because it's specific to the circumstances of that day.

And all we have is today, right?

Yesterday is gone, tomorrow is not real.

We have today.

How do I live?

Well, and that's where the Lord's Prayer just speaks so powerfully to our daily circumstances that ultimately at the end of the day and at the end of what we've wanted to do with this project is we wanted people to be able to watch the film, read the book, see the television series, and literally go, I'm never gonna go another day of my life not saying this prayer because they just realize it is so important for daily life.

And it, it lends itself really well to teaching your kids to pray and praying with your kids.

And you'll see this when you go through the book is each line has a seminal contextual insight.

And so like I, when I put my 10 year old to bed, she'll say to me, daddy, I want to do the special prayer.

Oh, you mean The Lord's Prayer.

Yeah, that one.

I want to do it.

And so I'll just say to her, okay, it's.

It's Sunday, so we're.

We're praying.

Our Father.

Do you remember the first place in the Bible where God is called Father?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

The Exodus.

I said, yeah.

Do you remember the name of his children that he.

He came down to rescue?

And she thinks for a second and she says, the British.

So I'm like, no, baby, the Israelites.

The Israelites.

So, but then I just say to her, okay, God is this father who hears his children crying and he comes crashing into their lives to rescue and redeem them in their time of need.

So I'm going to pray right now that God would hear your cries and you would experience him showing up in your life in your time of need.

And then I want you to pray the same for me.

And, you know, if you really want to be undone in prayer, ask your children to pray those things over you.

And you better have a box of Kleenexes nearby.

Yeah, yeah.

I love, I love how you're applying that, you know, with your kids when you're, you know, having the bedtime prayer time, you know, And I think one thing when you're saying that is I was thinking to myself, yeah, I think there's so much, right, because that we talk about, you know, are you doing devotional?

Are you walking through the Bible?

Are you doing Bible in a year?

Like, there's.

So I think there's all these things that sometimes I think you're hearing messages like you need to do a new part or you need to.

Right?

So there's all these messages.

So I think for some people, they're thinking, yeah, I didn't think about, you know, just every day praying on, not saying you shouldn't do other scripture, right?

But the same prayer, you know, and not saying some people don't do that.

But I guess for me that's, you know, I hear so many messages about the other stuff that I think this is.

Makes so much sense that the early Christians would have.

Or some of them would have said, this is.

This is kind of some of the crux, like you said, of all the pieces of kind of Jesus coming here and him saying, this is how I'm living.

This is kind of what I'm calling you to do.

And so I think that that's.

And it makes it, let's be honest, if you repeat the same thing over with that time, you're going to learn new things, right?

You're going to gain some wisdom, but you're also.

You're making it easier to do in one sense.

Right.

Because, you know, every day I'm going to do part of my.

My faith practice is going to be to go over the same Lord, the Lord's Prayer.

Right.

But using something that's familiar, that is ancient is a good way of.

Yeah, yeah.

It's not like it spurred a thought in me.

And I wanted to throw this out because one of the stories that we finished the book with is about a Scottish Presbyterian writer named John Philip Newell.

And near the end of his father's life, his father has dementia.

And he travels home to help his father sell the family car because it's no longer safe for him to drive.

And he contacts the dealership ahead of time and tells the salesman, hey, my father has dementia, but please do him the honor when we come in of speaking to him and not to me.

But his father had spent his life in ministry, and he had always prayed the numbers.

Chapter six, blessing the Lord bless you and keep you.

And now in his old age, as everything else was going, that prayer was like, it remained deep underneath everything.

And every time he would leave someone's presence, he would want to bless them.

And so they finished selling the car, and this old man takes the car salesman's hands, and John Phillips says, my father would like to bless you now.

And I think that's the sort of thing that happens when a prayer goes really deep in you.

It gets a hold of you, it starts to live and work through you.

And I think that's the hope and the power of the Lord's Prayer.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's.

That's so powerful.

I love that.

Okay, so what, what?

Walk us through the next part of the Lord's Prayer and just how can we once again kind of see something new, uncover something new from that maybe we haven't thought about before?

Yeah, well, to kind of bridge together our Father in the heavens, and then your kingdom come will be done on earth as is in heaven.

Sitting between there is hallowed be thy name, or holy be your name.

And this one is.

Is really where the prayer moves pretty quickly into the participatory aspect.

And this is one of the things people often miss with the Lord's Prayer, is that it becomes this understanding.

Well, this is something that I pray to God, but to anybody in the first century world, anytime you prayed a prayer, or especially if a rabbi like Jesus gave you a prayer, to pray wasn't just something that you prayed and said, okay, God make this happen.

You immediately then ask, what role do I get to play in making this thing a reality?

And so prayer is always participatory by nature, not just a pleading or petitioning for what you want God to do.

And where it really begins to show up is once you're located, that this is our Father who is in the heavens, the compassionate, loving, perfect parent who sits above it all and yet is as near to us as the air we breathe.

Holy be your name.

Is this declaration that you want to see God's name being understood well, which a name was a representation of one's essence in the biblical story.

And so the word holy is the word kadosh, which means to be separate, distinct, other than.

And one of the things that you see throughout the scripture is how God is constantly saying, I am not like the other gods and goddesses.

Like, don't lump me in.

Don't, you know, misconstrue who I am and what I'm like.

And so on the one hand, you say, well, God, I want people to accurately understand who you are in the world.

Like, if they truly knew what you were, like, people would flock to you.

But so many people have a misunderstanding.

But then this is where it jumps into the other side of the holy be your name is that when God makes a promise to rescue and redeem his people from their slavery in Egypt, and he makes good on that promise, he brings them to Mount Sinai and he says to them, do you want to be in partnership with me?

And their response is, we do.

And God says, then I am going to put my name on you.

Like, literally, you're going to bear my name.

And so even with the Ten Commandments, the commandment that you shall not, you know, take the name of the Lord your God in vain, most people go, oh, that just means not using God's name in a flippant or swearing manner, which is part of it.

But the idea is way bigger because the literal Hebrew reads, you shall not miscarry the name of the Lord your God, meaning God's name is on his people.

They bear his name.

And they are God's message.

They are God's ambassador to the world.

And so what God does is he not only then puts his name on his people, he then gives them his instructions, which is Torah, we often translate as law, which feels very wooden and, you know, imperial, impersonal.

And just like, you better do this or else.

But the word even Torah just means teachings, instructions, God's instructions for life.

God is saying, you're partnering with me, you're going to bear my name.

I'm going to give you my teachings and instructions on how to represent me well, and then I'm going to put you in the most highly trafficked area of the entire ancient world, Canaan, so that you will be my message on display for the world to see.

And when the people struggled to do that and they misrepresented God when they got exiled to Babylon, it was because God finally got to the point where he said, I can't have you misrepresenting me anymore.

I need to wake you up to the severity of what you have done because you have misled the world in an understanding of who I am and what I care about.

And so when God sends them off into exile, he says, I am doing this because you have profaned my name.

You have given the world an inaccurate understanding.

And when God brings them back into the land, they're hypersensitive to the fact that they did not carry God's name well.

And that if you live well, you demonstrate to the world that God is holy.

If you don't live well, you demonstrate to the world, in a sense, that God is a fraud.

And so when Jesus says, pray, holy be your name, there is this petition, God, I want the world to see what you are like.

And then in the same breath, you're going, oh, and I bear your name.

People are watching my life to know, what does it matter if you are a follower of Jesus?

How do you live any differently?

And why would I even want that in my own life?

And so you recognize in the decisions I make, the things I say, the jokes I tell, what I do is actually a message to the world on what God is like.

And if God's name is going to be holy in their eyes, I have a part to play in giving an accurate representation of who God is.

So it's just that really powerful moment where you just go, okay, what does my day look like?

And what are.

What are the opportunities that I have before me to put God on display for the world to see what he is like, you know?

Yeah.

And I think whether I said it with Lord's Prayer or not, but it's kind of, you know, I've talked sometimes that our life is our ministry.

Yeah, right.

You don't have to have a ministry, you know, on the books officially.

You don't have to even be working in a church.

But like you said, it's everything we do.

It's all of it.

You know, it's.

Yeah, like you said, it's how we work, what we work on, how we show up in our lives, how we are there for other people.

You know, the same, the same thing, right?

Like how are we spending our time, how are we spending our, right, our money and our, and our talent.

So yeah, that makes so much sense.

And that, that does really though hit at home the idea, like you said, it's not just about not doing something with his name, it's about what we're expected to do when we say we're a follower, right?

And even then, what, what Nelson had then had said when he talked about that the kingdom is the, is the nuclear core of the prayer and of Jesus's entire ministry is that when you then are thinking in terms of how do I partner with God to see his goodness and his power advance here on earth as it is in heaven.

And that's where you recognize in that next part of the line, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, is that yes, I represent God, but I also get a chance to partner with God, right?

So as Dallas Willard said, kingdom is the range of your effective will.

We all have a little K kingdom, right?

The decisions I make impact my family, impacts my organization, the people that I get to lead.

And the goal really every day is to go God, you've given me these unique gifts, you have given me opportunity, you've given me influence.

And like you said, Kristen, it's not that you have to have a ministry to be effective.

Like if you're a follower of Jesus, you are already in full time ministry.

And God has placed us all in the various avenues.

And God wants us, he wants his people in every facet of society and he wants us people to wake up every day going, how am I taking what is before me?

The opportunity, the placement, the job that I get to do, the people that I get to lead, the resources that I have, the influence that God has graciously given to me.

And how do I leverage that in a way where I'm not advancing me and my kingdom, but I'm advancing what God cares about.

Which when we care about the things that God cares about, like we experience transformation, right?

So the whole idea is we want to orient our little K kingdom to the Kingdom so that we not only experience the goodness of God in our lives, but we become a conduit through which God works through us to advance his purposes in the world.

And he does that people on people.

Like, we get a chance to partner with God to bring heaven here so that others can taste and see that the Lord is good.

Yeah.

I mean, it reminds me of either conversations I've had lately or just things that I read in, you know, different Christian authors, books or pastors books.

But it's the idea that we're also called as Christians to be some of us in the marketplace.

But if you show up as.

As Christ followers, we're doing better work or we're doing work that.

Work that points back to Christ.

And so, once again, it doesn't matter what profession or what type of work you do, it's that we show up just like you guys.

Right.

You're showing up in books and film, television.

And so you have an opportunity to do better work, work that matters for eternity instead of much of the stuff we see.

You know, we think, I never want to see that show.

Or, you know, and not because I don't watch all different things, but.

Right.

So the point is, is we all have to remember we have that opportunity to do.

Yeah.

Whatever God's calling us to do and create.

Whatever it is he's calling us to create.

Yep.

Yeah.

Andy.

Andy Crouch and the folks at Praxis have some incredible thoughts on what it means to be redemptive in the marketplace.

And they explain what they call a redemptive frame.

And basically, there are three ways to be in the marketplace.

The first is just exploitation.

It's the rough and tumble.

That's just the way the cookie crumbles.

If I get one over on you, good for me, it stinks to be you.

But then you have the second way, which is ethical.

We do what we say.

We honor our contracts.

We try to treat people with dignity.

And that is what a lot of us think it means to represent Jesus in the marketplace.

The problem with that is that's sort of the expectation that everybody has of every other human.

There's nothing really distinctly Christian about that.

What is distinctly Christian is this idea of redemption, which is an economic term.

It is to restore value where value has been diminished or where value has been lost.

And so the challenge then becomes, okay, if I'm in the marketplace as a Jesus follower, how do I be here with that same sacrificial self giving mentality that Jesus brought from heaven to earth?

And that just puts you on a whole new safari as a person in the marketplace representing Jesus.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Wow.

So good.

So what else would you guys just want to share about the Lord's Prayer and just how you want people to kind of see it?

You know, as we've already been digging into in A new way, a new light, and just to kind of, you know, pray on it in a different way.

Yeah, well, once you just get to the kingdom part, like, you've hit the climactic moment.

And so the rest of the prayer is actually three different petitions that now that you are oriented to what the mission is, what you are called to do, then when you even begin with the first of the three remaining petitions, Give us this day our daily bread.

Daily bread represents in scripture, what do you need?

And love this line from N.T.

wright.

He wrote a book a number of years ago on the Lord's Prayer, and he said, when it comes to daily bread, he says, the problem with asking for bread is that we get there too soon.

Meaning for many of us, when we start praying, like, we have this laundry list of all the things that we want to ask God for.

And when you recognize that the petition for asking what you need comes much later in the prayer, the rest of the prayer is supposed to frame how you think about the very things that you want to be asking for or what you think you need.

So it's really a moment of, like, being reminded of, like, what is essential.

Like, for many of us, we ask for things, and if God actually gave it to us, it would derail the direction of what God wants to do in our lives, because we just haven't been recalibrated to the mission, and we're distracted and we want things, and we're engaging in things that actually take us off the course for what God wants to do in and through our lives, to impact the world through us.

And so daily bread is just a really great, like, okay, this is what I need.

And I really just need to ask the question, like, what's essential?

And then, you know, if you're doing everything else in the prayer and the community is coming together, which.

Which, you know, one of the things we talk about is the whole prayers in the communal.

You know, it's our Father, give us this day our daily bread.

Forgive us our debts.

It's very communal.

It's the.

The discipleship is never intended to be.

Be going alone.

Is that really the power of where people see God is not in an individual, it's in a community.

Like, when a community is banded together, like, that's when people are like, really, like, wow, what is going on here?

But nothing breaks down community faster than unforgiveness.

And so it's like a painful part of not just the prayer, but just of the human.

The human existence.

And there is a component in the Prayer where forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.

Like, we are daily reminded that God has forgiven us and that we want to forgive others.

Well, the problem is forgiveness is painful, and nobody wants to engage pain.

So we actually spent a lot of time in the film, more so than any other section, and we have multiple chapters on forgiveness in the book for people to really kind of dig into it.

I remember a number of years ago that Dr. Robert Enright, who is considered to be the father of forgiveness research, was talking about forgiveness, and he just said, In 100% of cases, when people struggle to forgive someone else, it's because they have an inaccurate understanding of what forgiveness actually is.

And so it feels like as we're going through this prayer, like, daily we are reminded of what God has done for us and how we want to be people that don't harbor bitterness and anger and unforgiveness because it actually does more damage to us than the other person.

Right.

And so you have, like, daily bread.

Here's what's essential.

God, we're banding together as a community.

Give us the capacity to be reminded of what you've done for us so that we will then pass it on to others.

And then the last line being, just lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Is this recognition that if you are successful with the rest of the prayer, you are a threat to the kingdom of darkness, and opposition is coming your way.

So don't be naive.

Like, recognize that temptation is the thing that Satan uses to try to derail you away from the will of God.

And, you know, there is a battle that is at play.

Like, earth is not a neutral, living existence.

Right.

The forces of good and the forces of evil.

Evil are going at it daily, and we're in the crossfires.

And so we want to show up every day not in fear, but in an awareness that if we're doing stuff that matters, the kingdom of darkness doesn't like it.

There's a lot of distractions.

There's a lot of things out there, so you can just kind of see that flow, and you go, oh, it makes a ton of sense.

It literally covers every facet of life as you just kind of work through the rest of the prayer.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So anything else, Nelson, that you want to add, you know, just to that or just kind of to the con or to the.

To frame the episode as we wrap up, you know, everything you've covered, we've dug deep into some of these things, and I think it's it's, it's just refreshing.

And I think you're right.

It lets you see it in a new way, or at least in a new way to align it with your own life and in your daily life.

Yeah, yeah.

I think the, maybe the last thing I would say is that for a lot of us, we struggle with the idea of what some would call a rote prayer or a set prayer, because it.

Does it feel authentic?

If I'm praying someone else's words and I'm just repeating them, and at what point do they start to feel tired and worn?

But what's interesting about that is it would not have been uncommon at all for a first century sage or a rabbi to give his disciples a set prayer.

I mean, they would look to the rabbi, teach us how to pray.

And so the rabbi would give them particular words that reflected his value system, the things that he thought was most essential and most important.

So that's part of what Jesus is doing with the Lord's Prayer.

Like, hey, if you want to know my own personal prayer life, if you want to know what sustains me on the daily journey, these are the words.

But then there's this, this other approach to it.

And it's really just the Jewish form of prayer that, you know, as Westerners, we think of prayer as an opportunity to express our feelings.

But in the Jewish mind, a Jewish boy and girl who's learning how to pray, they're not sent off and told to tell God what they feel.

They're given a copy of the Psalms, go recite these, commit these to memory, get these words in you.

And I think it's author and pastor Brian Zahn who says, we pray the Psalms not to express what we feel, but in order to learn to feel what God's words express.

And so that is, I think the heart and soul of this prayer is, it is deeply, deeply formational.

This is a prayer that's going to help guard you against making Jesus in your own image.

It's a prayer that is going to prevent you from getting sucked into all of the things that your day, right now, the news headlines say are so urgent and call you back to these fundamental principles that sort of undergird human existence, these primal things that God really made us for.

If you pray these words, you're going to be in touch with those.

And so I think it's just, it is the center of what it looks like to stay connected to Jesus and to live out his way.

I love that.

All right, so before you share with us just the names Again, right of the, the documentary and the book and where they can find that.

Any last words of encouragement?

I would just say, even if it's a prayer that you're not fully understanding because you haven't had a chance to watch the film or the television show or read the book to learn more about it, just getting back into a daily rhythm of saying the Lord's Prayer and whether that is you starting your prayer time by saying it or you go to bed saying it, or you just do how you normally do prayer and then at the very end, tie up your prayer with the Lord's Prayer is just getting these words back into, you know, your heart and your soul.

And that as you continue to grow in your understanding of the Lord's Prayer, these words will, will continue to, as Nelson said, to form and shape you because you're actually embedding in, in your soul and speaking aloud.

The very thing that wasn't just a prayer Jesus taught people to pray was the prayer that Jesus was living out in his own life.

It's what is essential and it's what Jesus is all about.

And it's deeply, deeply formational for you as a follower of Jesus to be praying the words that we believe Jesus was praying every day for his own journey ahead.

Okay, so why don't you share with us where people can watch the documentary, you can, they can buy your book and then where the series will be coming out.

Yes, we got a really great place for people to go.

Thelordsprayer.com so yeah, it's actually we were, we were.

It's a pretty remarkable gift to be able to have.

Thelordsprayer.com but yeah, our film is streaming with angel, which launched the Chosen.

They did a ton of other great projects and so people can get there through thelordspray.com we have a direct link there.

The book is called Bringing Heaven here sold wherever books are sold, there's a link to buying that book through thelordsprayer.com and then it'll also have, when the full television series drops will also be through thelordsprayer.com so great.

Kind of one stop shop for people to go.

Wonderful.

Well, let me tell you, I watched the documentary and it is beautiful.

The footage is, is, is gorgeous.

You know, how you guys put it together is amazing.

So definitely go and watch that.

I've read part of the book and it, it's a great resource.

So I definitely think that's, you know, a wonderful thing to dive into as well.

So thank you for all the work that you all are doing to help the rest of us, you know, like you said, grow in our faith by understanding the original context and just really tying it back to our own lives.

So thank you so much and I wish you well on all these projects.

Thank you, Kristen.

Yeah, thanks Kristen.

Take care.

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