The Lord’s Prayer teaches us that prayer must be grounded in the Word of God.

• "Prayer escapes the danger of disorder and confusion only when it is enkindled by the words of Scripture. From the Word proceeds its inner justification, as well as its life-giving power and the clearness of its petitions. A prayer that does not stick to Scripture will soon become poor in ideas, poor in faith, poor in love and will finally die" (Adolf Koeberle).
• Prayer is the voice of faith. Calvin: the chief exercise of faith. That is to say, that prayer grows out of the Word of God.
• "The richness of the Word of God ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart" (Bonhoeffer, Psalms, 15).
• Prayer is "responding speech" (Peterson, Answering God, 5).

The Lord’s Prayer teaches us that we live and pray together in community.Me, my, or mine.  OUR father. The focus here is not on what I need, but on what we share together. Prayer is a means for uniting us as a community of faith. It is “our Father” to whom we pray, not my personal sugar daddy. It is “our daily bread” that we ask God to give us, not just my piece of the pie. It is “our trespasses” that we ask to have forgiven.

In a day when we are increasingly alienated from one another, from family, from community, from God himself, in an age marked by increasing financial instability and worry; in an era of hunger for knowledge and of spiritual poverty, this prayer makes rich soil for growing in the gospel.

The Lord’s Prayer teaches us the attitude with which we are to approach God in prayer:

To whom do we pray?The name “Father” appears on the lips of Jesus forty two times in Matthew’s gospel.  To say “our Father” is “a mark of grace, one of the first signs of faith” (NT Wright, The Lord and His Prayer, p. 12).