What Is the Lord's Prayer?

The Lord’s Prayer is the prayer Jesus himself taught, given when his disciples asked, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1). That origin makes it unlike any other prayer: it is not our best attempt to reach God but God’s own Son showing us how to speak to the Father. As such, it is the perfect pattern and the safest words we can ever pray, because we are simply praying back to God what he gave us to say.

It opens by naming the relationship: “Our Father.” Before a single request, Jesus teaches us to approach God not as a distant deity to be appeased but as a Father—and “our” Father, so that we never pray merely as isolated individuals but as members of a family. We come with the confidence of children who have received “the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Romans 8:15). Luther captures the tenderness of it: God “encourages us to believe that He is truly our Father and that we are truly His children, so that we may ask Him boldly and with complete confidence, as dear children ask their dear father.”

The prayer then moves through seven petitions in a wise order: three concerning God’s glory (his name hallowed, his kingdom come, his will done) and four concerning our needs (daily bread, forgiveness, protection in temptation, deliverance from evil). It teaches us to seek God’s honor first and then to bring him everything—body and soul, this life and the next—trusting that a good Father wants to hear it all.

You can pray it in at least two ways, and both are good. You can pray the words themselves, slowly and thoughtfully, as a complete prayer—it is never “vain repetition” (Matthew 6:7) when prayed from the heart. And you can use it as a pattern, letting each petition open into your own specific prayers. Either way, when you don’t know how to pray, you always have somewhere to begin: the words your Lord placed in your mouth.