Objective:
The middle school youth will come to a deeper understanding of the Lord’s Prayer and learn how to apply the principles of this prayer to their lives
Overview:
Often Jesus makes things quite simple for us, as He did with this prayer that He taught us, which we call the Lord’s prayer or the Our Father. The disciples asked Jesus how to pray and He gave them the words to use (Matthew 6, Luke 11). Through this prayer we learn what God wants us to focus on in our prayer lives:
[…] The Lord’s prayer is the most perfect of prayers… In it we ask, not only for all the things we can rightly desire, but also in the sequence that they should be desired. This prayer not only teaches us to ask for things, but also in what order we should desire them (CCC 2763).
In the book of Matthew, we find Jesus teaching the Our Father at the heart of his Sermon on the Mount, in which he instructed his followers on the ways to live a holy life. It is through living out the words of this prayer that we may come to live holy lives as well.
The Sermon on the Mount is teaching for life, the Our Father is a prayer, but in both the one and the other the Spirit of the Lord gives new form to our desires, those inner movements that animate our lives. Jesus teaches us this new life by his words; he teaches us to ask for it by our prayer. The rightness of our life in him will depend on the rightness of our prayer (CCC 2764).