Balanced, Strategic Prayer - Church Prayer Leaders Network

Using the Lord’s Prayer to Unify Your Group

By Andrew Wheeler

How do you pray for your church? Do you scan the weekly bulletin and note the events, trying to remember to pray for each one? Do you look for the list of people who are sick or in the hospital and in need of prayer? When you pray for your church, what dominates your prayers?

Our church has a team of four to six people who pray before our weekend services. Sometimes, we pray with great synergy, building effortlessly off each others’ prayers and covering the church effectively. Other times, we can be a bit unbalanced, focusing on surface issues and neglecting to pray deeper Kingdom prayers for our congregation.

Martin Luther’s consistent answer when asked how to pray was, “Use the Lord’s Prayer.” The Lord’s Prayer provides a great outline for balanced, strategic prayer. Our pre-service prayer team has begun using this prayer as an outline for our prayer time.

Following Luther’s example, we begin each segment of our prayer time by quoting a phrase from the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:9–13). We then use that phrase as the theme for that segment of prayer.

Our Father in Heaven, Hallowed Be Your Name.

God is more than just “my Father.” He is “our Father”—the Father of all in our church. Jesus’ prayer was always meant to be more concerned with the needs of the community rather than with my personal needs (although my needs are certainly part of the church’s needs). As a result, using this prayer to pray for our church is fitting.

The opening petition recognizes a balance in our relationship with God. He is “our Father,” an intimate, personal relationship made possible through Jesus’ death on the cross. At the same time, He is “in heaven,” while we are on earth. We are meant to be intimate, but not familiar, with this God who is at once our Father and also the Lord of the Universe. This is an important context for prayer, reminding us that prayer is not about us, but about God.

Our team uses this sentence as our primary worship time, praising God for His attributes and expressing our desire to honor Him in our prayer time, in our weekend services, and in our lives.

Your Kingdom Come, Your Will Be Done on Earth as It Is in Heaven.

These two petitions can be synonymous, but we think of them as two different areas for prayer to help us pray more completely. We think of God’s Kingdom coming to the lives of unbelievers and of His will being done in the lives of believers.

Praying for God’s Kingdom to come includes prayer for our church’s outreach and missions efforts. We pray that as we preach God’s Word, it will draw seekers to Himself, that His love and grace will be apparent to the community through our outreach initiatives, and that lives will be changed for eternity. We pray for fruit from the missions initiatives of our church. Sometimes we pray for specific unsaved neighbors and family in this segment.

God’s will is done in the lives of His people as we reflect His glory, grow in the character of Christ, and bear the fruit of the Spirit in our lives. His will is done in our church as we live in unity, grace and love, and as we meet one another’s needs and encourage each other in spiritual growth. At this time, we pray for spiritual formation in the lives of our congregation. Sometimes, we pray in line with the current sermon series.

Although we try to keep all our prayers biblical, this is when our praying becomes most overtly scriptural. We pray for church members, using passages such as the vine and the branches (John 15), the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:13–26), the love chapter (1 Cor. 13), Paul’s exhortation to humility in Philippians 2, and “transformation” passages such as Colossians 3. We also pray for our church collectively here, often using some of the prayers of Paul (Eph. 1:15–19, 3:16–21; Col. 1:9–14; Phil. 1:9–11).

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread.

As we turn to personal requests, we try to remember that the first half of the prayer provides the context for our requests. So we ask God to meet our congregation’s needs, knowing it is His will to provide, and we ask Him to care for us in ways that honor His name (recalling the first request of the prayer is “hallowed be Your name”).

Two thoughts guide our petitions here. First, we admit we cannot provide for ourselves. We depend on God for our sustenance. We trust Him to care for us because He is a loving and gracious God as He meets our needs (Matt. 6:25–34).

Second, we trust God is answering because He promises He will. His answer may not be what we envisioned—but it’s His answer. By turning our church’s needs over to God, we give Him the freedom to respond in ways that honor Him and provide the greatest benefit. Like Paul responding to God’s refusal to remove his “thorn in the flesh” (2 Cor. 12:7–10), we accept and rejoice in God’s answer because it is His answer.

Our team uses this segment to pray for specific needs we know of in the congregation—people who need healing, help finding a job, or overcoming an addiction, etc. We pray for God to meet these needs, but we also pray for Him to be honored as a result.

If we’ve received prayer requests from the congregation, we pray over those. My personal favorite prayer is to pray Jesus’ words in John 9:3 over them—that the work of God may be revealed in their lives as a result of God’s intervention.

Forgive Us Our Debts, as We Have Forgiven Our Debtors.

Since sin is a universal condition, forgiveness is a universal need—both forgiveness for our own sins and a spirit of forgiveness toward those who have sinned against us. Forgiveness does not come naturally, however; we need God’s supernatural work in our hearts to produce forgiving spirits.

Our team prays in a few different ways here. We don’t tend to use this time for personal confession (though we could), but more for confession on behalf of our congregation. Corporate confession isn’t that common in church anymore, and needs to be approached with humility so that we do not become judgmental. We ask God to forgive us for times when we approach His throne casually or carelessly, for our failures to obey His Word (again, focusing on the sermon series when applicable), for times when we fail to see the needs around us, etc.

We also pray for sensitivity to sin for our congregation (Psalm 51), for contrite spirits and for God’s forgiveness. Finally, we pray for a spirit of forgiveness among our people—for humility (Phil. 2:5–8), for the maturity to not easily take offense (James 1:19), and for the willingness to take the initiative in confession and reconciliation (Matt. 5:23–24).

Lead Us Not into Temptation, but Deliver Us from Evil.

This wording can seem odd at first because we know God does not tempt us. There are a couple of ways to think of the first petition in this segment—that God would lead us away from temptation by giving us discernment to make the right decisions and that He would lead us away from trial (the word used for “temptation” is also used for “trials” in James 1 and elsewhere). So, here our prayers focus on guidance and protection.

In this segment, we first focus on individuals or groups in the congregation; second, we focus on the church as a whole (and especially on our leaders). We often pray for our youth, knowing the many temptations they face and the potentially life-altering decisions they might be making. We pray for God’s wisdom; for Him to protect their paths, and to keep them from situations, decisions, and relationships that could lead them down harmful roads. If there are others in our congregation facing different crossroads, we tend to pray for them here.

For our leaders, we pray for wisdom in decisions regarding the direction of our church. We also pray for wisdom in their personal lives and for God’s protection of them and their families. Finally, we pray for protection over our church and its ministries.

Yours Is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory Forever.

This doxology isn’t included in every version of the prayer, but it fits the prayer’s spirit, returning to the idea of God’s Kingdom and moving the focus back from us to God.

Because God is King, He is sovereign. He answers our petitions as He chooses. We come to Him not with demands, but with requests. God does not “owe” us the answers we seek—He’s our King, not our servant. What He grants, He grants out of His grace, not out of obligation.

Because God is all-powerful, we can trust Him to do what is best for our church. He “is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us” (Eph. 3:20). Because His thoughts and His ways are higher than ours, those answers often take different forms than we imagine. But God’s answers are never “less” than we ask—they are always “more.” If He doesn’t answer as we envisioned, it’s not because He is powerless. It’s because He is wise and gracious.

Because the glory belongs to God, our prayers are ultimately prayers for God’s glory. Our desire should be first and foremost that God will glorify Himself as He answers our prayers. Whether we pray directly for God’s Kingdom to come or whether we pray for personal needs, we are praying for God’s glory.

Heeding Jesus’ Words While Scripture offers many models for prayer—and no model completely represents all that Scripture teaches about prayer—we have found the Lord’s Prayer to be a well-balanced format. Interestingly, using this format has often resulted in more silence during our prayer times. We listen more to each other and to the Holy Spirit as we pray, resulting in greater unity and cohesion in our prayers.

We’ve also found that the newer members of our group participate more meaningfully because they are comfortable with the format and expectations. We don’t use this format every week, but even when we don’t use the outline, our prayers tend to be more focused and balanced because of the practiced model.

Though a few of us have been praying together for several years, we find that we’re growing in serving the congregation in prayer as we heed Jesus’ words, “This is how you should pray.”

ANDREW WHEELER co-directs the prayer ministry of Willow Creek’s regional campus in Crystal Lake, IL, where he leads the pre-service prayer team. He is a featured blogger on the Pray! Network and the author of Together in Prayer, available from prayershop.org.