Several years ago, Bruce Wilkinson published a 92-page book entitled The Prayer of Jabez. The book took an obscure prayer in the Old Testament and promoted it as the model prayer for believers. To everyone’s surprise, it became the fastest-selling book of all time and created a cottage industry almost overnight.
My problem is that when you look at the prayer, the most prominent, recurring words in the prayer are “me” and “my”:
‘Oh that Thou would bless me indeed,
and enlarge my coast [territory],
and that Thine hand might be with me,
and that Thou would keep me from evil,
that it may not grieve me!’
The prayer is only one sentence long, but the words “me” or “my” appear five times! When it is all said and done, the prayer can be boiled down to just two words: “Bless me.”
What a dramatic difference between the “Prayer of Jabez” and the “Prayer of Jesus.”
In the Lord’s Prayer the key words are not “me” and “my.” The key words instead are “our,” “us,” “thy” and “thine.” Jesus did not instruct his disciples to pray, “My Father…give me…,” but “Our Father…give us.”
By teaching us to pray “Our Father,” Jesus is not insisting that our needs are not important. But he is inviting us to move beyond our singular preoccupation with ourselves and to experience a sense of shared humanity with others. By praying not just for “my” bread, but for “our” bread, we are invited to pray in solidarity with people in need everywhere.
What difference would it make, for example, if in our mind’s eye we were to take the hand of one of the 98,000 children in Virginia who live in extreme poverty and earnestly pray, “give us this day our daily bread?”
How would our hearts be different if we were to close our eyes and mentally place ourselves in the midst of one of the refugee camps in Palestine or Pakistan and pray, “give us this day our daily bread?”
But there is a danger in praying “Our Father,” for once you pray, “Our Father,” you have to wrestle with the question: How big is the “Our” in “Our Father?”
Does the “Our” include only your family or the people with whom you go to church? Is it restricted to your close circle of friends—or is it much vaster than that?
There are over a quarter of a million families in Virginia who are having a difficult time putting enough food on their table—including single mothers in Roanoke who are trying to feed their families on food stamps that until recently totaled only $2.55 per person per day. Does the “Our” include them?
What about the families who have to sleep in their cars at night or those who know the icy chill of winter winds blowing around their doors and windows?
What about the inner-city children who live with the fear of being the next victim of a drive-by shooting?
What about the children in southern Africa orphaned by AIDS or the teenaged girls in Sudan, terrified of being murdered or raped?
What about the millions of people in the Two-Thirds World who live on the equivalent of a dollar a day?
Does it make a difference to consciously include them when we pray, “Our Father?”
I think it does—and I cannot help but believe that the world would be a very different place if those of us who pray the Lord’s Prayer prayed it not just for ourselves, but in solidarity with all of those who are so desperately in need of the basic physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual provisions of life.
Tonight, when you go to bed, try praying the Lord’s Prayer in solidarity with those throughout our communities and across the globe who struggle each day for their daily provisions. Who knows, maybe that simple act will take us a step closer to the day when God’s kingdom will come and God’s “will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Gary Robbins is pastor at Greene Memorial United Methodist Church.