Central West End Church

By ending the Lord’s Prayer with the word “evil,” Jesus is saying that true spirituality is constantly aware of the reality of evil, and constantly praying about it. In the last verse, Jesus shows us how to walk through the minefield of evil in the world and not just survive, but thrive.

Forgiveness is a difficult topic for all of us, afterall it's not our default setting. In the Lord's prayer Jesus shows us how our struggle to forgive is connected to the forgiveness of God. As we see the fullness of God's forgiveness to us, we are enabled to trust God enough to forgive those who sin against us.

Jesus affirms our physical needs and instructs us to pray for them. But our physical needs are also connected to a much deeper need we often won’t reach out for unless every other option is taken off the table. Why?

Throughout history, we’ve experienced a tension between longing for a world beyond this world, and longing for the healing of this world. In teaching us to pray “your kingdom come,” Jesus shows us that those two things don’t have to be in tension with each other.

What is the point and the power of prayer? Jesus shows us here in what is perhaps the most famous prayer of all time. This week we look at the first actual request in the prayer: Hallowed be your name.

At the very heart of Jesus’ picture of the transformed life is prayer. In the first line of this most famous of all prayers, Jesus shows us that if we want to know how to pray, we have to know to whom we pray.

Before Jesus shows us how to pray he tells us how not to pray. But this isn’t a formula. Very often we don’t even know what our deepest needs really are. Join us as Jesus reconnects us to the deepest needs of the human heart.

Jesus affirms many of the reasons many today are “done” with religion. But instead of telling people to go do their own thing, he says, “Follow me, I’ll show you a better way.” In this passage, Jesus shows us that authentic spirituality is bound up in something he calls righteousness.

“Love your enemies” is Jesus’ most unique teaching, and also his most difficult, painful, and offensive. And yet, the deeper we follow him into the pain of evil done to us, the more he leads us through it into a world of “perfect” love.

What do you do when you suffer personal insult or loss at the hands of someone else? Jesus’s answer sounds outlandish to us. But what if the way of Jesus is the true way of ultimate human flourishing?