The Healing Power Of The Lord’s Prayer
Again and again Jesus told His disciples that whatsoever they asked in His name they would receive. When they asked Him to teach them to pray, He gave them that wonderful, all-embracing prayer which is prayed by many millions all over the world every day, or at least it used to be fifty years ago.
The ‘Lord’s Prayer’ is, perhaps, not often recognized as a healing prayer, and yet there is healing in its every line and clause, whenever we stop to think about it, and to believe it.
When we pray that our heavenly Father’s name may be ‘hallowed’, His Kingdom ‘come’, and His will ‘be done’ on earth, as these things are done in heaven, we are asking for a pure and perfect world in which such things as sin and sickness are quite unthinkable.
The clause, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’, surely covers more than just our daily material needs—it covers our spiritual needs as well, which are far greater and far more important to us than just bread and meat. When we really pray this prayer, believing, we are asking for the ‘true bread from heaven’. Jesus Christ, our Saviour, Redeemer, Healer and King, is the ‘true bread of God’ which ‘cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world’. He said, “l am the bread of life: he that cometh to Me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst.” There is healing in every word, in every crumb of that ‘bread of life’, if we will only believe it, and live by it.
The next petition is one of our most frequent stumbling blocks to healing—’Forgive us our trespasses . . .’ God is ready and always waiting to do His part: and trespasses forgiven mean sin and sickness healed: but this depends upon us-‘as we forgive’, so shall we be forgiven. How often we forget, or refuse to forgive, little thinking how much depends upon it, how much we need forgiveness, and how black our sins are beside the little hurts that have been done to us. We cannot be healed unless we will forgive; but, when we do forgive, we shall find our Father waiting for us, like the father of the prodigal son, so ready to forgive and heal.
‘And lead us not into temptation.’ An old Aramaic translation renders this: ‘And lead us out from temptation’, which means out of sin and sickness, into health and happiness in God’s presence, because without temptation we could not fail.
The next and final petition of this great healing prayer is ‘But deliver us from evil.’ God undertakes to deliver us from evil whenever we ask in Jesus’ name; and there can be no room for sickness in His care, for His is the Kingdom, and the Power and the Glory, for ever.’ Amen.
