The Sermon on the Mount 14 - Matt 6:9

The Lord now gives an example of a prayer, but what I find very interesting about the Lord’s prayer is that before going into his prayer, he specifically counsels against vain repetition, teaching that prayer should be heart felt and personal. Yet other churches have come and taken this Lord’s prayer to be a recitation verbatim for their members. It’s interesting to think how these two opposite concepts are reconciled. The IM quotes Elder Russell M. Nelson as teaching, “The Lord prefaced His prayer by first asking His followers to avoid ‘vain repetitions’ and to pray ‘after this manner.’ Thus, the Lord’s Prayer serves as a pattern to follow and not as a piece to memorize and recite repetitively.” The Lord says, “After this manner therefore pray ye:”

He continues, “Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.” The IM quotes Elder Dallin H. Oaks as teaching, “When we go to worship in a temple or a church, we put aside our working clothes and dress ourselves in something better. This change of clothing is a mark of respect. Similarly, when we address Heavenly Father, we should put aside our working words and clothe our prayers in special language of reverence and respect.” My ex- sister-in-law, when she first joined the church as the first member in her family and with their great disgust, she offered a prayer in like family home evening or something, and this guy who was visiting came up to her afterwards and said, “when we pray we don’t say ‘you’ we say ‘thee’ ‘thy’ and ‘thou.’” She just said ok and adjusted her prayers accordingly from then on. I always looked back on that experience and thought about how amazing she was to take the counsel of that man and adjust. Personally, when I came back to Church, I was not interested in changing the way that I talked when I prayed and felt like an idiot using those words. So I basically told the Lord, “you can take my prayers like this, or you can’t have them at all.” To his credit, he took them, and wasn’t angry with me, he’s amazing. Did that guy need to scold my (at the time) sister-in-law when she was so new to the church? I felt that he came at her with an attitude of parent admonishing a child, and probably would have said something, except she so meekly answered this with “ok” and redirected that I took the lesson from her instead. Personally, this was a big feat for me to overcome and learn to obey. It sounds stupid that this should be such a hurdle, but it was for me.

He continues, “In offering prayers in the English language, members of our church do not address our Heavenly Father with the same words we use in speaking to a fellow worker, to an employee or employer, or to a merchant in the marketplace.” While I was overcoming my need to “show God” by using whatever words I wanted to when praying, I was taught a much needed lesson in Sunday School about this concept. We were talking about prayer, and how we use the “thee” “thy” “thou” type of language while doing it. One person had related a story about his mission to Germany and something about how it was difficult for him to learn the difference between the formal German words to address God and the casual German words to address other people. At that moment I realized that many of the other languages that I’ve heard or studied have both formal and informal verbiages, nouns, and pronouns. The concept of using a different set of words to show respect while praying was unknown to me because I spoke English and we don’t have a much used formal set of words to use ever. I asked if people who had formal words that they used regularly in their language had the discussion about what words to use while praying, and the answer was no. Those who have a formal version of words in their language naturally, automatically know to use those formal words when praying as a sign of respect. We must have this discussion because we don’t naturally have those words in our vocabulary. That eased my mind a bit that this word usage was a power struggle but simply a respect issue.