God’s Priorities: Living the Lord’s Prayer Everyday by J.John
Review
God’s Priorities: Living the Lord’s Prayer Everyday was a pretty seamless fit into my life in January, and super welcome, too, as a deep-dive into one of the spiritual practices I had undertaken over the course of that month. I grew up Catholic, so reciting the Lord’s Prayer has always played a huge part in my life and brings me a ton of comfort (more on that here), but I never understood its true resonance until I carved out the time everyday to pray the Lord’s Prayer and read J.John’s definitive exposé.
He takes the famous prayer line by line, breaks it down into themes, and uncovers a pattern of prayer that should shape our times of communion with God and, in turn, the whole of our whole lives.
For so many of us, The Lord’s Prayer is one we can recall within the blink of an eye, with virtually no thought as to its import. Too often we rattle it off in meaningless ritual, fooling ourselves into feeling like we’ve prayed, and that God is pleased enough with our babble. We couldn’t be more wrong. In its first four lines alone, we are provided with the total depth and breadth of God’s priorities, particularly in prayer, with brilliant clarity. There’s no questioning what He wants from us; knowledge and intimate understanding of His highest relational desires come straight from the horse’s mouth.
J.John takes the time to discuss in plain language what these Divine priorities of privilege, praise and purpose mean for our everyday communion with God. How are we to recognise who He is to us? How are we to know where He is in relation to us; how He is simultaneously set apart in blinding awe and glory and yet is so intimately close? Rushing through life and rushing through prayer render the answers invisible. Yet praying the Lord’s Prayer prayerfully — with diligence, slowness, and deep reverence — will show us very plainly who and where God is and how He most desires us to relate to Him.
He wants to wait on us, and us to wait on Him, every single day of our lives.
J.John then moves on to what the Prayer means for us. Through the themes of provision, pardon, protection, and perspective, we begin to comprehensively understand what our lifelong priorities should be. The overarching idea is that our main focus should be on what is of concern today, and only today. As he writes in one of my favourite standouts from this text, J.John explains that the prayer does not ask, “‘grant us, Lord, such a vast quantity of food that we will never need to ask you again’ but rather something like ‘grant us enough food for this very day’.” It is in this daily prayer, this daily asking, this daily conversation, that the desired nature of our relationship with God is revealed… He wants to wait on us, and us to wait on Him, for every need, every single day of our lives. He wants, more than anything, to be with us and for us to daily desire Him. Is there anything more heartrending?
God’s Priorities is well worth the read. On a topic so seemingly basic as the Lord’s Prayer, it first appears as a book directed solely at new Christians, but those who have gone the yards would be mistaken in thinking there’s nothing new to learn in this prayer. I wouldn’t call myself a new believer, but after reading this, I’ve humbly realised I may not have travelled very far at all.
Standouts
“Our lives without prayer are like lungs without air.”
“The one thing we ought never to do in prayer is get ourselves in a groove where we end up praying the same way, day in and day out. To reach the point where a meeting with God is dull and boring is to go against everything that Jesus teaches about prayer here and elsewhere. In using the Lord’s Prayer as a pattern we need to keep it alive.”
“Although invisible to us, heaven is not far from us. That means that praying to God does not represent the ultimate in long-distance phone calls.”
“A great nineteenth-century missionary, Hudson Taylor, said, ‘It’s a good idea to tune your instruments before the concert begins.’ Remember that every day we will be given an opportunity to honour or dishonour God’s name.”
“What seems almost universally agreed is that the prayer is for our short-term and immediate needs. It is not ‘grant us, Lord, such a vast quantity of food that we will never need to ask you again’ but rather something like ‘grant us enough food for this very day’. It concentrates on the immediate and looks no further than today. It looks for bread that, like the manna, God gives only on a daily basis.
So this part of the Lord’s Prayer is very much a one-step-at-a-time prayer. But then faith is pretty much a one-step-at-a-time business.”
“To be spiritual in the Bible’s terms is not to be removed above the world, but rather to be in it. It is spiritual to be involved in this world’s affairs. Real bread is just as spiritual as some imaginary and invisible ‘heavenly bread’. I have no doubt that if we became more spiritual (again, in the Bible’s meaning of the word), we would find ourselves more involved with the poor, the hungry and those discriminated against.”
“‘What do we have that God hasn’t given us?’ [1 Corinthians 4:7] is one of those questions that should puncture any arrogance.”
“Perhaps in our praying we need to think about how we can live with less. In our prayers we need to come to God and ask him to show us how we can learn to live at the level that he wants us to live. After all, we are far more likely to find contentment in seeking moderation than we are in desiring more.”
“Remember prayer and action go together. After all, your practical deeds may be the answer to someone else’s prayer for protection against temptation. It is frankly hypocritical to pray, for example, that God will help someone overcome their problem with loneliness and not to visit them or invite them round for a meal. Equally, to pray for someone’s stress levels without thinking whether you can help them, makes a mockery of prayer.”
Rating
4.5/5 🌟 (I’ve left .5 off because I hate the font! Sans-serif is hard to read in print!)
Pages
195.
Time it took me
I want to say a week?
