Soul Sister Time

The Lord’s Prayer — Thy Name , Thy Will, Thy Gift, Thy Victory, Thy Protection Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil               In our last section of the five requests in the Lord’s Prayer, we ask God to send us into the world with His protection.   This request does not mention heaven, but it is all about the heavenlies!             It is vital that we daily take into account what we can and cannot see.   It is what we cannot see that has the greatest power to affect the outcome of each day.   Sometimes we think our enemy is our boss, our spouse, our children—those with whom we have a conflict.   They are not our enemy.             As this prayer attests, we are up against something powerful each day.   It is called evil.   We are tempted to follow th...

The Lord’s Prayer — Thy Name , Thy Will, Thy Gift, Thy Victory , Thy Protection And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.             I don’t know about you, but I don’t think very rigorously about the things I do wrong to others. After all, I know they are done out of a good heart. I have all kinds of rationalizations about them.             But let me tell you. I can become very stern over a minor (in comparison to my sins) resentment.   I can let resentment crush my soul by rigorously detailing every wrong I endured.   I can be depleted of time, emotional energy and clear thinking when I put myself in a prison of resentment and throw away the key of forgiveness.   When I do this, I drink the poison of unforgiveness, rather than experience the supernatural experience of sincere, agape love for someone who has either ...

The Lord’s Prayer — Thy Name , Thy Will, Thy Gift , Thy Victory, Thy Protection                                   In our five-part series on The Lord’s Prayer, we come to the gifts God gives us every day when Jesus asks us to ask for our daily bread.   The exact phrase:   Give us this day our daily bread.                 Why would something so basic be mentioned in a prayer so epic?   After all, we have started this prayer by wrapping our minds around how amazing and powerful our Abba Father is and that He is in heaven.   We quickly move on to establish the fact that no matter what we want or say in our prayer to Him we want it settled from the beginning that we only want His will to be done like it is in heaven.   So...

Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.             Once again this prayer teaches us how to orient our souls by thinking about heaven.   As we move forward in our reflection of these amazing words from the most famous prayer, we find ourselves considering heaven.   The world is so intoxicating—the good and bad aspects of it—that we often overly focus on and dismiss the unseen reality of heaven.   Jesus left heaven so that He could bring heaven to us.             Praying for God’s Kingdom to come and His will to be done is in fact, praying for heaven to intersect with our lives beginning in our hearts.   When we ask for the Kingdom to be in our midst, we are inviting the virtues and justice of heaven to govern our hearts and lives.   The best way to make sure that you receive everything you really need for each day on e...

The Lord’s Prayer —Thy Name, Thy Will, Thy Gift, Thy Victory, Thy Protection             For the next five weeks, I would like to unpack the five main phrases of what we call The Lord’s Prayer, The Our Father, The Prayer Jesus taught us to Pray, The Model Prayer , found in Matthew 6:9-13.   I hope to help us reflect more deeply on the phrases many of us know by heart.   Jesus did not teach them to us to pray without considering the meaning behind each word and phrase.               Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name ….what a beautiful way to begin.               Our Father : Jesus is the one who taught us to think of God as our Father.   God gave this image of Himself with mankind in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 1:31; Psalm 103:13; Malachi 3:17) but it was not until Je...