A blueprint for healing prayer
The Lord’s Prayer provides a blueprint that can guide us to the spiritual insight and inspiration that heal.
The mental picture of Jesus praying with his disciples is full of promise and inspiration for all of us, even though those prayers happened almost two thousand years ago. Just as those early disciples looked to their Master and friend for guidance and assurance, so do we as his current-day disciples. The Gospel of Luke records one of Jesus’ disciples asking him to teach them how to pray, and he gave them what we know as the Lord’s Prayer.
As recorded in Matthew’s Gospel, Christ Jesus tenderly encouraged his followers to pray after the manner of this prayer rather than through the “vain repetitions” stemming from the hope that “much speaking” would somehow enable them to receive the spiritual power he exercised and they desired (see 6:7–13).
In the chapter “Prayer” in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer of Christian Science, writes, “Only as we rise above all material sensuousness and sin, can we reach the heaven-born aspiration and spiritual consciousness, which is indicated in the Lord’s Prayer and which instantaneously heals the sick” (p. 16). And then she gives readers her understanding of the spiritual sense of that prayer.
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