Our Father in heaven,
may your name be kept holy.
May your Kingdom come soon.
May your will be done on earth,
as it is in heaven.
Give us today the food we need,
and forgive us our sins,
as we have forgiven those who sin against us.
And don’t let us yield to temptation,
but rescue us from the evil one.
Matthew 6:9-13 (NLT)
I heard a sermon recently....well, actually I heard a couple of lines in the sermon where the speaker pointed out in that in The Lord's prayer, it starts out with "Our Father." (That's where I stopped listening and started pondering.) Ours. Not yours. Not mine. Not a certain denomination, religion, race, gender or behavior but all of ours.
He doesn't belong to any one person. We are all in this together. The prayer goes on to say
Give us
Forgive us
Keep us
Rescue us
For those of us that somehow turn those into me statements, well, that's not what it says. How did our faith get so messed up that we began thinking it was about 'me'? How did we make it exclusive instead of inclusive?
God is so much bigger than that. I wish we were too.