The Lord's Prayer By Victoria Osteen

A fundamental concept of the Christian faith is prayer, the ability to pray, the act of praying, the type of prayers that are said, and how these prayers are said. One of, if not the most important prayers in all of Christianity is the Lord’s Prayer. Victoria Osteen, husband of renown preacher Joel Osteen, in a post on beliefnet, had some interesting points to make on prayer itself. Osteen believes in asking for very materialistic things in prayer, while others do not. Mrs. Osteen’s thoughts can be used as a lens to look at prayer and how it relates to the Lord’s Prayer. This will then show us that her opinions and beliefs oppose those of many famous theologians such as John Calvin, and Leonardo Boff. The Lord’s Prayer is a prayer that is taught by Jesus, and was intended to teach us how to pray. The Lord’s Prayer is a petitionary prayer, meaning that we ask for various things within it, such as daily bread, forgiveness, and deliverance from temptation and evil. When Jesus wrote the Lord’s Prayer, he wrote it in a way that would make it short and sincere to keep it from being wrongly interpreted and to make it easy to remember and teach. Jesus intended for the prayer to not be repeated over and over again like many other things in the Christian faith, but that clearly did not happen as the Lord’s Prayer is used in personal life all of the

This contradicts Leonardo Boff’s beliefs on the Lord’s Prayer. Boff states that when we ask God for things and he chooses to make these wishes into reality, these will not come fast or all at once, these will take time. We will only see sparks of God’s work at times. Based on the extensive list of items that Osteen says that we need to be asking for, this will definitely take a long time to be true, not what she believes “won’t be