Liturgical Colour : Green

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this day, we heard about how we ought to pray to the Lord. We heard how Jesus taught His disciples how to pray, through the teaching of the perfect prayer, which we now know as the Lord’s Prayer, or Pater Noster (our Father), as it is a prayer which signifies the relationship which exists between us and God who is our Father.

Why is it such a good and perfect prayer? That is because firstly, as Jesus had pointed out that when the pagans and the Pharisees pray, they like to pray with lots of words and loudly, and the louder and the more dedicated is the prayer, the more they believed that their prayers would be heard and fulfilled. And they liked to make the prayer in the public places, to show the people how pious they were.

Instead, Jesus formulated the perfect prayer that is not just succinct and to the point, capturing all the essences of a prayer, but it is also demonstrating what a prayer truly should be, that is for us all to communicate with the Lord our God, through the opening of our hearts, and the exposure of our hearts, minds, body and soul to the holy presence of God.

Truly, a prayer is like how a child talks to his father, as a communication between them, building up from their relationship. A prayer should not be a one-sided communication where we are the only ones speaking and talking, and yet we ignore the Lord who is speaking deep in our hearts. Sadly however, this is mostly the case when we talk about prayers.

More often than not, when we look at how we pray, it is a litany of demands, of wants, and of accusations, on how God had not done enough for us or that He had not listened to what we wanted. We also often pray to God only when we remember Him, that is when we are in difficult times, and need urgent and immediate help, as if God is a sort of last resort help we can always depend on for free and take it for granted.

And when we are in good times and times of plenty, more often than not, we forget entirely about God and ignore His presence around us. God is always with us, regardless whether it is during time of plenty or time of suffering, but we often do not see that it is God who has blessed us with such great graces, all the blessings and good things we enjoy in life, and most importantly, our very lives are gifts from God indeed.

When we pray, it is often that we focus on ourselves, on our needs, on our wants, on our desires, on our greed and on our own selfishness, as it is in our nature to put such an emphasis on ourselves. But this is why many of us do not have a good and fruitful prayer life, as our prayers are often empty and meaningless, if not improper and downright offensive to God.

Jesus taught us how to pray, that when we pray, we ought to open ourselves to God and allow Him to speak in us, and we also recognise Him as the Lord and Master of all things, and thus all that we are and all that we do are subject to His will and authority. Thus, this is why we said the first half of the Lord’s Prayer, glorifying the Lord our God and humbly submitting ourselves to His will.

And then, we must also give thanks to God for all of His grace. We know that God will bless us with all that we need, our daily bread, and He will also definitely forgive us our sins if we have also forgiven others who sinned against us. We do not need to doubt this, as the Lord Himself had affirmed this many times, by His words and actions. The Lord is ever faithful, ever loving and ever merciful, if we ourselves are willing to change.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, on this day, let us all pray for great grace from God, that all of us may realise how much more we need to do, and how much more genuine we need to be in our prayers. Let our prayers not be expressions of our ego or greed, but let it be a genuine expression of love and the desire for us to speak with our Father who created us and loved us all.

May Almighty God be with us always, and may He continue to lead us and guide us, to enable us to focus our attention to Him, giving Him thanks for all that He has done for us, by cultivating a good and disciplined prayer life. Let us all mean every words we say when we say our Lord’s Prayer, filled with renewed vigour and strength of our faith. God bless us all. Amen.