Because God has promised to give his Spirit, we can pray with shameless, persistent, urgent impudence. The specifics of our prayers will involve God’s glory and worship, the advancement of his kingdom, our temporal and spiritual needs, our sins and relationships, and our protection from evil.

When we think of the Lord’s Prayer, we typically go to the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:9–13).

This is the prayer most often memorized, regularly recited by churches in corporate worship and by individuals in private devotions. It has been used in all the major catechisms of the church stretching back to the Didache of the first century. The words of the King James Version in particular have a beautiful cadence which has entered the public consciousness of the English-speaking world.

For many Christians, Matthew 6:9–13 is the Lord’s Prayer.

But our Lord gave us two versions of his prayer. And in the “other” Lord’s Prayer, Jesus counsels us that everything we ask for amounts to one thing, and that one thing is exactly what he promises to give.

The Two Prayers

The two versions come to us in different contexts. In Matthew’s Gospel, he records Jesus preaching the prayer in a section of the Sermon on the Mount on personal piety. He not only teaches them what to pray, he also teaches them how to pray—with humility rather than a public show of spirituality (Matthew 6:5–8) and what such a prayer life is characterized by—a posture of humble forgiveness (Matthew 6:14–15).

When we come to the prayer in Luke’s Gospel, the occasion is the disciple’s request that he teach them to pray. Here, like in Matthew, Jesus does not only give them what to pray, he also teaches them how to pray and what they should expect to receive when they pray.

These differences are what make the “other” Lord’s Prayer so valuable to our Christian walk. Let’s take a look.

What to Pray

Luke’s version is broadly similar to Matthew’s, but shorter and more compact. It omits the expanded title “who art in heaven” from the first petition, addressing God simply as “Father.” It doesn’t have Matthew’s third petition (“your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”) or the final phrase of the sixth petition (“but deliver us from evil”).

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