You hear it time and again, and I think it will not do us harm to repeat it, that the Our Father is the model of all Christian prayers. This means each time we pray, our prayer should follow the pattern of the Our Father.
If we listen very carefully and examine the Our Father we will see that the prayer is divided into two parts. The first part is in praise of the Father who is God. The second part of the prayer is still for God but the petition is for our benefit.
If we examine our prayers, we are bound to discover that our prayers are so different and so far from the model of all prayers which is the Our Father. We spend so much time begging the Lord for our needs, for our daily bread. We spend so much time asking the Lord to take away our weaknesses, our failures, to forgive our sins. And yet, we forget to praise God, to remind God that He is so good. It is not because we are selfish. It is may be because we are too pre-occupied with our needs.
When we tell God “You are so good,” when we tell God, “You are so holy” it is not because God has to hear that He is good. God has no need for such sweet words. God does not need that. He knows them already. When we say that God is good, it is actually for our own benefit. It will do us some good to keep on saying that God is good. Each time we say that God is good, we become good ourselves because we are challenged by what we say.
People who forget to praise God, people who just ask and ask and ask are like people who go to the fast food stalls of Robinson after every Mass. People go there, pick their food, their meals but then forget who prepared these for them. We pay for the food but completely forget those who prepared them for us. That is what happens to us when we just ask and ask and ask. We might forget the persons who cooked our hamburger, the persons who fried our french fries. We might forget the cook behind the fast-food counter. In the same manner, we might forget God Who cooked all these graces for us.
Let our prayer be like the Our Father. There is nothing wrong in asking, but before we ask, let us first say that God is good, God is kind, so I must be merciful. The good that we enjoy comes from God.
GOD IS GOOD
Mt. 6:9-13
Only Jesus, Always Jesus
