A lesson on prayer: one of the means by which God communicates His grace. Prayer is efficacious in aligning our will with God's will, and a means by which God carries out His decree. He desires for us to communicate with Him in prayer, in order that it would become the means by which He fulfills His purposes; glorifying Himself in our offering up of our will to Him, being sanctified to the effect that we desire to obey His commands, and with joy and thankfulness in our hearts, genuinely seeking to glorify Him in our requests. And so, in today's passage, Jesus models for His disciples, and by extension all Christians, how we ought to pray.

We begin with our eyes and hearts fixated upon our heavenly Father, keeping in mind on the one hand our nearness to Him, being adopted through the merit of His Son. Yet at the same time, in no way should we diminish or lessen our understanding of His utter holiness - therefore it is with reverence and fear, in awe of His majesty, that we boldly come to the throne of grace. We then lay out our common daily needs before Him, for it is not as though God is merely in the business of ordering extraordinary circumstances. On the contrary, God operates through common things. And so with thankfulness and regular devotion to Him, we ask for our daily needs to sustain us. We also come confessing our sins, with the assurance of pardon on the basis of the shed blood of Christ our Savior. And so we too, as children of God, ought to reflect God's mercy in our own forgiveness of sins by demonstrating forgiveness toward others, lest we be ungrateful hypocrites as to the grace that has been shown us. We then should ask for God's strengthening and protection against all forms of evil and corruption; from outside, as well as from within. It is in God's will and by His hand alone that the hand of evil can be restrained; therefore we should regularly ask that He would do so, in order to receive that sustaining and sanctifying grace, and that He would be glorified. And with that, we yield our trust fully to Him, to satisfy the requests which we have made, knowing that God will surely answer them insofar as it would be for our good, and for His glory.