Wesley Hill, The Lord’s Prayer: A Guide to Praying to Our Father

Hill, Wesley. The Lord’s Prayer: A Guide to Praying to Our Father. Christian Essentials. Bellingham, Wash.: Lexham Press, 2019. 120 pp.; Hb.  $12.99  Link to Lexham Press

Like Ben Meyer’s The Apostles’ Creed, this new book in Lexham’s Christian Essentials series focuses on a well-known and beloved section of Scripture: the Lord’s Prayer. This series intends to cover the foundational teachings and practices of the ancient church. Every generation has been nurtured by the practice of prayer, often using the Lord’s Prayer as a model.

Hill is an associate professor of biblical studies at Trinity School for Ministry, Ambridge, Pennsylvania. He has previously published Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality (Zondervan, 2010) and Paul and the Trinity: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters (Eerdmans, 2015).

This short book is a series of meditations on each line of the Lord’s Prayer. In the introduction to the book, “Your Father in Secret,” Hill points out that Jesus’s prayer in Matthew 6:5-8 differed from the prayers of the Jewish experts in the law and the overly theatrical prayers of the pagan Gentile world. Jesus’s prayer is a template, a pattern to follow, a “model for approaching God with childlike confidence that he will hear” (4).

Hill divides the prayer into seven petitions, taking each phrase in order. In most chapters, he relates the petition to several Old Testament texts before setting the words in the overall biblical theology present in the New Testament. For example, when praying “our Father in heaven,” Hill begins with God as Father in Isaiah 64:8 and then relates this to Paul’s use of “abba father” in Galatians and Romans.

Hill’s meditations occasionally use classic writers from church history (Augustine, Calvin), modern theologians (Sarah Ruden, Rowan Williams), current events (e.g., the Coptic martyrs beheaded in Libya in 2015), and pop culture.

Finally, Hill offers a brief coda, “Praying the Lord’s Prayer with Rembrandt.” He reflects on Henri Nouwen’s description of Rembrandt’s painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son. In his practice of prayer, Hill has come to relate each line of the Lord’s Prayer to the image of the son kneeling before the father to beg forgiveness and the father’s compassion as he embraces his son. By drawing parallels between the Parable of the Prodigal Son, as imagined by the Rembrandt painting, Hill suggests one will find themselves praying the Lord’s Prayer in a new way.

Each book in this series is an attractive 5×7-inch hardback. However, it is quite short. There are only slightly over 100 pages in the body of the book, but every chapter begins with three pages of illustration, so the actual page count is much lower. This makes for quick reading, but the book could have been edited differently to allow for more space in each chapter.

Reviews of other volumes in the Christian Essentials series:

• Wesley Hill, The Lord’s Prayer: A Guide to Praying to Our Father
• Ben Myers, The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism
• Peter J. Leithart, The Ten Commandants: A Guide to the Perfect Law of Liberty
• Brad East, The Church: A Guide to the People of God

NB: Thanks to Lexham Press for kindly providing me with a review copy of this book. This did not influence my thoughts regarding the work.