Hallowed Be Thy Name

THE SECRET AND POWER OF PRAYING THE LORD’S PRAYER

Hallowed Be Thy Name

By Sarah Kerubo Nyandoro

As 2023 ends and 2024 begins, many of us enter into it with wishes, resolutions, dreams, and prayers. In the Christian faith, prayer is our communication with God, one of the ways of being in relationship with God.

Growing up in church, there is one prayer everyone knows, and that is the Lord’s Prayer, also know as the Our Father. This prayer, which Jesus gave to His disciples to teach them how to pray, is the subject of Kenyan-born Sarah Kerubo Nyandoro’s book The Secret and Power of Praying the Lord’s Prayer.

Inspired by her spiritual journey and prayer life, Nyandoro starts off with some truths about humans and their mindset about prayer. Often, people pray the most when they are under adverse and dire circumstances. They lose heart when prayers are not answered right away, or the answer doesn’t come in the package they expect. Or, in the case of the Lord’s Prayer, they do it by rote, by recitation, without tapping into the power of the meaning of this prayer.

Chapter by chapter, Nyandoro takes each section of the Lord’s Prayer and cross-references it with other scriptures in the Old and New Testament (the New King James Version), inviting the reader to examine the deep meaning behind each section. For example, in the first chapter “Our Father, Who Art in Heaven,” it establishes whose we are as well as what makes a father, earthly and heavenly. At the end of the chapter, she includes a prayer, stating the importance of saying scriptures out loud whenever possible.

Nyandoro is intentional in stating that the Lord’s Prayer, and prayer period, is not a one-and-done. We pray without ceasing, and coupling prayer with praise and the acknowledgment of God is where our power comes from. While sharing her story from both sides of the Atlantic, she makes it relevant to the issues of our 21^st century experiences.

After I read her book, my mind went back to my days as a young Black man attending the 11:00 p.m. broadcast services of First Church of Deliverance in Chicago. The service always opened worship with the choir singing the Lord’s Prayer. No matter how many times I heard the choir sing it, the power and anointing of the words always tapped into my spirit while the congregation around me praised God. It set the tone for the rest of the service, and the rest of my week.

The Secret and Power of Praying the Lord’s Prayer is available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Christian Faith Publishing.

Thank you, Sarah, for sharing your story and your faith walk, and for inviting us to come up a little higher in our understanding of this well-known prayer.