The Lord’s Prayer: the full text and what each petition asks
The prayer
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Amen.
In short
The Lord’s Prayer is the prayer Jesus taught his disciples. The form recited in English comes from liturgical use and does not match the biblical text word for word; Scripture carries two versions, the longer one in Matthew 6:9-13 and a shorter one in Luke 11:2-4.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 5 min read
When to pray it
At any hour, and above all when your own words run out: short enough to fit in a minute, complete enough that nothing is missing from it. It opens and closes every decade of the rosary.
The structure hinges in the middle, and the hinge is the content. The first half speaks of God: the name, the kingdom, the will. The second speaks of the one praying: today’s bread, forgiveness, protection in trial. Beginning with God and only then reaching one’s own needs inverts the natural order of any request, and it is the one part of the prayer nobody says on autopilot once they have noticed it.
The bread asked for is today’s. Not the month’s, not the year’s, and the limit is deliberate: it keeps the prayer from becoming insurance against the future. Whoever prays it comes back tomorrow.
One detail of the petition for forgiveness usually escapes notice. In Matthew it is the only petition that gets a comment right after the prayer: Jesus returns to it in the next two verses and ties the forgiveness received to the forgiveness given. Anyone praying the whole prayer is accepting that condition out loud, every time.
The first word is the strongest in the prayer and the least noticed. Calling God Father, rather than Lord or Creator, is what Paul describes in Romans as the mark of adoption and the opposite of fear. Everything that follows rests on it.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared First century, in the Gospel
The prayer begins with a concrete request. In Luke, a disciple watches Jesus praying and asks to be taught, as John the Baptist had taught his own followers. The answer is not a lesson about prayer: it is a finished prayer, short enough to be memorised on first hearing.
The two Gospels that record it do not agree. Luke’s version is leaner; Matthew’s, longer, is the one that entered the churches’ liturgical use and the one the world memorised. The explanation current among scholars in both traditions requires no choice between the Gospels: Jesus taught more than once, and each community kept the form it prayed.
The formula recited in English is not the wording of any biblical translation published on this site, and that is nobody’s error. It is a different object: a text fixed by use, with centuries of repetition aloud behind it, in which rhythm and memory weighed as much as literalness. That is why it appears here as a prayer, with the biblical text just below, among the passages.
Little-known details
The ending many people recite is not in Matthew
Scripture says debts; the recited prayer says trespasses
The word behind “daily bread” exists nowhere else
“Lead us not into temptation” has been debated for centuries
What the passages say
9Therefore, you shall pray in this way: Our Father, who is in heaven: May your name be kept holy.
10May your kingdom come. May your will be done, as in heaven, so also on earth.
11Give us this day our life-sustaining bread.
12And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.
13And lead us not into temptation. But free us from evil. Amen.
The version the liturgy settled on, and the basis of the recited form. Compare it with the text above: Scripture here says “our debts” and “our debtors”, where the prayer says trespasses.
2And he said to them: “When you are praying, say: Father, may your name be kept holy. May your kingdom come.
3Give us this day our daily bread.
4And forgive us our sins, since we also forgive all who are indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.”
The shorter version, together with the scene that prompts it. Reading the two side by side is the quickest way to see that the church received two forms of the same prayer, not one closed formula.
14For if you will forgive men their sins, your heavenly Father also will forgive you your offenses.
15But if you will not forgive men, neither will your Father forgive you your sins.
The comment Jesus adds immediately afterwards, and it concerns a single petition of the prayer. It is the only line in the passage that sets a condition, and the condition falls on the forgiveness the one praying grants to others.
15And you have not received, again, a spirit of servitude in fear, but you have received the Spirit of the adoption of sons, in whom we cry out: “Abba, Father!”
Explains why the prayer opens by calling God Father. Paul describes that word as the mark of adoption and the opposite of fear — which makes the first line of the Lord’s Prayer the strongest claim in everything that follows.