Mohler’s subtitle grabbed my attention: The Lord’s Prayer as a manifesto for revolution. What a provocative phrase. We live in an age of revolution, or perhaps more accurately, an age of failed revolutions, he says. We long for them, knowing that the world is deeply flawed and broken beyond repair. There is a utopian streak promising to cure all that ails. But just as the revolutionary spirit is abroad, history reveals that they scarcely deliver.

In the Lord’s Prayer, there is no clearer call to revolution than in “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Mohler says this is the prayer that turns the world upside down. That it is “for men and women who want to see the kingdoms of this world give way to the kingdom of our Lord” (74). Each phrase contains a theology lesson in itself (170), and instructs us on what to pray.

Jesus teaches that prayer is not primarily an act of therapy, granting a sense of serenity or about lessening anxieties (though these things often result), but can disrupt our inner being as it reorients our hearts to God’s agenda. Prayer is about his glory. What we pray forces us to articulate assumptions about who God is and who we are. “If we don’t know God, our prayers will be impotent, facile, and devoid of life” (67). The Lord’s prayer disrupts our sense of individualism, emphasizing our corporate identity. Just as we wrongly present our petitions first, Jesus begins by identifying God’s character (43).

There is much more that could be said. It is a great book filled with great teaching about this all important prayer. Believers need to know what and how to pray and this book is really helpful toward that end. ( )