In this episode of Year on the Mountaintop, we turn to the Lord’s Prayer—the most familiar prayer in Christianity and one of the central teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus doesn’t simply tell his disciples what not to do when they pray; he gives them a model for what prayer can be. But the familiarity of these words raises an important question: have we learned not only to recite the Lord’s Prayer, but to understand and live its meaning?

The Lord’s Prayer is both a liturgical prayer shared by Christians across centuries and a foundation for developing our own relationship with God. In this introduction to the series, we’ll explore why Jesus spends so much time teaching about prayer, how the Model Prayer contrasts with religious performance, and how its words can shape our personal and communal lives. Over the coming sessions, we’ll take the prayer line by line, exploring its meaning and discovering how Jesus teaches us to communicate with God.