If the Lord’s Prayer is the sort of thing we pray for if we love God and love others, then it would be good to look at some specifics.

In the first half of the Lord’s Prayer we learn the following things about loving God:

1. To love God means to relate to God as Father. It is not enough to say Jesus taught us to “call” God Father. “Father” is more than a name we give to God, as if we’ve now added to the long list of Bible names for God: like YHWH and Adonai and Lord of Hosts. “Father” is who God is to us. Father evokes relationship more than description.

2. To love God means to pray for God’s Name to sanctified. If we love God, which means that we accept God for who God is and ourselves for who we are before God, then we want God to be God — and that means we want God’s very Name to be reverenced. In what we do, in what we say, in how we act, and in our relationships.

3. To love God means to pray for God’s will to be established. This is a global yearning for God’s will, his Kingdom will, to be established in every nook and cranny of life and society and culture. When we see systemic evils — from the abuse of humans into poverty, or racism, or persecution, or consumerism, and we could go and on, our response should not be first “these people are jerks” but that “this is not what God’s Kingdom calls for.”

To love God means to yearn for, pray for and work for what makes God to be God: we embrace God as Father, we yearn for his Name to be honored, and we long for his will to be done — right here on earth as it is always done in God’s presence.