Posted by Roberta Grimes • July 31, 2021 • 23 Comments
Afterlife Research, Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus, Understanding Reality
Our Father who is in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
Your kingdom come. Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
– Jesus, from the Gospel Book of Matthew 6:9-10
The requirement that we pray to God is another human-made idea. God seeks a very much closer and more loving relationship with us than that! And I’m glad, because I really can’t pray those old formal churchy prayers anymore. Once I began to understand the glorious truth about reality, saying rote prayers to God made me feel self-conscious and foolish, as if I were speaking aloud and formally to my own deepest heart. There is no cranky God outside and above us, eager to see us prostrate our bodies and debase our minds! Here are some glorious eternal truths that beat religions by a country mile:
Coming to understand these glorious truths some twenty-odd years ago made me surrender whatever privacy I still thought I had. I began to live with an open prayer-line, a sense that the top of my head was wide open. I was aware in each moment that my every thought and emotion was available to God, and the more I lived this way, the happier and more peaceful I became. God was inside me! I no longer saw a place where I left off and God began. It was then that I began to feel stupid about reciting the Catholic rote prayers at Mass, and even reciting the Nicene Creed made me feel embarrassed before God. I urge you for your own mental peace to read the two-year-old post linked here, and similarly welcome God into your mind. Just be aware that when you invite God in, God will never again be a distant stranger you can try to keep distant by genuflecting now and then and reciting some rote prayers.
What did Jesus say about prayer? It was a touchy subject for Him to address, since He was teaching at a time when for him to speak against the prevailing religion was a capital crime, and the notion of reciting prayers to God is at the very heart of Judaism. Even if He had wanted to speak against formal prayer, He could not have done so without risking arrest. So instead, He talked about our need to relate to God more intimately. To the Samaritan woman at the well He said, “But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit 
and truth” (JN 4:23-24). Jesus said a lot of things about prayer, but they all were consistent with the wonderful passage from His glorious Sermon on the Mount quoted below. There He calls rote public prayers hypocritical, and He urges us to pray privately and in secret. He transforms our relationship with God into one that is entirely intimate:
“When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.
“And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words. So do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him. Pray, then, in this way:
‘Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name.
Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’” (MT 6:5-13).
The Lord’s Prayer has been called “the perfect prayer” by leaders of many Christian denominations. What I love about it is that it is short and complete, it contains all that you ever might need to say to the genuine Godhead in your living room, and it is a song of praise to God that rests easily on your mind and makes your heart soar. Let’s briefly analyze this perfect prayer:
“Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name.”
Jesus was always trying to lessen our fear of man-made deities and transform our image of God into something more like a warm and loving Daddy. Here He starts His prayer with that. He knows that there is no place where God is not, so it seems that He may have been mostly reassuring the listening Temple guards of His devotion to the prevailing religion when He then stressed the fact that God is in heaven, and God’s very name is holy. All true, but beside the point of His drive to transform the way that we relate to God.
“Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.”
It is odd that the religion that bears the name of Jesus hasn’t more deeply tried to understand what He means when He talks about the kingdom of God. So we have put considerable effort here into doing just that! And the first and most important thing that Jesus teaches us to pray for is that the emotional stressors that we came here to use to elevate ourselves spiritually will be so effective for each of us that the entire earth will become as spiritually elevated as the sixth level of the afterlife.
“Give us this day our daily bread.”
Jesus tells us that God already knows and will satisfy all our needs (MT 6:25-33), so here He gives our praying that God will meet those needs just one quick sentence.
“And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”
Here the word “debt” is meant in the broadest sense. It refer to anything that anyone might owe to someone else, and also to any harm done to others. And we know that Jesus isn’t asking God to forgive us, because – as He says – God doesn’t judge us (JN 5:22-23). So Jesus is telling us here that we always must forgive, and He makes His point by reminding us of how much we rely upon God’s forgiveness.
“And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
We enter each lifetime in order to experience the spiritual stressors of temptation and negativity, so He isn’t asking here that we not encounter them. Instead, I think that what He is praying for is God’s sure guidance so we will triumph over all our most difficult lessons and thereby achieve tremendous spiritual growth.
“For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.”
This sentence is thought by some to have been added later, but I am confident that Jesus said it. This is the reset of our entire relationship with God! Our own beloved “Daddy” owns it all, every bit of all the wealth and power, so eternally and forever we have nothing to fear!
Jesus warns us against praying long and self-important public prayers as the Gentiles and the hypocrites do. So now the only prayer I ever pray is The Lord’s Prayer, and I pray it in the living room of my mind as an intimate song of praise since God is always there. Jesus didn’t talk much about gratitude, but we know now that praying in gratitude affirmations puts the powers of our own minds behind our prayers. As the brilliant fourteenth-century Dominican theologian and visionary Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) said, “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.” So I always follow the Perfect Prayer with “Thank You for giving me work to do. Thank You for showing me how to do it,” and I follow that with whatever other gratitude affirmations are currently in my mind.
Praying: done! Then all day every day I dialogue with Spirit in my mind. I’m sure that it’s Thomas I’m chatting with, but he prefers that I 
think of our mental conversations and our little jokes as my connection with the perfect All-That-Is of which I am an integral part. It never leaves me now, this connection with the Godhead and eternity that fills the living room of my mind. So now I am always there, always joyous, always certain and at peace. Most of all, dear beloved friend, I want this perpetual bliss for you, too!
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.
– Jesus, from the Gospel Book of Matthew 6:11-13
God would never lead us into temptation, so that part of the prayer must be mistranslated. If you study the Arameic it becomes clear how mistranslated this is.
This website may give you some deeper insights into the many mistranslations:
https://www.jesusaramaicteachings.org/
Oh my dear Adrian, neither you nor I is qualified to speak for the Godhead. With these limited earth-minds, we struggle to play checkers while God easily plays ten-dimensional chess! But in fact, we all plan lives that are full of temptations of all kinds, big and small. To be tempted, and to resist that temptation or else to handle it in some other positive way is one of the many big earth-life challenges that empower us to grow spiritually. So I think we might easily say that the Godhead – in the person of God’s minions, our spirit guides who help us to live our planned lives – leads us into temptation all the time. I can give you examples from my own life of when and how this has happened, and how I handled it (not always successfully, especially early on).
And yes, thank you for pointing out that Jesus spoke Aramaic, and everything He says in the English Gospels has been translated from Aramaic into Greek and from Greek into English. When I first looked into this – fifteen years ago now – I was determined to use only the direct-from-Aramaic translations! There still are a few native Aramaic speakers – I think their community is in Turkey? – and reading the Gospels in Aramaic was something of a fad around 15-20 years ago.
The problem was that the Aramaic-to-English Gospels bore little resemblance to the familiar modern two-stage English translations. And those that we used to think were dead were telling us that those two-stage translations were actually closer to the Lord’s actual teachings. Finally my primary guide, Thomas, made it plain to me that my ministry is to those with a Christian background who will find the accurate English words in Gospel versions translated through Greek to be comforting. Then in 2015 I channeled Liberating Jesus, which is based in a modern two-step translation and is what Jesus wants me to be teaching now. So I follow the plan! But we are all different people. If others would like to check out your suggested website, that might work for them.
p.s. The Fun trilogy – Dying, Staying in Touch, Growing Forever – all contain Appendix III, which addresses this problem.
Roberta. I was wondering how you would answer the question of Temptation. You cleared it up very nicely for me. Thanks.
There is reason to believe we have temptation even when not experiencing incarnation. I have been shown that I was “tempted” to stay “home” rather than join this particular “mission” party. I resisted the recruitment. We “tempt” ourselves because free will is free will.
Yes, perfectly right, my dear Mike!
I am glad, my dear David! Temptation of one kind or another is essential to our lives on earth, because the essence of our lessons is free-will choice of what is most loving. I think we’re going to be talking about the free-will issue next week!
Dear Roberta,
Thanks for expressing these wondrous truths about living in God, thus any formality about praying to Him more about connecting to that reality than asking, for he always knows what’s in our hearts and what’s best for us–all of us.
What’s helpful is guidance on how to live out mortal life, and that’s so well expressed by the Golden Rule and the conscience implanted in our souls.
So, about how to go about living:
Why we exist
you, me, and all else,
so steeped in turmoil,
owns its reasons in stealth
We are, we do, we think,
and dream beyond reason,
but in a blink
all will be gone and done
Such is our illusion of life,
sometimes fun,
but invariably beset with strife,
and always for us finally done
Illusion or reality,
death or eternity
Body or soul
which determined our goal
Matters not to eternity’s light
when exactly we leave
Matters only we did what’s right
not if any bereave
in our brief time waging the good fight
My dear Jack, you are more and more a poet! Thank you for this.
I have come to think that the secret to feeling ever closer to God really lies with our primary spirit guides. We draw closer to them, and they are in contact with the Godhead, and so long as we have done as much as we can to free our minds of negativity, our merging ever more closely with Spirit seems to happen naturally.
Our spirit guides are by design our connection to God in thus experience we perceive as incarnation. Prayers to them for guidance are like radio contact with mission control.♐️
Oh my dear Mike, this certainly is true in your case! In mine, Thomas has only very lately let me think that he is my closest connection to God. I have come to think that’s true for all of us, but he won’t let me take anything for granted!
Dearest Roberta,
You have given me, and perhaps some others, another reason why churches, i.e. denominations, should not exist. The job description of the priests that serve the congregation is to act as a go-between the parishioners and God. This sounds like the job description of our spirit guides, except that our guides have a much better understanding of us than the priests who should find another position. Without priests or ministers, there is no reason for churches.
Yours,
Cookie
Hello Roberta,
I haven’t watched TV in years and the last movie I watched was How To Train Your Dragon (which did have a moral message). Even so, I have friends that are swimming in the cesspool of current politics, so unless I go live in a cave I can’t seem to get completely away from the negative. Which raises the question; if we remove all negativity from our lives are we not removing one of the things we are here to experience?
Great post, as always. Thank you.
Dear AC, I remember that movie! I watched it with grandchildren. It’s a cartoon, and it’s tame enough for me.
You ask a good question about whether removing political news and other highly negative stuff from our lives might be removing some important stressors, and I have thought about it, but I think political warfare is not the kind of emotional stress that helps us to grow spiritually. Interpersonal stress seems to be useful, but political and daily-news sort of stress is removed from our personal lives and really revs us up to no purpose. A fight with someone we love, on the other hand, is deeply personal and will require us to learn to better love and forgive. I think that’s the difference. Good point, however!
AC, Your decision to remove negatives provides opportunities to well exercise your moral conscience. And as you also realized, the cesspool of negatives will not disappear, so your opportunities will abound.
Fortunately (or unfortunately) that is certainly true, my dear Jack. I think it actually has become harder to grow spiritually here, with the collective consciousness vibration of this planet currently sunk so low, and with individual negativity so universal. How do you choose love in each instance, when every alternative is to some degree negative? And unless you make an active task of removing negative entertainments and news, just the culture itself can be such a massive downer! My rule now is that unless I can be part of fixing some problem, I don’t even want to know about it. And I can’t tell you how much that has improved my whole overall mindset!
Perfect for Sunday! Thank you, Dear Dear Roberta.
“Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.”
– Jesus, from the Gospel Book of Matthew 6:11-13
Oh my dear Cam, it really is a beautiful prayer! I have heard at this point from many people who say something like what you said, that these posts for them make Sunday feel like Sunday. Just from my informal sampling, I think a lot of people stopped attending church a year ago this past March, when the Covid panic hit, and they have filled their Sunday mornings in other ways, including for some of them their reading of these blog posts. So I have tried since early this year to include in them more of the spiritual food for which these people once went to church. And since the teachings of Jesus are essentially the same things we learn from the afterlife evidence, that really hasn’t been difficult! Your comment makes me smile. Thank you, my dear!
Hi Roberta!
I always Loved that prayer. Thank you for reminding us. I feel its power !
Dear Jennifer, I’m so glad that it moves you! The Lord’s Prayer has become almost a commonplace, in the US at least, so I worry a bit that we might be so used to it that we no longer really hear the words we are speaking. So it’s lovely that for you those words still have power!
Hi Roberta. Thanks for the reminder to begin most prayers with, “Thank you.” That sort of affirmation seems so much more powerfull, but beyond that, as you also say, “prayer” can also be just chatting with “God”, more likely guides, (maybe angels?), and whatever other benevolent beings might be working with us for the higher good – it all seems like sort of a continuum – and then finding that quiet inner place to listen for the replies (the still inner voice.) Some might call it meditation which can sound quite daunting, but with practice, perhaps it could just be a quick tune-in at a moment’s notice, sort of like rocking back and forth between this world and the next. Having a quiter mind is important. How can you listen if you are constantly in “monkey mind?” In fact, the first communication I had from my guides was “Listen!” I believe that one of the most important prayers in Judaism starts with a word that means more or less the same thing, “Shema!” I hope that someday I can slip into that “zone” at a moment’s notice. Imagine if everyone learned to have that sort of moment-to-moment connection if they so chose. I’m guessing Jesus was there, and in his veiled way way trying to teach that skill to his followers.
Dearest Roberta,
Prayer feels different now I actually believe that I am loved and I’m part of the wholeness of God.
It’s not so much, ‘Heck I hope I make it to Heaven’ and, ‘If I make it in the end, it will be by the skin of my teeth.’
Now my (simple) prayers feel like a kind of celebration of being included; like I share in God-ness (and goodness) knowing that I too am accepted and included. They’ve become more enthusiastic…
I guess to pray without fear is a very different experience.
And now it seems important to pray for another person, with as much intensity and fullness of heart that I would pray for myself when asking for something vital. 🙏🏼❣️🕊
Oh my beautiful Efrem, you have brought tears to my eyes. How perfectly glorious! This is so precisely what I am learning that my role is, dear one – this patiently lifting your burden of fear and bringing you the perfect wonder of God’s love – and you have succeeded at it so wonderfully! I read over again what you have said, and I smile. If only we can find a way to give to everyone on earth this gift of perfect, trusting intimacy with the Godhead! I would hug you, darling friend, but there is a whole world between us….
🙏🏼❣️🌅