An Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer for Simple Laymen

Martin Luther preached on the Lord's Prayer in Wittenberg during Lent of 1517, months before the indulgence controversy made his name. His student Johann Agricola took the sermons down and published them without Luther's approval, and Luther, unhappy with the result, prepared his own version. Auslegung deutsch des Vaterunsers für die einfältigen Laien appeared in German in 1519 and went through numerous printings within a few years. The title names its audience plainly: not clergy or university men but ordinary believers who had been taught to multiply prayers and count them, and who had rarely been told what the words they repeated actually meant.

Luther opens with the address itself. To call God Father is to be given permission for confidence; to say Our Father is to be bound to every other Christian, so that no one prays this prayer alone; to say in heaven is to confess that we are not there, that we are exiles in need. From there he moves through the seven petitions, and his governing insight is that each petition is also a confession. To ask that God's name be hallowed is to admit that we dishonor it. To ask that his kingdom come is to admit that we live under another rule. To ask that his will be done is to admit that our will resists him, and Luther is blunt that God answers this petition by breaking our will rather than flattering it. The prayer thus becomes a mirror of sin and a school of grace at once: the one who prays it rightly learns what is wrong with him and where help lies. In the fourth petition Luther reads the daily bread as Christ and the Word of God, the food of the soul given through preaching, an interpretation he would revise a decade later in the catechisms toward the literal bread of the body. The petition against temptation does not ask to be spared trial, since God uses trial to drive us to prayer, but to be kept from falling. The prayer ends with evil because the Christian life does not end before death, and Luther closes by insisting on the Amen: the one who prays must say it with certainty, since a doubtful prayer has already refused what it asks for.

The treatise mattered because it taught a whole population how to pray in their own language and showed that the gospel of justification could be read off the oldest prayer in the church. The pattern of petition as confession reappears in Luther's catechisms of 1529 and shaped Lutheran devotion for centuries. Its directness and brevity still make it one of the most accessible windows into Luther's pastoral mind before the great controversies hardened his tone.

Who should read this: anyone who prays the Lord's Prayer by habit and wants to pray it with understanding, and pastors or catechists looking for a model of plain exposition for ordinary people. It is not for readers seeking Luther's mature theology of prayer in its final form, or for those wanting polemic; this is a pastor speaking gently to laity, not a reformer at war.