Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an

apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization using media both old and

new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate an encounter with

Christ and His Church. The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring

the transformative power of God's Word where it is most needed. Today we invite

you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the

warmth and light of Christ with each one of us. Peace be with you. Friends,

today's gospel gives us Luke's version of the our Father, the most beloved and

popular prayer in the Christian tradition. A prayer offered literally millions of

times every day around the world. So it might be good for us to seek to

understand it better. How wonderful first that it comes directly from the prayer

of Jesus Himself. We hear that He's been spending significant time in prayer

and so the disciples ask Him, Lord, how do we pray? It's as though the prayer

that He teaches them sums up the manner and content of His own prayer. So when

you pray, He tells us, say, Father, halluade be your name. We call God Father when we pray.

Not Lord, not King, not power, though He is all those things too. But first we

call Him Abba. And as you well know, that was distinctive to Jesus this way of

addressing God with a child's term for his Father, something a bit like dad or

daddy. The point is the same intimacy that Jesus has with his Abba, He invites us to

share. See, the point is we don't just imitate his prayer the way we might imitate the

prayer of any spiritual teacher. So you know, the great master teaches you a set of

words and so on. The point is we enter into the dynamics of his own being when we

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