Also by this author: The King of Christmas
Series: FatCat #3
Published by Lexham Press on October 5, 2022
Genres: Children's
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How God's children pray. Join FatCat, the friendly feline, as he learns the Lord's Prayer―Jesus's prayer that teaches us how to pray. This simple yet profound prayer shapes children's love for God, need for forgiveness from God, and dependence on God for strength and protection. Learn the Lord's Prayer and search for FatCat on every page!
Each petition of the Lord's Prayer has a full-page illustration from Jesus's life and a reflection on its meaning. With a list of Scripture references and a guided family prayer, this FatCat book helps God's children understand, memorize, and pray the Lord's Prayer.
As a loving Father, God invites all his beloved children to come to him. In a fun and friendly way, The Lord's Prayer: For All God's Children encourages children to pray to our Father with reverence and boldness.
Proverbs says “Train up a child in the way they should go, and when they are old, they will not depart from it.” If you want to get very technical, I think a better translation of the Hebrew is “it will not depart from them.” How and what we teach our children in the formative years of their life matters. With so many resources and so many options, how are were to choose? Lexham Press’s FatCat books are intentional in their educational value, reclaiming the lost art of catechism. A catechism is usually a simple summary of Christian doctrine intended for memorization. FatCat is a series of books that uses simple sentences, repetition, and beautiful illustrations to teach biblical truths. The Lord’s Prayer is the third FatCat book.
If you’re like me, you grew up reciting the Lord’s Prayer in church. The church where I served as the youth pastor was a bilingual church and, when the prayer was recited, people recited it in their heart language. Even though, as a primarily Chinese church, the cadence of Mandarin was in my ears, I always finished my English recitation at the same time. It was a prayer that was methodical, catechetical, and liturgical. A problem with that is that when a prayer can be recited effortlessly—mindlessly—we can lose track of why we’re even saying those words in the first place. The Lord’s Prayer is an attempt to bring renewed life and understanding to some of Christianity’s most-repeated refrain.
Each panel of the book contains a line from the prayer along with a 12-15 explanation of the text. The first line is always the same: Lord, teach us to pray. Following this line is a repetition of the line from the Lord’s Prayer. In the panel of “Our Father,” we are told that God is Jesus’s Father, and he is our Father as well. He isn’t far away from us, but invites us into relationship with Him. In the panel about “Daily Bread,” we learn that daily bread refers to everything we need to live—while the illustrations showcase Jesus feeding the 5,000. Natasha Kennedy brings the prayer to life as Harold Senkbeil provides exposition.
Unlike The King of Christmas, The Lord’s Prayer seems intended for an older audience. The former had a one sentence refrain repeated throughout the book. The Lord’s Prayer takes the famous prayer line-by-line followed by several sentence of exposition. It’s perfectly fine, but stylistically different to the point that it seems like two different audience ages were intended. The point being, if you pick up one of these assuming that all the others will the same, you might be disappointed. Beyond that, though, The Lord’s Prayer is a simple, reflective line-by-line explanation of the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray.