“Pray, then, in this way: Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. You 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.”

—Matthew 6:9-13

When I was about to start my sixth year of teaching, God threw a holy wrench right in the middle of my career and what I thought it should look like. It was the middle of July, so there were only a couple of weeks before the beginning of the school year when I got a call from the school’s counselor to tell me that because I have history/social studies on my teaching license, in addition to teaching English III, I would also be teaching Psychology and Sociology that year.

I knew nothing about either of these subjects other than knowing that ology means “the study of” and psych refers to the mind. I was convinced that this little experiment was going to crash and burn, but I’d already signed my contract, so there wasn’t much I could do about it.

As a result, I learned some amazing things about the brain God designed for us that have taught me so much about God and His love for us. It’s now my opinion that one of the best things a Christian can do to strengthen their faith in Christ and learn how to be a more effective warrior in the spiritual battles we will face is to study how God designed our brains to work, so how about a quick psych lesson?

One of the things I learned while studying to teach my new psych class was about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Basically, Abraham Maslow looked at all the needs we have as humans, put them into five categories, and ranked them. According to him, every human has these five types of needs: physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization… in that order. 

What this means is before we can worry about whether or not we are safe, loved, esteemed by others, and being the best version of us we can be, we have to have our physiological needs met. In other words, we have to make sure we have food, water, shelter, etc. When we have cared for our physiological needs, we have to make sure our need to feel safe is met before we can worry about our need to feel loved and accepted.

We as humans will always start at the bottom of the pyramid and work our way up, and if one of those needs suddenly is not being met anymore, we won’t be able to worry about the needs above it in the pyramid until that need is being met again. It’s almost like God wired a self-prioritizing code into our brains so that when we encounter a crisis, we don’t have to worry about trying to figure out if finding food or making sure we’re respected by our peers is what’s most important. 

That’s pretty amazing by itself, but if we look back at the Lord’s Prayer, we can see just how good our God and His provision in our lives really is.

Look at the things God tells us to ask for: (1) That we will remember God’s holiness and that His will shall be done, (2) that we receive our daily bread, (3) that our relationships with God and with others will be restored through forgiveness, (4) that we will be delivered from evil and will not give in to temptation.

Let’s start with number two: “Give us this day our daily bread.” One of the first things we are to ask for is provision for our physical needs which also help us feel safe and secure. Then we move on to number three, which focuses on the restoration of relationships. Without relationships, we can’t feel loved and accepted, nor can we have our need to be respected and esteemed by those around us met. 

Last, Jesus tells us to pray that we will be delivered from evil, which is a concept closely tied to the idea of self-actualization. Self-actualization is just a fancy way to say that we have a need to improve ourselves and be the best version of ourselves that we can be, but in Jesus’s model for us, actualization is backed by God’s power rather than our efforts.

It’s all five needs. They’re all in order.

Yet again the King of Creation gives us guidelines and it turns out that the reason we’re told to do things in that way is just because it’s what we need. Even in the way He tells us to live, He is constantly providing for us and our needs. What a good, good God!

One last note: earlier, we started with number two. There is another need that supersedes even our physiological needs because whether or not it’s met will influence how we go about meeting all our other needs—the need to have a relationship with God Himself. By keeping His holiness at the forefront of our minds and focusing on remaining in the center of His will, we are in a position to go about meeting our needs in the most healthy way possible.

So maybe this week, it’s time to make the Lord’s Prayer part of our daily routine again, not only to be obedient to the model Christ gave us but also to remind ourselves that our good God is constantly providing for us.