The Unity and Completion of the Lord’s Prayer

The Lord’s Prayer is not a collection of separate requests, but a single, ordered ascent of the soul toward God. Each petition follows from the one before it, as steps in a ladder that raises the heart from earth to heaven. In these few words, the Lord has taught us everything we may rightly desire and the order in which we should desire it.
— Book II, Chapter 10

The prayer begins with God’s glory and ends with our deliverance, so that even when we ask for ourselves, we seek Him first. For to ask that His Name be hallowed, that His kingdom come, and that His will be done, is already to live as His children. The petitions that follow—bread, forgiveness, protection, deliverance—show how we must depend on Him for all that sustains, cleanses, strengthens, and completes us.
— Book II, Chapter 10

Each phrase contains the whole of faith, hope, and charity. Faith calls upon the Father; hope seeks the coming kingdom; charity forgives and receives forgiveness. The soul that prays rightly ascends through these virtues until it is established in peace. Thus the prayer not only instructs the mind but forms the heart, drawing it upward by ordered love.
— Book II, Chapter 11

As the Beatitudes describe the transformation of life, so this prayer gives voice to the transformed life. The same Spirit who makes us cry, “Abba, Father,” teaches us to ask for nothing apart from the good of the kingdom. When the heart is purified by this prayer, it no longer clings to earthly desire, for it has learned to rest in the will of God.
— Book II, Chapter 11

And when we say, “Amen,” we affirm our trust that all these petitions are granted to us in Christ, who is Himself our Bread, our Forgiveness, our Deliverer, and our Peace. In Him the prayer finds both its beginning and its end—for through Him we have access to the Father, and in Him we are delivered from all evil.
— Book II, Chapter 11

Source: St. Augustine, On the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, Book II, Chapters 10–11.