How Jesus Teaches us to Pray
/
Prayer is a topic that I personally believe that the church has taken great strides toward over complicating. Seasonal prayer, contemplative prayer, intercessory prayer, ejaculatory prayer, listening prayer, child’s prayer, praying the scriptures; there are likely as many types of prayer as there are seconds in the year, and that is even after you sort out the good from the rest!
For the most part, I would say this even makes a lot of sense. After all, as Christians, we are called to pray often (Philippians 4:6), so it makes sense that over the years the theology and practice of prayer would become as developed as it has. The church is great at recording what has worked and what hasn’t. So that there are all these hundreds of types of prayer shows us that this is a topic that is worth our attention.
But at the same time, often, I think this wealth of information leads to a very different problem altogether. Since becoming a pastor, it has not been unusual for me to hear the following statement: “I don’t know how to pray.” Often, after talking about this feeling for a bit, what I have found is that the source of this thought is that the person has done some digging on their own into these different prayer traditions, and has found themselves, in their own eyes, coming up short. This, in turn, has caused their prayer life to stall.
And so, it is with this in mind, that I think it is well worth our while to look at what the one person best equipped to answer the question, “how should you pray,” has to say on the topic. And spoiler, it turns out, what Jesus two-cents are on the subject of prayer is far more simplistic than a lot of what has been added on over the years!
“One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.” He said to them, “When you pray, say: “‘Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. And lead us not into temptation.’”
If we want to talk about what Jesus has to say about prayer, there is no better place to start than the four verses above, Luke 11:1-13. The passage begins, fittingly, with our Lord deep in prayer. After finishing, a disciple, a dedicated follower of Jesus, immediately asks how they should pray. When I picture this scene, I like to imagine that the disciple was just waiting for Jesus to finish, getting almost antsy, just so they could ask their question. And thankfully for all of us, Jesus obliges.
Now, this story is not the first time that Jesus teaches on prayer in the Gospel of Luke, in fact, he even teaches something quite similar to this during the Sermon on the Mount. But what makes this passage important for us now, in my eyes at least, are the specifics of who Jesus is addressing. Instead of preaching to a crowd of thousands, here Jesus is simply teaching his close friends and followers, people with a relationship to the Lord the same as we Christians two thousand years later have, how they should talk to God both on their own and together.
And so he begins. When you pray, Jesus teaches all his believers, begin by saying something like the following. “Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come”. In that phrase, already we learn a lot. For starters, by calling God “Father,” Jesus is telling us right off the hop that there really isn’t much of leg to stand on to think of God as someone at arm’s length. We know this because, In scripture, that is not what an ideal father is ever supposed to be. In scripture, the ideal father is loving and caring. In scripture, fathers are supposed to lead and teach their children in the way they should go (Proverbs 22:6). While the unfortunate truth of life is that many people have terrible experiences with their fathers’, how we are being taught by Jesus to think of God here, is not that. Instead, when we pray, we are to understand the person we are praying to as the farthest possible thing to a bad dad that could possibly be. How do we know that to be the case? Well because of the next two things Jesus says for us to include, “hallowed be your name, your kingdom come.” Who among us would ever call a deadbeat father holy? Who among us would ever ask for the “kingdom,” that is, ‘the wants,’ of an abusive dad to come to pass? Hopefully no one.
And so it is from this base, that God is our loving, caring, holy, Father, that Jesus builds. “Give us each day, our daily bread”, we are taught to ask next. An ideal parent in scripture is one that provides for their children’s needs. If you reading this are not someone with the finances to provide for your children and feel you come up short of the mark on that front, first off, we can help (confidentially of course), but also know that is not the message to take from me saying this. There are more ways than money to provide for your children’s needs and still be a good parent, and what’s more, is that more wholistic understanding of what it means to provide is really how we should understand this teaching either way. As human beings, we all have legitimate needs of many different kinds, and if God is really our Father it should be completely natural for us that we ask him to provide. To do anything else would be to say we think God is coming up short in his role as our father, which isn’t the case. And so we even are to pray this often, every day even. By doing this, the thought of our loving father, and our thankfulness for what he does for us will never be far from our mind.
And from here, Jesus reaches the height of what he has been building, “Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.” This should be understood as what Jesus’ teaching on prayer has been building toward. I say this because if all people, when they pray, are taught to think of God as their Father, the one who loves them and cares for them, and if they are from there taught that all their needs are provided for by this God who loves them… if to those teachings any person thought it okay to turn around and treat someone like unloved garbage, that action, would essentially be slapping God in the face! If we are truly people who believe what we are taught to pray - that God is our father who loves us, whose name we call holy, and whose will we want to live out - then there is only one way we can possibly act toward other people, even other people we simply cannot stand. And what that way is, is in the same way God acts toward us. It only makes sense. If we can’t act lovingly toward others, well would it not be hypocritical to expect God to act lovingly toward us? After all, if God loves all people, then for us to hate some of those same people is to hate something God loves, and that is not a good place to be (although this is not to say put up with abuse either, as it is not loving to let someone fester in their sin, although that is a discussion for a different day). And so, forgive us God as we forgive others, we pray. Help us to be good to others as we know you are good to us.
And from this height of Jesus teaching in this passage, we come to the prayer’s end, “lead us not into temptation.” And while this phrase may seem odd, and like God is the one that places in situations where we may falter, that is not what this means at all. Instead, think of it like this. That the teachings of Jesus will become so built into us, that when life throws us a curveball, something that threatens to take our focus away from God, that we will be able to stand strong. Simple as that.
In Luke 11:1-4, this is how Jesus teaches his disciples to pray. And if you out there are someone who still feels that you do not know how to pray, than to draw this article to a close, let’s take a moment to sum things up. Because if we do that, very quickly we find there are only four things Jesus wants us to keep in mind:
When we pray, remember God is our loving, caring Father. Someone who is so good as to be worthy of our praise. Someone whose Will for the world is something we know to be what is best.
To thank this God for providing for our needs, as we know he will since we understand him to be our father, and that’s what this father does. In line with that, we should ask that He continues providing so that we never forget what our God has done or does for us
To, in light of all this, recognize that God feels this same way about everyone as he does about us and as such recognize that to love God as he loves us means we need to love others as he loves us as well.
And finally, to learn these previous points to the extent that when the trials of life come we will stand strong in our relationship with God.
Do you feel like you don’t know how to pray? Well, if you can just remember these four things Christ teaches about prayer, which is pretty easy to do as they all build off the understanding that God loves you, well then I am here to tell you that you will be able to pray just fine.
Again, this is not to say all these other teachings about prayer do not have their place, but instead, all the ones that are solid, build on this right here. So if you feel your prayer life to be lacking, maybe this passage, the place where Jesus taught his disciples how they should all pray together to God, is the place to start.
Speaking of prayer, MacGregor EMC does have a weekly prayer meeting, Wednesdays at 1 PM online via video chat during this time of social distancing. The Prayer Meetings are open to all who are able to attend. Links to join the Prayer Meeting are posted on our Facebook page as well as on our church calendar 10 minutes prior to the prayer meeting beginning. If you want to join the prayer meeting but are not able to use video chat, if you contact me in advance, I can bring you into the meeting via a regular phone call as well. Hope to see you then!
