“One day Jesus was praying in a certain place.
When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord,
teach us to pray’” (Luke 11:1).
It might seem that Christian prayer, perhaps most simply
described as listening and talking to God, should be
instinctive and effortless for Christians. For most of us,
however, the awkward truth is that our conversations with God
are anything but easy or automatic.
We struggle to fit prayer into overstuffed schedules. When we
do pray, our efforts often seem like tangled thickets of
thoughts and feelings, shopping lists of wants and needs
sprinkled with pious phrases learned in Sunday school.
Frustrated by an inability to pray well, our prayers become
less frequent and more erratic. Finally, something causes us
to echo the prayer of that anonymous disciple, “Lord,
teach me to pray.” The answer Jesus gave, and still
gives, to that humble request is The Lord’s Prayer.
The Lord’s Prayer is simple enough for a child to learn,
yet so profound that mature Christian thinkers have probed its
depths for centuries without exhausting its riches. Its
pattern can be followed easily by babes in Christ, yet these
petitions and their sequence have awed the most insightful
spiritual theologians from Origen to the present.
In this study we will consider two implications of the
disciple’s request: our need to pray and our need to be
taught how to pray. The studies that follow will explore how
the prayer Jesus taught meets those needs.
Our need to pray
Throughout his earthly life, Jesus prayed. Why? For many
reasons, but first of all because he was truly human, and, as
John Leith observes, “To be truly human is to pray.”
As human beings we were made to be in constant conversation
with our Creator, to “live and move and have our being”
in God (Acts 17:28). Our rebellion ruptured that intended
communion (Gen. 3). To heal the breach caused by sin, God the
Son, the second person of the Trinity, became fully human,
lived a sinless human life, and atoned for our sins by his
sacrificial death on the cross. Having been raised from the
dead and seated at the right hand of God in heaven (Acts 2:33;
Heb. 8:1), Jesus continues to pray to the Father on our behalf
(Rom. 8:34; Heb. 7:25; I John 2:1).
In his earthly ministry, while never ceasing to be fully God,
the fully human Jesus prayed (Mark 1:35; Matt. 14:23;
26:36-44; Luke 5:16; 11:1; John 17) and taught his followers
the importance and the power of prayer (Mark 9:28-29; 11:24;
Matt. 7:7-8; John 15:7, 16; 16:23-24). So when his disciple
asked to be taught how to pray, Jesus did not say, “If
you pray” but “When,” not so much commanding
his disciples to pray as assuming they would follow his
example as well as his instruction.
After all, if the Master found prayer vital to his life and
work, how much more should his servants realize that our
ministries of preaching, teaching, feeding and healing need to
be nurtured and guided by periods of prayer.
Our need to learn
The Gospels never show Jesus’ disciples asking him how
to preach or teach. Rather, Jesus was asked how to pray. That
Jesus’ first disciples were not quite certain how to talk
to God is confirmed by such New Testament authors as Paul (“We
do not know what we ought to pray for,” Rom. 8:26) and
James (“When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask
with wrong motives,” James 4:3).
That’s not surprising. Think about the
difficulties we have talking with each other as husband and
wife, parent and child, employer and employee, pastor and
congregation. We spend enormous amounts of time and money on
counselors and consultants who have learned, and have learned
how to teach, the tools and techniques of effective
interpersonal communication. If we find talking with other
people to be such a challenge, it is no wonder that we
struggle to communicate with God. In the midst of such
struggles, it is appropriate that we ask the only human being
who is also fully God to share his knowledge with us.
As God Incarnate, Jesus knows his disciples better than we
know ourselves (Psalm 139). He knew, for example, that
Nathaniel had been sitting under a fig tree before Philip
called him (John 1:48) and that Peter would deny him three
times before the night was over (Mark 14:30). And in the
Sermon on the Mount, just before he taught his disciples how
to pray he taught them that God knows what we need before we
ask (Matt. 6:8).
Since Jesus knows us intimately and is our teacher (Matt.
23:10), it is especially appropriate that we ask him to teach
us how to pray. It is hard to imagine instruction more
beneficial, or inspiring more confidence (Heb. 4:16), than
that which comes from him who now sits at God’s right
hand and prays for his disciples, whom he loves.
“It is quite clear,” writes Teresa of Avila, “that
when a master teaches anything, he develops a love for his
pupil so that what he teaches will inspire and delight the
pupil.” In a bit of understatement she adds, “It is
helpful also to pay attention to what is being taught.”
Paying attention
Certainly it is helpful to pay attention when being taught,
especially when the teacher is God and the subject of the
lesson is how to improve our conversations with him. Indeed,
paying attention to God, a practice historically known as “contemplation,”
is at the very heart of prayer. (For a series of meditations
on prayer as contemplation see Hans Urs von Balthasar’s
Prayer.) To help us learn to pay attention, Jesus has
given us The Lord’s Prayer, both as a prayer we can pray
and as a model for our own prayers.
Whether we pray it verbatim throughout the day (highly
recommended by great saints throughout the ages) or use it as
the framework upon which to construct our own prayers (equally
commended), The Lord’s Prayer helps us clear the clamor
of voices, internal and external, that constantly compete for
stray bits of our fragmented concentration. Its crystalline
structure and simple rhythms bring to our attention what God
has revealed about himself, his kingdom and his will and they
allow us to focus on what we know we need from God: daily
provision, forgiveness for the sins that separate us from him,
and protection from the reality of evil.
The Lord’s Prayer is an extraordinary gift from the
loving God to whom we pray. For those who wish to learn how to
pray, and for those who wish to improve their skills for
communicating with God, it is both an accessible starting
point and an ultimate goal.
Not to be overlooked, however, is that “Lord, teach us
to pray” is also a prayer we can profitably pray with
regularity. For as Gerhard Ebeling notes, “Those who know
how to pray ought also to know that at best they are in the
process of learning how to pray.”
Lord, teach us to pray. Amen.
For
Discussion
1.
Have you ever prayed "Lord, teach me to
pray"? If so, how has God answered that prayer.
2. Why do we need
to be taught how to pray?
3. What does The
Lord's Prayer teach us about our own prayers?
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Additional Resources
Hans Urs von Balthasar,
Prayer (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986);
Gerhard Ebeling, On Prayer (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1966); John H. Leith, Basic
Christian Doctrine (Louisville: Westminster/John
Knox Press, 1993); Teresa of Avila, A Life of Prayer,
James M. Huston, ed., (Sisters, Ore.: Multnomah Press,
1983)
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