  Foundations of the Faith
Foundations
of the Faith explores
and explains
Volume 33, Number 1, Posted March 27, 2000 |
|||
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).
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. |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
Foundations of the Faith index |
|||
| Home
· News
· PLC
Publications ·
The
Presbyterian Layman Online Reviews · Archives· History of the Lay Committee · Feedback · Links |
|||
