Paul Wells reflects on what Jesus taught his disciples when they asked him how to pray
People think prayer is some kind of meditation, or perhaps what you resort to when you’re in a fix.
Not so. In the Bible, it is asking God for what he has promised to be and to do. That’s why the Lord’s prayer begins with the familiar ‘Father’. To pray, you need the kind of relationship with God in which he is something other than a distant unknown.
Prayer is a form of personal communication. There is a way to do it and a way not to do it. We can pray because Jesus, as God’s only Son, has free access to the Father and he helps us to find the way through him.
Asking Jesus
So when the disciples asked Jesus for some help with praying (Luke 11.1) he gave them a blueprint (Matthew 6.7-13). His guide was not given to be parroted, because God is not impressed by wordiness. It helps us to find the way in our prayers. It lays down a structure for their form and content.
Jesus replied positively to his disciples’ request, but not in order to better what John the Baptist and others had recommended. We need help because we don’t know how to pray. No-one is a natural and even when the inclination is there, prayer is not easy. Jesus shows us where the priorities lie and helps shape our way of going about it.
Firstly, trust. God is a loving Father. He really hears and answers. Prayer must be motivated by that confidence, even if our batteries are not fully charged. Secondly, gratitude. Prayer thanks God for what he is and for all he does. Praise blossoms in our hearts when we feel God’s fatherly presence.
There is no real prayer without these attitudes. If we don’t know God in this way, we won’t ask him for anything, even less be thankful.
The prayer Jesus gave his disciples shows this concretely. To begin with, Jesus tells us to acknowledge God for who he is. In the first three requests we pray that:
• God’s name may be made holy in everything
• his kingdom may come everywhere
• his will may be done by everyone
There is an order in these three petitions. If we recognise who God is, our hearts will be inclined to serve him and we will want to obey him. Glorify God and enjoy it!
Then we can pray about our human problems. In the second half of Jesus’ prayer he teaches us to pray for:
• daily needs, both ours and those of others
• forgiveness of sin and peace, personal and social
• freedom from evil and its destructive consequences.
There is an order here too: we pray for God’s care in the physical, psychological and spiritual aspects of our lives. We are to ask, trust and get on with it!
All about asking?
So prayer should start with God in praise and then move on to our needs. There is a problem if our prayers are all about asking and we forget the importance of glorifying God, his name, his rule and his plan for all things.
There is one more thing that we often forget. Martin Luther comes back to it repeatedly in his commentary on the Lord’s prayer and it highlights again the difficulty of real prayer. Sometimes we pray out of selfgratification; our concerns and our needs, which are often legitimate, get inflated. The danger is to become hypocritical in prayer because we pray for the wrong reasons. Jesus says that this sort of attitude gets its reward (Matthew 6.5). To guard us from this danger, Luther says we must learn to pray the Lord’s prayer against ourselves.
It’s because we are dilatory in glorifying God’s name, in our activity for his kingdom and in doing his will, that we need to pray for these things to become motors in our lives. It is because we forget that our day-today needs are supplied by God and not the supermarket, because we harbour grudges instead of having a forgiving spirit, and because we are unaware of the danger of our sins that we need to pray with a spirit of contrition. This attitude will keep us from the syndrome of evangelical smugness. None of us are what we should be and this ought to energise our prayer.
So prayer aims at God and then at ourselves, but not in an isolated way. Luther says we cannot ask anything for ourselves without concern for others, particularly our brothers and sisters in Christ. How can we have a ‘me in my small corner’ mentality, thanking God for his provision for us, while others suffer injustice and starve? This can’t be. So prayer drives a missionary concern for God’s kingdom everywhere.
Undermining our self-centredness
In a strange way the Lord’s prayer undermines our self-centredness and our big ideas about ourselves. It reminds us that all our prayers are only possible because God has forgiven us and that he hears in spite of what we are, and not because of it. This also means concretely that we cannot pray in an unforgiving way for others to get their come-uppance. Matthew adds at the end of the prayer ‘if you forgive others, your heavenly Father will forgive you’ (Matthew 6.14). Jesus is not laying down a condition for prayer, but telling us that all prayer must come from a heart in which grace toward others is real, because we have experienced God’s forgiveness.
God rules as Lord of all. We learn this through Scripture and our experiences as we pray the Lord’s prayer. Learning is difficult when we do things our way. Prayer reminds us daily how much we depend on God and his grace for everything.
