One difficult discipline for new Christians is prayer. Most people have occasionally prayed to God in a time of difficulty or personal need. Even pagans pray at certain times. What makes disciples different is the commitment to pray consistently, developing a personal relationship with the Personal Living God of Wisdom and Love.

When I was a new Christian, I realized that I was good at reading my Bible, attending Church, and being involved in certain ministries. I was not good at praying. I am naturally an active person, and sitting silently praying, listening for God was (and is) very, very hard for me. Therefore, I did what people do who like to read, I bought a book, Prayer, by George A. Buttrick. [1] It is still in print, but it is often reproduced in small type, and its style is dated to a time when people liked longer paragraphs and more complex writing than most of us enjoy today. Several years ago, I tried to read it again and had great difficulty keeping my mind on it!

It did not take long to realize that reading a 300-page book was not likely to improve my prayer life. Therefore, I took a different tactic. I just started praying. I found a short guide to prayer that focused on Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Personal requests (Supplication). Several years later, I was part of an early morning prayer group that met for a couple of years during a time of difficulty in our church. This group stretched and improved prayer life. In seminary, a group of us met weekly on Friday for prayer and had prayer partners. Once in ministry, I developed the habits of prayer I still have today. In a tough period at Advent, I started another prayer discipline. This summer, I want away for an eight-day silent time of prayer, wanting to further deepen a prayer relationship with God.

Text and Prayer

Prayer does not come easily to most people. As Luke renders today’s text, the disciples came to Jesus and asked him to teach them to pray (Luke 11:1). The more the disciples spent time with Jesus, I am sure the more they realized that Jesus’ prayer life was much deeper, richer, more powerful, than theirs. Therefore, they came to him and asked him to teach them pray. In Matthew, Jesus gives the following response:

[W]hen you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. This, then, is how you should pray:

“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.”

For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins (Matthew 6:5-15).

Prayer: God our Father, we come to you like the disciples saying, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts lead all of us to a deeper understanding of what it means to be in communication with the Creator of Heaven and Earth. Amen.

 A Disciple is a Person of Prayer

It is hard to preach or teach on prayer. Like discipleship itself, prayer is not something we learn about, it is something we do. Like all skills, no one begins his or her prayer life as an accomplished prayer. Instead by trial and error, by long experience, by praying well and badly, rightly and wrongly, slowly but surely we become better at prayer. This has been my own experience, and I think it has been the experience of most Christians.  In prayer, like pitching a baseball, you begin learning to just throw a simple fastball, and then you gradually learn and improve your game.

It is important in prayer, as with any other skill, to keep practicing and keep learning. A disciple needs to be a person of prayer, and a disciple of 50 years should be a better person of prayer than a disciple of 15 minutes—and they will be if they just keep on praying. This summer I went on an eight-day silent retreat where for a week we did nothing but pray. We prayed in groups, alone, in journals, on walks, sitting alone, while running, etc. We prayed prayers from Scripture, in writing, and through prayers of silent contemplation of God. Once a day we prayed out loud in worship. Believe me, thirty-five years ago, I could not have endured such a long period of silence and prayer.

The Character of Christian Prayer

By the time of the Sermon on the Mount, the disciples had been with Jesus for a while. They had seen miracles, healings, exorcisms, and the like. They had heard his teachings and his preaching. They had eaten a lot of meals together. They had experienced his hidden, secret, silent power. In addition, they had seen him pray and go away to be alone in prayer. They had noticed that Jesus was a person of prayer and that somehow prayer was deeply a part of who he was and his mission and ministry. Therefore, it was natural that they should ask him to teach them to pray. It was natural that in the Sermon on the Mount, he would talk about prayer.

Jesus begins by giving just a few basic things to remember. First of all, our prayers are to be directed to God. Jesus prayed to his Heavenly Father. This does not mean that we cannot use different words to refer to the One True God, the Father Almighty, the Maker of Heaven and Earth. We can pray to God, the Eternal God, the Almighty, God the Healer, and the like. We can direct our prayers to Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but we must remember that we are directing all those prayers to the Triune God whom Jesus called, “Father.” In particular, we don’t pray to other gods, natural forces, new age figures, crystals, or the like.

Second, we should pray from the heart. Jesus tells us to pray in secret. He does so to remind us we should not pray to show off, to show how spiritual we are, to gain the praise of other people, or for any reason other than to communicate with God.

Finally, we should be careful about “babbling.” In other words, we should be careful not just to pray words to be praying words. We should pray rationally, that is reasonably. We should be careful not to just pray nonsense or repeat a request 1000 times hoping to force God’s hand.

The point is that we should not make our prayer life a life of emotional self-exposure, irrational babbling, or showing off. If occasionally, overcome with emotion, we pray an especially emotional prayer, that’s fine. If on occasion we repeat a phrase or a request, that is fine. If we have a deep prayer for a family member or ourselves that we must pray over and over for years, that is fine. If occasionally our prayer is beyond human words, that is fine. We just need to remember that the purpose of our prayer is communion with the God of wisdom, love, and power, whom Jesus called “Father.”

A lot of people have seen the movie, “The War Room” recently. [2] This picture beautifully shows the importance of praying for our families, of praying Scripture, and of the place earnestness and emotion play in our prayer life. Jesus, I think, would have liked the movie. It certainly involved some emotion, repetition, and and public praying. The point is to remember it is the heart that counts.

The Two Tablets of the Lord’s Prayer

Having given some basic teaching on what prayer should be like; Jesus now gives a great example in a prayer we all know as the “Lord’s Prayer.” In its historic form it goes like this:

Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name. Thy Kingdom come,
Thy will be done. On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those that trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory,
Forever and ever.
Amen. [3]

Since the time of John Calvin, scholars and others have noticed that it is possible to understand the prayer as having six parts, divided into two halves very much like the Ten Commandments, with one half being about or relationship with God and the other half being about ourselves. [4]

The prayer begins by invoking “Our Father who art in Heaven.” This is meant to indicate that we are not praying to the Force, to an impersonal deity, but to a Father who loves us. When we pray “Hallowed Be Thy Name,” we are recognizing and invoking the God who gave us his Name on Mt. Sinai and who is absolutely holy and who we should recognize as absolutely holy.

Then, we pray for God’s Kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven. This is where the Gospel and discipleship begin to enter into our prayers in a major way. When we pray for God’s Kingdom to come we are praying that God’s wisdom, justice, peace, and love would come into our world. We pray that old divisions would be healed, that wars would cease, that the poor, widows, and others in need would be taken care of, that those unjustly imprisoned would be released, that those who are being treated unfairly would be treated fairly. We are praying that our world would look like heaven itself. This is a time when we can speak to God about big issues, war, peace, government, and the like. Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God, and every day we should pray for it.

Having prayed to God for really big things, we now pray for ourselves. When we pray for our daily bread, we are praying for the necessities of life. We are praying for the things that we need for ourselves, our family, our friends, our neighbors, and those we love and care about.

Then, we pray to be able to forgive those who have wronged us. If the first prayer we have is a prayer for physical needs, this second prayer is for our moral and emotional needs, our need to be forgiven and to forgive others. Jesus warns his disciples that it is not healthy to keep grudges. It is not healthy not to forgive others. Just as those who have wronged us need forgiveness, so also we need forgiveness. In this regard God reminds us that if we expect to be forgiven, we all had best get about the business of forgiving others.

Finally, we pray to be delivered from evil. We live in a fallen world, and sin and temptation are ever-present realities. When we pray to be delivered from evil, we are praying that God will rescue us from our own sin and from the sin that surrounds us.

The Power of Prayerfulness

One of the themes of my summer was prayer. I took an extended time to to pray about big problems and deep issues. Prayer provides for our needs, protects us where we need protection, changes us where we need to be changed, and it is part of bringing God’s kingdom into the world. Every day this summer, I spent significant time reading my Bible, reflecting in my journal, contemplating Scripture and problems of our family, congregation, nation, and world. More than once, I spent an entire morning praying. It was one of the most important things about the time away.

This week, I have prayed the Lord’s Prayer almost every day, as I would say one phrase, ponder it, pray it, ask God what meaning it had for my life and for the life of our church. It became the center of my quiet time. One thing I suggest some of my readers do this week is pray the Lord’s Prayer slowly, daily, using it as the outline of your daily prayers. See if it makes a difference in your life. 

As individuals, families, communities, and nation, we face a lot of problems. The most important of these problems, the one at the root of so many of our problems is human pride, arrogance, and over-reaching. At the root of so many of our problems is the lack of a sense of family, of community, of love, of reason, of desire for justice and equity, in so much of our public debates and even in our families. Many of the problems we face are spiritual at their root, and only prayer can solve spiritual problems. We don’t necessarily need big public prayers, national prayer meetings, and the like. What we most desperately need is many, many individual people going into their own prayer closet and lifting their hearts to God.

Copyright, 2015, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] George A. Buttrick, Prayer (Nashville, TN: Cokesbury/Abingdon Press, 1942).

[2] Alex Kendrick & Stephen Kendrick, The War Room Dir. Alex Kendrick. Starring Pricilla Shirer, T. C. Stallings, Karen Abercrombie, et al. (Sony, 2015).

[3] In the original text, the final phrase “Forever and ever” is not found in many ancient texts. Nevertheless, it is the perfect ending for the prayer, as John Calvin noted in his commentary on the prayer.

[4] John R. W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount (Downer’s Grove, Ill: IVP Press, 1978), 146