The Pattern for Prayer Part 2

Last week we started looking at the Lords prayer or what its true name is The Model Prayer.

The disciples did not know how to pray.

The leaders of the Synagogs at the time had gotten so far from the true meaning of worship that they did not pray as they should.

When we look at the model prayer we should look at it as not for something to repeat but we should model our prayers after it.

The fundamental error in all wrong thinking about prayer is that it is primarily for people to get what they want.

In reality, it is the unfathomable privilege of communing with the sovereign God of the universe; of living in constant awareness of the One who is equally and perfectly aware of us.

True prayer brings believers into the presence of God to submit to His will and see His glory on display in His answers.

God as Father (v 11:2b)

The first word in Jesus’ prayer marks it as profoundly different from the Jewish prayers of that day.

God is seldom referred to as Father in the Old Testament, and then only in a national sense to refer to Israel as a whole.

Nowhere in the Old Testament is God addressed as Father in a personal prayer, which would have been considered presumptuous.

For Jesus to address God as Father (as He always did except on the cross, and to instruct His followers to do so was revolutionary and shocking.

Abba was an intimate term used by children, and was often one of the first words a young child learned to say.

It emphasizes that prayer involves intimacy with God.

Believers have the privilege of entering the presence of the Creator and sovereign King of the universe and addressing Him on tender, intimate terms.

Addressing God as Father affirms that believers live in God’s eternal family and are partakers of His divine nature 2 Peter 1:4.

2 Peter 1:4 ESV

by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.

The many blessings God graciously grants His children include:

instruction (Pss. 25:12; 32:8; 94:12)

comfort (Ps. 23:4; 2 Cor. 1:3–4),

correction (Heb. 12:6)

protection from Satan’s assaults (John 17:15; 2 Thess. 3:3; 1 John 5:18)

access to Him through prayer (Heb. 4:16)

provision for all their needs (Pss. 34:10; 84:11; Phil. 4:19)

and an inheritance that includes all the blessings of salvation (Matt. 19:29; 25:34; Eph. 1:11; Col. 1:12; 3:24; Heb. 1:14; 1 Peter 1:4).

God As Sacred (v112c)

The reality that Christians have an intimate relationship with their heavenly Father does not mean that they can treat Him with flippant, irreverent lack of respect.

The reality that Christians have an intimate relationship with their heavenly Father does not mean that they can treat Him with flippant, irreverent lack of respect.

Hallowed translates a form of the verb hagiazō, which means to set something apart as holy.

In this context, it means to acknowledge that God’s name deserves to be differentiated from and set above all that is created.

God is supremely separate from what He made, exists in a different sphere, and has knowledge and wisdom far beyond our own.

To hallow His name is to believe that God is who He has revealed Himself to be on the pages of Scripture (cf. Heb. 11:6) and to live a God-conscious life.

True prayer begins, therefore, with a proper understanding of God.

Emphasizing the importance of the correct thinking about Him from which true, God-honoring prayer flows A. W. Tozer wrote:

We must think worthily of God. It is morally imperative that we purge from our minds all ignoble concepts of the Deity and let Him be the God in our minds that He is in His universe.… That God exists for Himself and man for the glory of God is the emphatic teaching of the Bible. The high honor of God is first in heaven as it must yet be in earth. (The Knowledge of the Holy [New York: Harper & Row, 1961], 42).

Such thinking and praying must begin, as the example of the Lord Jesus Christ in this passage reveals, with recognizing God as our sacred Father.