How Should We Pray?

Introduction and Scripture

We’re rounding the final bend in the questions series.

While some of the questions that we’ve been looking at are kind of big picture questions about life, and the universe, and how we relate to one another as humans, this particular question is radically practical.

The New Revised Standard Version The Lord’s Prayer

11 He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” 2 He said to them, “When you pray, say:

Father, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

3 Give us each day our daily bread.

4 And forgive us our sins,

for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.

And do not bring us to the time of trial.”

Perseverance in Prayer

(Mt 7:7–11)

5 And he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; 6 for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ 7 And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ 8 I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

9 “So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. 10 For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. 11 Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? 12 Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? 13 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

The Presbyterian Shoe Inspection

One phenomenon I’ve come to know in my years of pastoring and professional ministry is what I call the Presbyterian Shoe Inspection.

When we gather for a meeting or a Bible study or something like that, I ask if anyone would like to open our proceedings with prayer.

Almost immediately, everyone’s eyes fall down to their shoes.

Because if you make eye contact with the pastor, there’s a great likelihood that he’s going to ask you to pray!

The truth is that many of us are uncomfortable with prayer.

Maybe this is because it involves some element of public speaking, which as we discussed a few weeks ago makes a bunch of folks uncomfortable.

Maybe it’s because we’re speaking to God, and that feels really high stakes and nervewracking.

Maybe it’s because we’ve seen others pray “well,” and we don’t know how to string together the phrases and ideas the way that they do.

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s because we were never taught how.

Deep Dive on Luke 11

Set an example: In a certain place.

This passage begins with Jesus praying in a “certain place.”

The principal of first mention

Takes us back to Genesis 28:

The New Revised Standard Version Jacob’s Dream at Bethel

10 Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. 11 He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. 12 And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 13 And the LORD stood beside him and said, “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; 14 and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. 15 Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” 16 Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the LORD is in this place—and I did not know it!”

This passage, near the very beginning of the Bible, reminds us that God is everywhere, even and especially in the places that we don’t anticipate God showing up.

A “certain place” is absolutely nowhere special.

This isn’t the temple in Jerusalem.

It isn’t the sanctuary of a pristine building.

There aren’t scented candles and Christian journals lying around.

The purpose behind a certain place is to remind us that God can and does encounter us wherever we find ourselves.

You can have great moments of spiritual awakening in the middle of the McDonald’s drive through.

God can meet with you on Laundry day.

You can seek the Lord even in the middle of traffic.

This all starts with the disciples seeing Jesus in action.

When they see the kind of prayers that Jesus is lifting up, they want that in their lives.

Decoder ring prayers.

The disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray the way that John the Baptist taught his disciples.

When different Rabbi’s in 1st Century Israel were traveling around with a crew of disciples, it was common for them to develop their own prayer.

Sort of like pledging a fraternity, these prayers were the way you could tell who was in and who was out.

They were a way of dividing people.

The disciples want that kind of thing.

It shouldn’t surprise us at all to see that Jesus isn’t the slightest bit interested in giving his disciples that kind of prayer.

Jesus does two things, and we’re going to look at them both in turn here this morning:

1) Jesus gives the disciples a formula for prayer, what we have come to recognize as the Lord’s prayer.

2) Jesus shows them what it looks like to cultivate a lifestyle of prayer and persistence.

The Lord’s (Formula for) Prayer

While we know the Lord’s prayer, and we recite it every single Sunday here together, I’m not sure that Jesus had in mind a specific rote prayer in this moment.

What I think Jesus was after was giving his disciples a template, a formula to follow when they are working on their prayer lives.

And really, if we take this prayer seriously, this is one of the most scary things we can pray!

Focus on a Holy (and yet personal) God

Our

This is not a prayer meant to divide the in from the out crowds.

This is a God who is available to everyone, everywhere, at every time.

No one should ever feel like they are on the outside looking in of our prayer practices.

Father

This is revolutionary thinking for people of Jesus’ time.

Father was used 15 times in the OT as a title for God, and absolutely none of those is in prayer.

When you get to the NT, the title is used 65 times in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and over 100 times in the Gospel of John alone.

Jesus clearly is clearly showing himself to be the Son of God by referring to God as Father.

But what is revolutionary is that Jesus is inviting us to use the same language!

God isn’t just the Father of Jesus, but we are adopted in to this family and can use the same language.

Paul puts it this way:

The New Revised Standard Version Chapter 4

6 And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!”

This God is one with whom we can have a personal, child-like relationship with.

Hallowed

This is an unfortunate carry over from old english translations of the Bible.

“Howard be thy name...”

The better word would be holy

Kavod- Heavy!

Ultimately, what Jesus is saying here, is that while we can approach God with childlike humility, and God ultimately wants to relate to us personally, we dare not treat God lightly.

You’ll find that in people who say they will pray, but haven’t developed a prayer life habit.

You’ll find that in people who offer up a ton of prayers, but don’t follow those up with action and behavior.

You’ll find that in people who offer up prayers, but don’t actually live in hope that those prayers will be answered.

Ask for what you need, in a simple lifestyle

Daily bread.

This is actually one of only three occurrences of the word “daily” in Greek literature, not just the Bible.

Essentially what Jesus is saying here is that we should ask for what we need to survive for the day, no more, and no less.

It calls to mind the story of the Mana in the wilderness.

If the people took more than they needed for any given day, it would spoil and rot right before their eyes.

Don’t get greedy!

If we’re honest, this is one place where the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the American Dream are in real tension.

The Gospel says ask just for enough to get through the day, the American Dream wants to consume as much as we can.

The Gospel says use your left-overs to bless those who are in need, the American Dream says look out for number one.

The Gospel says God will provide, the American Dream says there’s never enough.

It’s a gut level question to ask if we are content with what God has given us?

I think if I’m honest, I am rarely content with what I have.

I am blessed beyond reason, and yet I am just as prone to temptation over the latest advertisement, the newest trend, the latest gadget.

And in truth, it is a sin that in the Kingdom of God I could be coveting these new fads while there are brothers and sisters who don’t know where their next meal is coming from.

To pray “our daily bread” is to ask God to tune our hearts to the simplicity of the Kingdom, and let those values drive us, rather than the values of the marketplace.

Ground and Root yourself in Forgiveness

Jesus spends the most time in his prayer teaching us to pray for forgiveness.

We pray for the forgiveness we need from God.

We’ve talked about this before, but part of being a follower of Jesus Christ is carrying with us a radical honesty about our shortcomings.

Too many of us try to put on a happy face, try to display our lives as being all held together, to keep up with the Christian Joneses.

When we do this, we lie to each other, we lie to ourselves, and we lie to God.

Jesus is always inviting us to honesty with ourselves, each other, and God, in a move that we might call integrity.

To truly experience the Love of the savior, we might need to know what we’re being saved from.

Jesus Loves This Mess- I absolutely love this name for a Youth Group!

We pray for the courage to forgive others.

If accepting forgiveness from God is one of the hardest things a Christian can do, offering that forgiveness to others is right there next to it.

Let’s face it: we all have people in our lives who have wounded us, who have harmed us, or even just annoyed us, that seem just on the outside of our ability to forgive.

Two problems with that:

God’s forgiveness for us seems tied to our ability to forgive others.

This isn’t a works-based salvation kind of thing, where God will only love us if we get our act together.

It’s more of a recognition that we don’t understand the forgiveness that God has given us if we can’t offer it to other people.

Jesus tells the parable of a servant who is forgiven 10 lifetimes of wages, but can’t seem to forgive a fellow servant who owes him 10 bucks.

Our inability to forgive can actually make us sick.

Anne Lamot has a great quote:

Refusing to forgive someone who has wronged us is like eating rat poison, and then waiting for the other person to die.

Harboring resentment and anger toward another person doesn’t actually harm the other person. It harms our spirit.

Jesus is inviting us in this moment to let go.

Let go of anger.

Let go of resentment.

Let go of hatred.

Doing so will help you to receive and accept the forgiveness that God has to offer us.

Look to the Future

The last line of the prayer is a reminder that a life of prayer never has an arrival point.

If you could be given forgiveness, and could find your way to offer perfect forgiveness to others, wouldn’t that mean you were set?

And while no one would ever say it out loud, I think a lot of believers behave this way.

There’s no relationship in their prayer lives.

Essentially, prayer exists as something to be checked off the to-do list, and we can move on with whatever was actually important to us in that moment.

The Lord’s prayer ending with a request to keep us from a time of trial is a reminder that we’re going to keep right on moving in this life.

There will be hard days.

There will be difficult moments.

There will be tough decisions.

We need to cultivate a persistent lifestyle of prayer to allow ourselves to live in to this avoidance of trials.

Cultivating a Persistent Lifestyle of Prayer

Transitive Property of Teaching

Jesus is using a rhetorical device here, which gets confused a lot.

On the playground at school, there was a hierarchy of bullies.

If Jimmy can beat up Billy, but Tom can beat up Jimmy, then surely Tom could beat up Billy, right?

There was this transitive property of bullyness, which I assure you I was always on the bottom of.

Jesus is doing a sort of similar thing here.

If you guys are horrible, sinful, no good humans, and you find your way to the fairway every now and again, imagine how good God is at this!

Persistence is the Key

So this teaching isn’t telling us that God is going to play hard to get with our prayers.

We may be tempted to think so, that God is somehow interested in withholding the gifts that we so badly want.

What this teaching is showing us is that we, sinful and broken humans, would eventually break down and give in.

And if we would, imagine what God would do with that kind of persistence.

Prayer is not like the cosmic slot machine.

We don’t put in our prayers and hope to get our rewards.

We are pushing for active relationship with God.

The best way to do that is to approach our prayer lives with a certain level of persistence.

Just…keep…praying.

As Paul puts it in 1 Thessalonians 5: rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances.

We need the persistence, the joy, and the presence of mind to pray in all times and in all circumstance.

Take this home

Find a certain place

Where you can pray is a limitless canvas.

In the car in traffic.

At home with a cup of coffee.

Here at the church.

In the grocery store.

The ultimate question is where do you pray?

That chair back there!

Every morning when I come to the office, I drop my things off in the office, and I walk up here to read the scriptures, pray, and lift up the prayer concerns from this week.

That spot has become for me synonomous with prayer.

It is indeed my certain place.

While prayer can happen anywhere, what does it look like this week to choose a specific, named certain place to call your prayer corner?

Write it down.

Pray the formula

Holy

Our prayers can and should start with giving God credit for what God has done in our lives.

To do that requires a certain amount of paying attention.

Maybe keep a notebook, and note all the things that God has done for you lately.

Nutrition

Pray for what you need, not what you want.

Be bold enough to actually pray for what you need.

Be shrewd enough to leave behind the excesses.

Forgiveness

Pray for the forgiveness that God provides.

But know that it is tied inseparably to the forgiveness we show to others.

Maybe this is best to pray that we stop taking the rat poison.

Future

Wherever this prayer leads us, we can’t stand still.

We need to be on our toes for what God is offering us next.

Persistent