The cause of all our powerlessness is our
lack of prayer. If we prayed, really prayed, we should soon see
Revival."
How often have we heard that said, or something like it. Is it
true?
In one sense it surely is, for to pray is to open our hearts to God, and open hearts are hearts God enters. Where God is welcomed things are bound to change.
But in another sense, it is not true at all. It is not prayer that changes things, but God. A prayerful spirit makes us more pliable in His hands of course, but it is God's loving action, not our prayer, that produces change. Prayer is not a tool in our hands with which to shape God to our desire; rather, it is the means we put into His hands to shape us to His desire.
God does not need to be informed about our needs or instructed or persuaded to meet them. As Jesus said by way of immediate introduction to this prayer, "Your heavenly Father knows what you need before you ask Him." (Matt. 6:8) If that is so, we are tempted to reply, "Then why bother to ask at all?"
Four reasons at least may be suggested.
1. Because a friendship in which conversation has ceased is already more than half-way dead. At the very least, we pray to stay in touch.
2. Because having to go to God for things keeps alive in us a proper spirit of dependence. We forget all too readily that "every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above," from the Father, James 1:17. What we need can be had only from God.
3. Because only when our desire is strong enough to drive us to God for a thing is it clear that we are ready to be trusted with it. God is hardly likely to bless us with gifts in which we show little interest.
4. Because whilst God knows what our real needs are, we may not. What we are sure we need may in fact be bad for us. Every parent knows that to be true of some of their children's many furious wants. It is hardly less likely to be true of us in our heavenly Father's eyes than it is of our own children in our eyes. Only by conversation with our Father - earnest conversation if need be - can we hope to learn those 'higher thoughts' which He thinks for us.
"Your heavenly Father knows what you need before you ask Him," Jesus tells us, "so - on that basis - pray. In the confidence that God already knows your needs and cares for you, let this be the way you pray." And there follows what we call the Lord's Prayer. So the Lord's Prayer is a blue-print to which we should build our house of prayer. If we ignore the blue-print, we must not be surprised if our house of prayer fails to go up satisfactorily, or even refuses to get built at all.
This chapter is concerned to make a few simple observations by way of introduction before we consider the prayer phrase by phrase in ensuing chapters.
Notice first that Jesus did not say, "Pray this" but "Pray like this."
One of the most fruitful things that any of us can do when we pray is to take this prayer as a pegboard, so to speak, and hang our own prayers on it peg by peg. In your quiet time work through the Lord's Prayer phrase by phrase, 'filling in' under the heading of each one your thanksgivings, affirmations and petitions. It is for just that kind of use that Jesus supplied the pattern, I believe.
"Lord," said the disciples, "teach us to pray as John the Baptist taught his disciples."
"By all means," Jesus replied. "Pray like this ..."
The little prayer that followed, together with a few supporting comments, constituted His complete course of instruction in how to pray. It did not come in thirty-two weekly instalments with progressive exercises included; it came 'in one easy lesson.'
First, Jesus counselled us to beware of cultivating the habit of prayer for the sake of a reputation in sanctity. "Don't do it to be seen of men," He said. (v. 5)
Do you want to be known as a man of prayer, a woman of prayer? "Don't!" said Jesus. How you pray, how much you pray, whether in fact you pray at all, is to be a secret thing, known only to God and yourself. It has always made me shy of talking about my prayer life in public. When preachers do it I question their motives. There are no medals for being a praying man - none at all. Rewards, yes; but reputations, no. Aim to be a man of prayer: desire to be a woman of prayer. But at all costs fight the desire to be known as one! That is what Jesus said.
Lovers do not publish their intimacies; it cheapens them. They cease, in fact, to be intimacies. For the same reason it is not fitting to advertise our prayer life. We cheapen it. We violate its intimacy, and God does not like that any more than lovers do. Intimacy with God is what prayer is about, according to Jesus.
Second, Jesus told us that prayer is to be a simple thing.
"Don't heap up empty phrases ... don't imagine that you will be heard for your much speaking," He said; "Pray like this." And the prayer that follows you can write on a postage stamp if you are clever enough. We have not always taken Him seriously. We seem often to work on the basis that our prayers are effective in direct proportion to their length. "Pray without ceasing," the Scriptures exhort us, and we have taken the exhortation literally instead of taking it seriously! What Jesus and Paul both meant by it was: "Steadfastly maintain the habit of praying; talk everything over with God; keep it up; don't let the habit die." They did not mean: "Batter heaven into submission with a blitzkrieg of beseeching."
The idea is never very far from our minds that we have to work very hard to overcome God's reluctance before He will give us what we ask, or else that by time spent in praying we somehow build up a store of deserving that eventually entitles us to be heard. That idea has sometimes been reinforced - even taught - by a complete misunderstanding of the parable Jesus once told about a man who battered on his neighbour's door at midnight, and had to keep at it till he had wakened half the village before he got his friend out of bed to give him what he had come for. But it is a parable of contrast, not of comparison: its whole point is that God is not like the wretched fellow in bed who resented having his night's rest disturbed. God, by contrast, welcomes the knock at His door. (Luke 11:8) God is not likened to him, but contrasted to him. Jesus made that quite clear in what He went on to say about fathers responding to their children's requests, not giving them serpents when they have asked for fish etc. Like any good father, God responds quite straightforwardly to his children's requests: He does not perversely mock them for bothering Him. There is to be a childlike confidence in our praying; we are to count on God's interest and desire to help.
Jesus Himself habitually addressed His Father in prayer as "My Papa." 'Abba,' the actual word He used, was the Jewish child's equivalent of 'dada,' or 'papa.' It was a wholly natural, familiar, intuitive form of address. "When we say 'Abba, Father' in our prayers," says Paul (Rom. 8:15), "the Spirit of God is bearing witness with our spirits that we really are 'children' of God."
God is our Father: we can be sure we have his ear. "On the basis that your Heavenly Father knows your needs, and that His higher thoughts for you are to be trusted, pray like this," Jesus said: and what follows tells us quite plainly, "Keep it brief, and keep it simple." There is no need to work ourselves up into a lather of sweat. Distressed as he was by the thorn in the flesh that troubled him, Paul seems to have felt that to take it to the Lord in prayer three times was enough. (II Cor. 12:8)
As to the shape of the prayer, it is in two halves, each with three clauses.
The first three have to do with God and
His interests.
The second three have to do with us and our
interests.
God First! Prayer is not, in the first place, or primarily, a means of getting things done for us. God's honour, not my need, is to be my first concern when I pray. "Hallowed be Thy Name ... Thy Kingdom come ... Thy will be done."
Almost the first lesson the Lord's Prayer teaches us, when you look at it, is that when we come to God in prayer the first thing we do not do is barge in with a bucketful of 'I wants' and empty it unceremoniously into the Father's lap. We do not have to: "Your Heavenly Father knows your needs," so we will not lose His attention to them because we spend time on other things first. We do not have to be urgent about them to get His interest; they will keep.
Besides, Father though He is so we do not have to stand on ceremony with Him, we do owe Him some respect. When the prodigal son was welcomed home, he was expected to stay at home and serve his father's interests in the property. When he did that, he was, for the first time in his life, in fact, truly happy.
The very shape of the prayer requires of us when we pray that we orientate ourselves first to God. You start with God and His concerns before you carry on about yourself and your own concerns. Are our prayers God-orientated or self-orientated? Dr W. Sangster once observed, "The outpouring of selfish sincerities is not prayer - and it is not answered." We have to tune in to God before we ask Him to tune into us. That is a common feature of communications; ask any pilot. You have to set your radio to the airport's frequency first before you can make contact: it is no use expecting them to know yours and tune in to you. Tune in to God before you ask Him to tune in to you.
Who it is we pray to matters more than who it is who prays. That first.
The second half of the prayer is concerned with our needs.
1. Our need of bread
Even for that it is right to ask. We are to ask for even life's bare necessities, for the most mundane and down-to-earth things.
So we bring the needs of today to the Father in prayer.2. Our need of forgiveness
By doing that we bring the need that has pursued us out of our yesterdays to the Father in prayer.3. Our need of help to face temptation
That way, we bring to God in prayer the one thing that matters most of all in our tomorrows.We are to pray for food, forgiveness and fortitude.
In those three brief petitions we are taught to bring the whole of our life, past, present and future to God ... and, what is more, to God in all the fulness of His being - all of life to all of God. For it is the Father Who gives us our daily bread, it is the Son Who looses us from our sins by His blood, and it is the Holy Spirit Who supplies us with the inward reinforcement we need to meet temptation. To all that God is we bring all of life.
Jesus, on this evidence, would certainly not agree with those who say that "prayer is presumption." There are those who ask incredulously, "Can we really believe that the great God Almighty, Who made all worlds and Who inhabits eternity, could possibly concern Himself with the trifles that occupy our tiny minds?"
It is a thought that appears on the face of it to pay God a highly flattering tribute - a noble, lofty view of Him, as befits His majesty and our insignificance. On this view, God is not belittled into servitude to my wants; rather, He is magnified into indifference to them. To some, this would come as a simply devastating thought: they would feel lost to God's tender care, cast adrift. To others, of course, it might well come as a relief: if indeed God fails to notice me, who knows what I may get away with!
But in fact, this view of God makes Him too small. It gives me a God Who has over-reached Himself: big enough to order the stars in their courses, but not big enough to tend the creatures He put on them; big enough to be Managing Director of the universe, so to speak, but not big enough to combine with that responsibility the rôles of Personnel Officer and Welfare Officer.
The God and Father our Lord Jesus Christ knows when even a sparrow falls to the ground. "The very hairs of your head are all numbered," He said, which is a vivid way of saying, "Not even the most trivial detail of your life escapes God's notice or His careful attention." He is a great God! He knows your name, He knows your history from the day you were conceived till now, He knows your hopes, your fears, your secrets. As I like to tell the children, "He has as many ears as He has children, and they are always listening. One of His ears is just for you, and He never puts His hand over it. He hears even your faintest whisper. Indeed He hears you when you only think words."
To pray is to share the whole of our life with our Father in Heaven, from its least to its greatest concerns. It is to do as it was said of Moses that he did: "He spoke with the Lord face to face, as a man speaks with his friend." (Ex. 33:11)
Finally, we are to pray 'we' not 'I': 'Our Father' not 'My Father.' For the Father Whose ear is open to our cry is open to our brother's also, and with the same attentive care. That we may command God's whole attention is true. What is emphatically not true is that we may commandeer it! When we come into the Father's presence, we are to come as one of the family; in fact, we are to bring the family in with us. You cannot have God to yourself. He has made us "members one of another." About that He is in earnest. It grieves Him that we should desire for ourselves what we do not desire at the same time, and with the same eagerness, for our brother and our sister.
If we have 'marked, learned and inwardly digested' what we have learned in this study, prayer may never be quite the same again.
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