Our lives are filled with Questions and in the Bible, we find requests being asked of God that often go unanswered because He is waiting for the right question to be asked. In today’s Gospel Lesson, we find one of the most important requests that should be on the mind of every twice-born believer: “Lord, teach us to pray.” (Luke 11:1)
When the disciples asked the Lord to “Teach us to pray”, they had finally asked the right question and Jesus answered them immediately and clearly. They knew and practiced the prayer techniques taught them by their fathers but they desired the relationship with God they witnessed Jesus enjoy through prayer.
Prayer is not simply a matter of words being spoken to another person, prayer is the avenue to experience a personal relationship between the Creator of the cosmos and His creatures. In Deuteronomy 4:7 NCV Moses professes, “the LORD our God comes near when we pray to Him.”
In Exodus 33:11 we read that, “Inside the Tent of Meeting, the LORD spoke to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend.” (NLT)
Prayer is crucial for anyone desiring to be in a personal relationship with the living, loving God and as Evelyn Underhill writes, prayer is “breathing the air of eternity.” (Weavings, 2002)
The breath of spiritual life is prayer; it is Deep calling to deep.
In prayer we encounter God, raw and unfiltered. Prayer takes intentional commitment and concentrated effort such that Jesus encourages us to be persistent in asking, seeking, and knocking. Do you want to know the deep things of God’s heart and have a more personal, intimate walk with Him?
Our hearts resonate with those who have walked close to God, but we lack the experience or wisdom to accurately assess their experiences or advice. In Scripture we have the true reference point for spiritual formation. Jesus, in answering the disciples request regarding prayer, provides the greatest teaching ever given for the pathway to spiritual fulfillment and genuine intimacy with God.
In his book, The Prayer God Longs For, Dr. James Emery White writes, “Authentic prayer is deeply molding and transforming, making its context decisive for the life of the Christian.”
The Latin tag lex orandi, lex credendi (literally, ‘law of praying, law of believing’) suggests that what is prayed indicates what is believed, and conversely what is believed should govern what is prayed.
The early church believed that Jesus’ teaching on prayer was the road map for the journey of seeking the face of God. Tertullian called the Lord’s Prayer the “epitome of the whole Gospel,” and Augustine called it the ‘source of all other prayers.’
The words Jesus taught speak most directly to the kind of prayer believers should offer and how we should be when we pray. They reveal the prayer and, more importantly, the pray-er, God desires all of His children to become. For Jesus and His followers – Prayer is communion with God.
“Again and again in public and private devotion the Lord’s Prayer is taken on hurried lips, and recited at a pace which makes impossible any realization of its tremendous claims and profound demands,” writes Underhill.
For those of us who recite these words as part of our worship, it can become a matter of rote recitation and today the Lord is calling us to ask what His original followers asked: Lord, Teach us to pray.
This teaching of the Lord can be found in Luke 11:1-13 and Matthew 6:5-15 in the middle of His Sermon on the Mount which draws a comprehensive portrait of the right way to live as spiritual beings having a human experience.
If being human is essentially about relation to God, it is clear, that speaking with, and listening to, God is essential. With prayer as the foundation that upholds our entire existence and shapes our whole consciousness, the presence of God becomes the heart of our thinking, our meditating, and our being which is what the Apostle Paul meant when he wrote, “pray without ceasing” (1 Thes 5:17).
Think about it, When we pray these words given us by Jesus, we are praying to God with words given us by God! In praying this prayer, Jesus’ promise regarding true worshippers, those who adore the Father and worship “in spirit and truth” (Jn 4:23), is fulfilled in us!
FATHER
Nothing can turn out right if our relation to God is not rightly ordered so this prayer begins with God addressed as ‘Father.’ Can there be any greater consolation – than to be allowed, to be encouraged to address God as Father? This one word contains the whole history of redemption. We are allowed to say ‘Father,’ because the Son is our brother and has revealed the Father to us; because, thanks to what Christ has done; we have once more become children of God – sons and daughters of God Our Father!
In today’s Gospel, the Lord reminds us that true fathers do not give their children serpents instead of fish or a scorpion instead of an egg. In verse 13 St. Luke specifies the “good gifts” that the Father gives; he says “how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!” The gift of God is God Himself. Prayer is a way of gradually purifying and correcting our desires and of our coming to realize what we truly need – God and His Spirit.
Hallowed Be Your Name
The name of God can now be misused and so God Himself can be sullied. The name of God can be co-opted for our purposes and the image of God can also be distorted. The more He gives Himself into our hands, the more we can obscure His light; the closer He is, the more our misuse can disfigure Him. I’ve heard it said, “when we consider all the ways in which God’s name has been so shamefully misused, we almost despair of uttering it ourselves.”
We must examine our own consciences and ask, How do I treat God’s hallowed name?
Do I stand in reverence before the mystery of His eternal nearness or His presence in the Eucharist, where He truly gives Himself entirely into my hands?
Do I take care that God’s holy companionship with me will draw me into His purity and sanctity, instead of dragging Him down into the filth of this world?
Your Kingdom Come
Where God is absent, nothing can be good. Where God is not seen, man and the world fall into ruin. This is exactly what the Lord means when He says, “seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” (Mt 6:33) Here is for us an order of priorities for human action, for how we are to approach everyday life.
Give Us Each Day Our Daily Bread
While Jesus says, “Do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat,” (Mt 6:25) He nevertheless invites us to pray for our sustenance and thus turn our care over to God. As God’s children, we have the privilege and duty to ask Him for what we need. He will not refuse us the good things that He alone can provide.
Forgive Us Our Sins
With this petition, the Lord is reminding us that guilt can only be overcome by forgiveness. God is a God who forgives, because He loves His creatures; but forgiveness can only penetrate and become effective in one who is first forgiving of others.
We must keep in mind that God Himself, knowing that we stood against Him, unreconciled, set aside His divinity in order to come toward us, to reconcile us to Himself. Whatever we have to forgive one another is trivial in comparison with the goodness of God, who forgives us. And ultimately we hear Jesus’ petition from the Cross, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” (Lk 24:34) In forgiveness, we must put our heart and our whole existence on the line. Even this act is insufficient for it can become effective only through communion with the One who bore the burdens of us all.
Lead Us Not Into Temptation
The way this petition is phrased is shocking for many: God certainly Does Not Lead Us Into Temptation. In fact, St. James tells us, “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted with evil and He Himself tempts no one.” (Jas 1:13)
St. Cyprian, the 3rd century Bishop of Carthage, said that when we pray, “and lead us not into temptation,” we are expressing our awareness “that the enemy can do nothing against us unless God has allowed it beforehand, so that our fear, our devotion, and our worship may be directed to God, because the evil one is not permitted to do anything unless he is given authorization.”
We make this prayer in trustful certainty that “God is faithful, and He will not let us be tempted beyond our strength, but with the temptation He will also provide the way of escape, that we may be able to endure it.” (1 Cor 10:13) Our praying can and should arise from our heart, from our needs, our hopes, our joys, our sufferings, from our shame over sin, and from our gratitude for the goodness of God our Father.
God has again come to our aid: He Himself provides the words of our prayer, teaches us to pray and He enables us to set out toward Him so that we can gradually come to know Him and draw closer and closer to Him.
Our praying is an encounter with the Son and the Holy Spirit and thus a becoming-one with the living God who is always both with us and in us. Each of us must go out to meet and open ourselves to and submit to the guidance of every word that comes from the Son.
Without the Lord Jesus Christ’s leading, we know not how to pray. Without prayer, we know not how to live, for prayer truly is the breath of spiritual life, and through it, we inhale the very air of eternity (Underhill).