The Lord's Prayer (eBook)

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When You Pray

Is there any activity more essential to the Christian life, and yet more discouraging in the Christian’s life, than prayer?

We know we should pray. We want to pray (or at least we want to want to pray). We admire those who do pray. And yet when it comes to actually praying, most of us feel like failures.

If someone asked us right now, “How is your prayer life going?” very few of us would be happy for the question and confident in our response. We wish we prayed more often. We wish we prayed longer. We wish we prayed better. I bet none of us anticipates getting to the end of our lives and thinking to ourselves, “You know what? I feel really good about what my prayer life has been all these years.” We are much more apt to resonate with the question I read from a pastor several years ago as he reflected on his own life and prayer: “How can something I’m so bad at be God’s will for my life?”

I’ve read a lot of books on prayer over the years. The best ones make me hopeful and grateful that God invites my prayers. Too many of the books, however, make even the most earnest Christian feel like a failure for doing anything else besides prayer. I remember reading a classic book on prayer early in my ministry. It was inspirational at first but deflating by the end. The problem may very well have been in my heart, but as I recall the book, it was a relentless exhortation to more committed prayer. In my experience, nonstop focus on the ought of prayer stirs up the Christian at first but quickly wears off, leaving in its wake more guilt than prayer. While there may be a short season where you say, “Yes, I’m going to pray more,” over the long haul you just feel this low- to medium-grade guilt for not praying enough.

But the Lord’s Prayer is different. It doesn’t focus on the will to pray, at least not explicitly. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us how to pray.

A Prayer for the Ages

It is hard to overstate the importance of the Lord’s Prayer. Throughout church history, new converts and children have been discipled chiefly in three areas: the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. For most of the last two millennia, it was assumed that if you were a Christian, you knew, memorized, and frequently prayed the Lord’s Prayer.

In one sense, John 17 is more precisely the Lord’s Prayer. It is the longest recorded prayer in Scripture from the Lord Jesus. What we know as the Lord’s Prayer is not the prayer Jesus prayed (at least not exactly—how could he say, “Forgive us our debts”?), but the prayer he taught his disciples to pray.

There are two versions of the Lord’s Prayer, one in Luke and the more familiar one in Matthew. I don’t think one prayer is dependent upon the other. A simpler explanation is that Jesus, like any itinerant preacher, taught on the same things over and over, with different words and in slightly different ways.

In Luke 11:1–2 Jesus’s teaching is prompted by the disciples’ request, “Lord, teach us to pray” (v. 1). They must have heard something in the way Jesus was praying that made them think, “We have a lot to learn.” Notice what Jesus did not talk about in response to their request. He didn’t teach them how long their prayers should be, or at what time of day they should pray, or how many times each day they should pray, or what they should feel as they pray, or whether they should be standing or sitting or kneeling, or if they should close their eyes and fold their hands, or whether they should lift their hands and eyes to heaven.

It’s not that concern about those things is wrong. But surely it’s instructive that Jesus was most concerned with what they prayed, more than with when or where or for how long. This may be the most obvious and most important lesson to learn from Jesus about prayer. We can pray in the morning or in the evening, for a long time or a short time, with eyes open or eyes shut. There is freedom in a great many elements of prayer. But (1) we must not neglect praying, and (2) we must pray for the sort of things Jesus tells us to pray for.

The passage in Matthew 6:5–9 is part of Jesus’s famous Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7). You’ve probably realized that before. What you may not have noticed is that this section in the Sermon on the Mount covers the three foundational acts of Jewish piety: almsgiving (6:1–4), prayer (6:5–15), and fasting (6:16–18). These were the “spiritual disciplines” for first-century Jews (they would have memorized much of the Bible, but most couldn’t read it daily because much of the population was illiterate, and individual families did not have Scripture scrolls in their homes). If they made New Year’s resolutions back then, they would have thought of giving to the poor, praying, and fasting.

Unlike Jesus’s teaching in Luke, here in Matthew Jesus is concerned not just with the what of prayer but with the how of prayer. Specifically, Jesus wants to make sure we are praying for the right reasons from the right heart. In fact, that is his central concern in discussing all three acts of piety. When you give to the needy, don’t make a big deal out of it. When you pray, don’t do it to look good. And when you fast, don’t draw attention to yourself. Jesus understands the pride and vanity that dwell in every human heart. Being religious doesn’t mean you no longer seek vainglory. In fact, being religious is one of the chief ways in almost every culture that men and women find ways to nurture their pride and their vanity. What better way to look impressive before others than to be spiritually impressive?

So don’t think for a moment, “Well, I’m a Christian, I go to church, and I’m spiritual and religious. I’m not in danger of these things.” Actually those realities may mean we are in particular danger.

Of Course We Pray

Before we get into those specifics, however, look at the first four words of Matthew 6:5: “And when you pray . . .” Jesus doesn’t have to teach his disciples that they should pray. That was already a given. He assumed they would pray, and they would have understood that prayer was not something for super-spiritual people but something that every Jew did. Don’t think, “Prayer is what pastors and missionaries do,” or, “Prayer is something I will do when I’m older.” Prayer is for everyone who is a true follower of God.

While it can be hard to know exactly when certain Jewish traditions developed, it seems clear that by the time of Jesus, prayer was offered in the synagogue three times a day.1 This may have grown up out of Daniel’s practice of praying three times a day (Dan. 6:10), or perhaps it goes back to Psalm 55:17: “Evening and morning and at noon I utter my complaint and moan, and he hears my voice.” Typically, the time of synagogue prayer began with a recitation of the Shema (Deut. 6:4) followed by the Eighteen Benedictions. These benedictions are not in your Bible, but they deal with biblical themes. In fact, you can hear echoes in the Lord’s Prayer of some of the language in them. These were a series of prayers asking God to bless Israel. We don’t know exactly when they were codified, but the main development of the prayer almost certainly took place before the destruction of the temple in AD 70.2

If that’s the case, Jesus and his disciples would have been familiar with these prayers. Jesus could assume not only that his disciples would have times of private prayer (like Jesus did), but more obviously that they would regularly attend times of corporate prayer (think of the words “our” and “us” in the Lord’s Prayer). When someone asks, “How is your prayer life?” we probably think, “How am I doing with my daily devotionals first thing in the morning?” That’s not bad. But Jesus’s disciples probably thought of corporate gatherings where they came together and prayed. Think about the Lord’s Prayer itself. There is not one example of a singular pronoun in the model prayer Jesus gave to his disciples.

No one—not Jesus, not his followers—questioned that God’s people would pray. The same is no less true today. If you are a part of the family of God, you will talk to your Father. If you never talk to your earthly father (if he is alive), especially if you live in the same house, something is very dysfunctional. Of course we talk to God in prayer. He is our heavenly Father. You can’t be a Christian and not pray. There is no such thing as a nonpraying Christian.

How Should We Pray?

We will get to the Lord’s Prayer itself in the next chapter. That is the what of prayer. For this chapter, we need to focus on the how.

According to Jesus, there are two big no-no’s when it comes to how we pray: don’t be like the hypocrites, and don’t be like the pagans. First, then,...