Teach Us to Pray

When you read the Gospels, you get the impression that Jesus spent a fair amount of time in solitary prayer. This shouldn’t be surprising when you consider that for eternity past, He was one with His Father and doubtless in constant communication. The Son’s time on earth was a radical departure from His accustomed relationship. No wonder He felt the need to spend many hours in prayer. Apparently, His disciples noticed His prayer habits, and they may have felt their prayer life fell short of His. So, they asked the Master to teach them to pray.

What we have come to know as the Lord’s Prayer is Jesus’ response to His disciples’ question. This well-known model as Matthew records it has five different types of prayer; four are obvious: praise, provision, forgiveness, and deliverance. The fifth prayer category is more subtle. I might call it evangelistic: “Thy kingdom come.” This request is both a confession of alignment with God’s purpose and a determination to see His sovereign authority become known throughout the world.

The usual repetition of the King James “hallowed be thy name” disguises the true meaning of the phrase. “Hallowed” is the translation of the Greek word for “holy” made into a verb. “Holify Thy name” doesn’t quite work, and “hallowed” is antiquated. The original intention was to proclaim God’s holiness – His separateness from all things worldly. According to John, it’s what the heavenly beings around God’s throne say continually: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.” It’s the purest form of praise.

We all understand the prayer for provision: “Give us this day our daily bread.” Jesus made it clear that if we are trying to cooperate with God’s purpose in our lives – first seek His kingdom – all our worldly needs will be provided. This prayer properly understood is less a request than a statement of gratitude for the way God fulfills our needs. I grew up getting a little taste of that at every meal; we always gave thanks before we ate. That was an acknowledgement of where the provision came from.

The prayer for forgiveness is also easy for most of us to relate to. Very few people of sound mind and slight biblical knowledge would say they have no need of forgiveness. We all sin, and if we are honest, we know it. In his first epistle, John reminds us of that, and he comforts us with the promise that through confession our sins are forgiven. The human part of me must be constantly reminded that when Jesus paid for my sins on the cross, He was in my past paying for all my sins past, present, and future. That is not a license to sin. As Paul told the Romans, if we have been baptized into Christ’s death, we have died to sin, no longer to be ruled by it.

What I am calling the prayer for deliverance may be more expansive than it first appears to be. Certainly, we would ask that God keep us from sinning, especially immediately after asking for forgiveness. It is grammatically possible, as some translations render Matthew 6:13 to say, “Deliver us from the evil one.” That’s like asking God to protect us from our common enemy, Satan. And, deliver us might imply that we are asking for deliverance for our brothers and sisters in Christ – or even beyond them to the whole world.

Now we come to the fifth, less obvious category of prayer. It is drawn from the section of Matthew’s record saying, “May your kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” As I wrote in “Bringing the Kingdom,” “It is our responsibility as believers, as God’s chosen representatives in Christ to bring the kingdom of Heaven to Earth. Where we see unbelief, we must share faith. Where we see brokenness, we must bring healing. Where we see sin, we must call it sin. Where we see injustice, we must advocate for justice.”

In this week’s message our associate pastor at Valley Christian Church encouraged us pray this kind of prayer. He noted how Paul prayed that the Thessalonians love would increase and that they would be “established blameless in holiness.” It is right to pray for the health and welfare of the people on our prayer lists, but if we are praying with eternity in mind (the theme of our sermon series on Thessalonians) we must consider the long view – the eternal view.

Several years ago, I wrote a Sunday School curriculum on prayer that I later published as a book, A Life of Prayer. In it I recommended the acrostic ACTS-I as a reminder to pray all kinds of prayer. It stands for adoration/acclamation, confession, thanksgiving, supplication, and intercession. I also included another type I called warfare prayer which takes account of the fact that we are engaged in a cosmic battle with evil every day. Practicing these types of prayer regularly brings a maturity and wholeness to a life of prayer that surpasses saying “grace” at mealtime and “now I lay me down to sleep…” at bedtime.

If we truly believe we have a relationship with our Heavenly Father through Jesus His Son, conversations across the spectrum of possibilities should be normal. If you begin thinking about prayer in this way, I have no doubt that the Holy Spirit will help you grow into a more fulfilling relationship with God. That is our goal: “to be conformed to the image of his Son.” An important part of that image is our Savior in a solitary place on His knees talking to His Father. See Him? Follow Him.