Luke 11:1-4
Lord, teach us to pray.
Prayer is a funny thing. It is on the one hand very easy to define: talking with and listening to God. On the other hand it is very difficult to pin down precisely what prayer is, and how. We must remember to thank St Luke for including this question from the disciples in his Gospel: “Lord, teach us to pray”.
In response, Jesus teaches them what we now call the Lord’s Prayer. If you thought it was a bit shorter than the version in our prayer book, that is because we use the version which is recorded in St Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 6. What is most interesting is that there, the Lord’s Prayer is part of our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount. Here in St Luke, Jesus has been travelling around doing various things, and has gone to a certain place to pray. The disciples must have heard him praying and been impressed, because the way Christ prays is what spurs them to ask this question. And so our Lord has taught this prayer at least twice on two different occasions – he thinks it is pretty good, as far as prayers go!
I want to suggest two ways we can use the Lord’s Prayer to upgrade our own prayer lives. One is to use it as a template. Take each line, and think of it as a header, or category. Then pray your own prayers along that theme. For example, start with the first word: “Father”. How wonderful that we can call God our Father! He is a good and loving Father, who wants the best for us, and is intimately involved with our upbringing. You could spend an hour just on that first word alone!
The other way to use it is if we consider the context. Specifically, the question that led up to it: “Lord, teach us to pray”. God will teach us how and what to pray for, if we ask him. St Paul writes about this in his letter to the Romans, when he says:
8:26 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. 27 And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
The Holy Spirit is praying on our behalf already. If we do not have the words to pray, which happens more often than we would like, then we can rest assured that the Holy Spirit is there for us. He is “interceding” for us; that is, he is standing between us and all that is not-God that would seek to do us harm.
And so the Lord’s Prayer is God’s gift to us. It gives us a wonderful outline to meditate on in prayer; it gives us specific words to say to God; and it teaches us that God will teach us how to pray and what to pray for. And so let us be people of confident prayer; maybe not always praying confidently, but rather praying with confidence, that God is always pleased to hear our prayers, and in our prayers, drawing us closer to him.