Sermon for Dalkeith Road Church of Christ 18/4/21
“Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’” (Lk. 11:1 ESV)
Prayer is an important part of the Christian life, but it can sometimes feel very difficult. What do we pray? Why do we pray? How do we pray? Quite probably, the disciples wanted answers to these questions and so they asked Jesus to teach them how to pray. In response, he gave them what we now call the Lord’s Prayer. Over the next few weeks in church the sermons will unpack the Lord’s Prayer. What I am going to do today is to provide an introduction to prayer in general and later I will give an overview of the Lord’s Prayer.
The first thing we must note in this verse is that Jesus was praying. Jesus is both God and man, and as such he shows us what God is like. But he also shows us how to be human; that is, what it is to live as fully and completely human beings before God. His example to us is therefore very important. The Gospel of Luke often records Jesus praying, beginning with his baptism by John in the Jordan. “When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened” (Lk. 3:21 NIV). “Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Lk. 5:16 NIV). When he had the important decision of who to choose as apostles, he spent the whole night in prayer (Lk. 6:12 NIV). He prayed privately and with his disciples (Lk. 9:18; 28-29 NIV). If the perfect, sinless Son of God, Jesus Christ, needed to pray and did so often, then how much more do we, as not perfect, not sinless people need to pray.
Jesus is certainly our example in prayer, but he is much more than that. He is our mediator. Indeed, he is our only mediator with God. “For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5 NIV). Without Jesus we would not be acceptable to a holy God and could not come to him in prayer at all. But through Jesus we are invited to come to God in prayer. “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God” (Rom. 5:1-2 NIV). “For through [Christ] we both have access to the Father by one Spirit” (Eph. 2:18 NIV). In fact, it gets even better than this. Not only does Jesus make a way for us to come to God in prayer, he himself is the way (John 14:6).
Because he is our mediator, Jesus is our confidence in prayer. So often, we get ourselves caught up in introspection when it comes to prayer. We think we have to do something to make God listen to our prayers. This is not true. We can have confidence in prayer because we trust in Jesus Christ. It is because of him that we are able to freely come to God in prayer and call him Father. “Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us” (Rom. 8:34 NIV). There is no need to find a formula to twist God’s arm so that he will listen to us. There is no need to find someone who is supposedly more spiritual than you to pray on your behalf. Because Jesus has died in our place, as long as we have faith in him as Saviour and Lord, the way is open to God in prayer. You and I can pray with confidence, knowing that because of Jesus, we are not condemned, but loved. Because of Jesus, our prayers are heard by God. Because of Jesus, God answers us. Jesus continually prays on our behalf and makes our prayers acceptable to God.
Now we need to get down to the question: what is prayer? We may perhaps understand this better if we contrast it with what prayer is NOT. Prayer is not meditation or mindfulness. When we pray, we are not reciting words to the air. Prayer is not declaring things into the spiritual realm. Pray is not psyching ourselves up for doing ourselves what we are asking for. So, then, what IS prayer? The simplest answer is that “Prayer is personal communication with God” (Grudem) or simply talking to God. Prayer is not complicated. The Lord’s Prayer is quite simple. We don’t need fancy words or special places to pray. We can simply talk to God. It can be out loud or quietly in your own head. But it is real communication with our Creator.
So what are we doing when we pray the Lord’s Prayer? Are we telling God about what we need because he needs to be informed? Are we trying to persuade God to do something that he does not want to do? Neither of those things are true. God already knows what we need (Matt 6:8). He invites us to pray; we don’t have to convince him that prayer is a good idea. When we come to him to ask for his help in our lives it is because we trust that he is God and will meet our needs. When we pray it is an act of worship. By praying, we are acknowledging who God is and that we are his creatures and wholly reliant on him.
He is the sovereign God over all the world and he offers us the privilege of coming to him in prayer. Prayer is a gift to us from God. It is the way we have fellowship with God. God made humans in his image because he wanted relationship with us. Along with reading the word of God and learning from it, prayer is the means by which we get to know God.
In addition, prayer enables us to partner with God. God has an eternal plan for the world and humanity. He wants us to be part of that eternal plan. When we pray, God’s kingdom is advanced. Again, it is a privilege to partner with God through prayer. It is not so much that our prayers change God’s eternal plan; they do not. But God has willed that our prayer is part of his sovereignty. In other words, God works out his plan as we pray. Prayer is participation in what God is doing in the world.
Now that we have some general ideas about prayer in place, let’s look more specifically at the Lord’s Prayer. Our verse for today is this: “Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’” (Lk. 11:1 ESV). It is not surprising that when the disciples saw, and probably heard, Jesus praying, they asked him to teach them to pray. The disciples knew how much Jesus prayed. They also knew that John the Baptist had taught his disciples to pray. There was nothing unusual about disciples asking their rabbi to teach them how to pray. Different sects of Judaism at that time had different religious, social and political emphases and they would therefore pray differently. When Jesus taught the disciples how to pray, he did so in a way which emphasised what is most important to him. This is the value of having a pattern of prayer taught by Jesus. When we pray according to the model of the Lord’s prayer, we are praying in line with the priorities of Jesus.
The Lord’s prayer is a model for prayer, not a prayer to be prayed in a rote fashion. Jews of Jesus’ day were quite opposed to the idea of praying fixed prayers, except for certain things such as reciting a blessing before meals. On the whole, Jewish prayers were informal. This means that we should take the Lord’s prayer as a structure around which we pray, rather than a fixed prayer that we must recite over and over. Each line of the prayer is intended as a prompt for further elaboration. We are given a template for prayer, if you like. And we are to fill in the template as we work our way through the prayer.
The Lord’s Prayer is a short prayer. “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one” (Matt 6:9b–12 NIV). Therefore, it is not difficult to remember it. I remember learning it as a child. The very simplicity of it means that anyone can pray this prayer. It is helpful to memorise the Lord’s Prayer so it can form a basis for your daily prayers. I pray this daily and elaborate on each line.
There are two versions of the prayer, one in Matthew, as part of the Sermon on the Mount and one in Luke. Luke’s version is shorter than Matthew’s but both are divided into two focuses. The first three lines of the prayer: “Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” are centred on God. It begins with worship, “hallowed be your name”. This is, of course, appropriate for the people of God. We begin with worship because as God’s people we have been saved from sin and death, redeemed and justified by God. Therefore, we give him praise and pray that others would also keep his name holy.
Then there is a prayer that encompasses the importance of what matters to God: “Your kingdom come”. This is a prayer that the reign of God will be fully manifested on the earth. When this happens, every human being will hallow his name. But this is also connected to the next line: “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” In heaven, all the angels and saints obey God fully. When we pray this, we are asking that we also will obey God fully, not to mention every other person on earth. These requests are focused on God’s purposes and sovereignty.
The second half of the prayer is focused on human needs. We pray “Give us this day our daily bread”. It is a petition for all the ordinary needs of daily life: food, work, health, and everything which we need. This is quite expansive and offers us the opportunity to bring to God everything which troubles us in our daily existence. The next “Forgive us our sins” is something which Jesus would never have prayed, because he did not need forgiveness. However, as sinners, this is a constant need for us. The last petition “And lead us not into temptation” can be translated as “Do not bring us to the time of trial”. This prayer is a request that Father in Heaven would keep us from a severe trial that would so stretch us that we would lose all faith in God.
Until the Lord Jesus returns and ushers in God’s kingdom in its fullness, we will always need to pray. The Lord’s Prayer is in one sense a summary of what Jesus preached about the kingdom of God. It helps us to focus on what is important to God rather than just concentrate on what matters to us. Instead of saying, “I don’t know how to pray”, let’s embrace praying the Lord’s Prayer because Jesus taught us to pray this way. He gave us this instruction so that we would know how to pray. Remember, praying the Lord’s Prayer is not constraining as if it were a fixed prayer. It is not a formula but an outline and we can freely expand upon this prayer as we go. We can pray it individually or we can pray it together as a church. Either way, because it is a gift to us from Jesus, let’s use the Lord’s Prayer as our prayer template.