“Lord, Teach Us to Pray”

Sunday evening, I’m going to be sharing a brief teaching about prayer, (I’m calling it, ”Lord, Teach Us to Pray”) at the youth/young adult “Adventure” meeting at church.

Because it was on my mind and heart today, I thought I’d type up the story about how I came to understand how to pray after becoming a Christian a number of years ago (I came to Christ at age 25 … and I’m 48 now … you do the math of how long I’ve been a believer). 

Here’s the story in a nutshell:

When I was a brand new baby Christian, I was sitting alone in my room one evening about to read the Bible. Before I started reading, I felt like I wanted to pray first, but as I opened my mouth to pray, I realized I really didn’t know what I was doing.

The only prayers I’d ever said before were things like, “Now I lay me down to sleep … blah, blah, blah … if I should die before I wake” (wow, that’s the stuff little kids’ nightmares are made of, believe me!).

Or occasionally if I visited a church with a friend, or attended a wedding or funeral, I’d hear people reciting the Lord’s Prayer. I think just by virtue of growing up as an American kid in suburbia, I knew the Lord’s Prayer by heart, even though my family never attended church during my growing-up years.

But as a new Believer, I found when it came time to sit down and actually communicate with God person-to-person, I honestly didn’t know where to start.  After all, I was only on my second read-through of the New Testament and I hadn’t even started attending a church yet.  My exposure to sincere, heartfelt Christian prayers was severely limited.

I sat there on my bed and pondered what it meant to pray. I knew prayer was talking to God. I knew people asked for stuff while they were praying.

Was that all it was? Presenting a heavenly “to-do” list or a Christmas list of wishes to God?

Or was there something more to it than that?

Was it just a matter of praying a mindlessly repeated, rote prayer, maybe something like the Lord’s Prayer or that scary “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” death prayer?

Or something more?

Not having a clue what I was doing, I bowed my head and said to God as best I knew how, “Lord, teach me to pray.” Amen. End of prayer.

Eloquent, huh?

Well, not surprisingly, I didn’t see any neon lights shining on the ceiling of my room detailing the how-to’s of an effective prayer life. I didn’t even get an inner “hunch” about what to do. I just sort of sat there on my bed and wondered what to do next.  Should I fix a snack? Brush my teeth? Let the cat out? Start reading?

The reading idea won, so I opened my Bible and continued on with my reading of the Gospel of Luke.

This is what I read:

Luke 11:1 (NASB) –

Now, it came to pass, as He [Jesus] was praying in a certain location, when He ceased, that one of His disciples said to Him, “Lord, teach us to pray …”

 

What?! It caught me up short.

I’d just asked God that exact same question! Was I about to find the answer to my request the first time I opened up the Bible after asking?  Hm.  Interesting.

The story continued:

Luke 11:2-4 (NASB) –

2 And He said to them, “When you pray, say:
‘Father, hallowed be Your name.
Your kingdom come.
3 ‘Give us each day our daily bread.
4 ‘And forgive us our sins,
For we ourselves also forgive everyone who is indebted to us.
And lead us not into temptation.’ “

That sounds sort of familiar, doesn’t it?

I immediately realized it was a shorter version of the Lord’s Prayer, so I did some quick digging around in the footnotes of my fresh, clean, brand new, hardly ever been opened study Bible and found a reference at the bottom of the page directing me to the sixth chapter of Matthew.

I read:

Matthew 6:5-13 (NASB) –

5 “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.
6 “But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.
7 “And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words.
8 “So do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.
9 “Pray, then, in this way:
‘Our Father who is in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
10 ‘Your kingdom come
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
11 ‘Give us this day our daily bread.
12 ‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 ‘And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. [For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.]‘

 

Wow. There it was again … more prayer teaching straight from the lips of Jesus.

Jesus’ disciples had asked Him to teach them how to pray and He responded by essentially reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

I sat there almost flabbergasted. I knew that I — yes, little ol’ me — was His disciple now, too. And, wonder of wonders, nearly 2,000 years earlier, His first disciples had asked Him the very same question I’d just asked.

In the quietness of my room, I’d asked God to teach me something specific, and the next time I opened my Bible – literally less than a minute later – I just happened to stumble upon the very spot in Luke where Jesus’ disciples asked Him the exact same question.

Coincidence? Hmm … probably not. 

So with both of those “Lord’s Prayer” Bible passages open before me, I muddled through my own little exercise in logic.

“If Jesus answered the disciples’ request for teaching them about prayer by reciting the Lord’s Prayer, how does that jibe with His instruction in Matthew 6 about how we shouldn’t be using mindless repetition when praying?

“It seems like most folks I know who recite the Lord’s Prayer are simply going through the motions, repeating something they’ve learned by rote – sort of like saying the Pledge of Allegiance – but not really understanding or thinking about what they’re saying. It seems like, in the life of many people, the Lord’s Prayer is almost the very definition of mindless repetition.

“So if we aren’t supposed to pray using mindless repetition, what on Earth’s going on here? Why did Jesus tell them to pray that particular prayer?”

I sat there scratching my head. Think, think, think. I knew there was probably an answer somewhere in the text for this dilemma I was facing in my brain. But what could it be?

Suddenly I found myself drawn to one little phrase in Matthew 9:2 – “Pray, then, in this way.”

I noticed that it didn’t say, “Repeat the following, word-for-word.”

It also didn’t say, “Turn off your brain and repeat after me.”

It simply said, pray like this. Pray in this manner. This is how to pray. This is the general format of prayer.

The lightbulb came on in my head! The Lord’s Prayer wasn’t simply a prayer to repeat verbatim … it was also a pattern for prayer. Pray in this way. Pray according to this pattern. Pray in this fashion.

As I re-read the Lord’s Prayer with fresh eyes, I saw that it contained topical sentences, almost like I was looking at a ready-made outline for what to include in an effective and meaningful prayer time.

–more later–