Praying Like a Disciple

This article was originally the first of a series of three sermons on the Lord’s prayer in Luke 11:1-13. I’ll be posting the other two parts over the next two weeks

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.” And he said to them, “When you pray, say: “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.”  And he said to them, “Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves, for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything’? I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs. And I tell you, ask, and sit will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:1-13)

Luke’s account of Jesus’ teaching on prayer (11:1-13) provides one of those rare gospel passages in which the disciples do something right. They don’t assume that prayer, the prayers they learned in synagogue and from their parents—the way of prayer practiced by their teachers and peers, the way of prayer they’ve always known—will remain the same. Everything else in their lives had changed because of Jesus. They understand that the way they pray will, must, also be redefined by their new Lord.

Prayer can be a very frustrating thing. John Macarthur says that when God brings new birth to a sinner, creating a new heart of flesh, drawing him to faith in Jesus Christ, he makes a completely new type of human being. We may look the same on the outside but inside we’re new creations. And as new people we have two pressing needs that must be satisfied. Just like a newborn baby needs air in the lungs and milk in the stomach, so a Christian, from the moment of new birth needs prayer and scripture. The word of God is milk. Prayer is breath. We cannot live without either one of them.

It is not that we “should” pray and study scripture, that’s true, but we must pray and study scripture. Not to study scripture, not to hear the word preached and taught, results in the same kind of weakness, confusion, and irrationality to your spirit that comes to your body when you do not eat. Without food, ultimately, you collapse. In the same way, the new life without scripture collapses. Scripture is our food.

Prayer is our breath. To resist prayer brings the same kind of pressure and discomfort and difficulty to the believer’s spirit that resisting oxygen—holding your breath—brings to the body. How long can you hold your breath? I can do it for about a minute but eventually I must breathe. The believer, eventually, must pray.

And that’s the rub because most Christians I speak to, myself included, express dissatisfaction with prayer. I wake up early and take about an hour to read my bible and pray. Many times I emerge from that hour without a sense that I’ve communicated with God. I know that I have but I don’t always feel it.

On the other hand, when I don’t pray I always feel it. When I go for any length of time without intentionally communicating with God, I get pent up and frustrated and things start to break down until I realize that I’m not breathing. I haven’t prayed.

So the common frustration comes from the fact that we need to pray, it’s something “new creations” are compelled to do, while at the same time prayer, as we do it, does not satisfy the longing.

We need Jesus to teach us—and continue to teach us throughout our lives—to pray.  For now, let’s sit with the disciples at Jesus’ feet and let him teach us to pray as if we’ve never prayed before.

Luke 11 opens with Jesus himself praying which all the gospels record as a prominent feature of Jesus’ earthly life. As a Man—even sinless man—Jesus is utterly dependent on his Father. He knows that. When he is weary he prays. When he is frightened, he prays. When he needs to make a decision, he prays. When the people in his life need help, he prays.

We’re not told the content of Jesus’ prayer in v. 1. We’re simply told that he is praying in a certain place and when he is finished one of his disciples, speaking on behalf of the rest of his followers makes a request.

“Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”

We do not know how John the Baptist taught his disciples to pray. But we do know that it was common for famous rabbis, and it still is, to teach both an “attitude” of prayer and specific set prayers to their disciples. The set prayers served to differentiate them from followers of other rabbis. They became distinctive, defining, marks of the followers of that particular school of thought. John the Baptist, apparently, followed this custom, teaching his followers a community defining prayer and way of praying that would have included both a way to approach prayer, an “attitude” and some rehearsed or memorized prayers.

Today many Christians believe that prayer must always be spontaneous and unrehearsed in order to be authentic; that true prayer cannot be read and repeated without falling into “vain repetition”. In Matthew 6, Jesus says “When you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words.” (Matthew 6:7). The King James version translates “empty phrases” as “vain repetition.” Some assume that Jesus had in mind all written prayers and all prayers known through memorization because, it is believed, when you pray using words that you know from habit, you’re not praying “from the heart.” You’re just repeating words.

It is true that when you’re in the habit of using a prayerbook or reciting set prayers, they can become empty. You can simply “say” the words without meaning them. It is possible to repeat them over and over again with no thought, mindlessly saying words you’ve never cared to understand. And if that is what you do on Sunday morning then, in fact, you’re not praying. You are merely “heaping up empty phrases.” Prayer is communication with God. He’s a living being. He’s personal. Prayer is not an address to a “something” but a conversation with “someone”. Written prayers are not meant to be used as incantations that, said a magical number of times, compel God to do what you want him to do. And it’s true that if you only use written or memorized prayers, prayer quickly becomes weird and impersonal, never producing intimacy with God.

How would you feel if your best friend were to invite you over for lunch and instead of conversing with you, he pulled out a sheet of paper and recited “You are my friend. I like you. Please get me a glass of water”...and repeated that praise and petition for the entire meal?

It would be annoying and weird. And so if you never depart from the prayerbook or written prayers of some kind then even if you mean what you say, it defeats one of the primary purposes and privileges of prayer which is to be in real true, friendship and fellowship with God.

At the same time, it’s not as if we’d never read something when addressing other human beings we love and admire. If, for example, I were to address a world leader, a president, a king, someone in high authority, I’d want to be very careful with my words. It would be handy to have a formal, written way to say what I mean. How much more so with God?

There are times, especially when we come together as a body in public, when we want to take care with the words we use to praise God and speak to him because we want to rightly reflect the truths that he has revealed about himself and if we’re freestyling all the time, not everything we say will be true, holy, and reverential. We want to honor God in prayer. We want to praise him in spirit and in truth. Written or memorized prayers help us to do that.

The division between Christians who use written prayers and those who do not would’ve been very strange to the disciples because both were an integral part of the prayer life of first century Jewish people. Even today, orthodox Jewish worship is full of rich written liturgical prayers, many of them going back to Jesus’ day and before. Jesus, from a very early age, would have memorized prayers and repeated them every day and every Sabbath in the synagogue.

Luke 4 tells us that it was Jesus’ custom to attend synagogue on the Sabbath where he would’ve necessarily continued the habit of using memorized set prayers and we can be sure that as he did so our Lord did not engage in vain repetition or empty phraseology.

The key to the modern confusion comes from the fact that we tend to equate emotion with sincerity. If I don’t feel it, I don’t mean it.

That’s not true. Sincerity comes from your will not your emotions.

When I speak to my mom or dad on the phone, I always say the very same three words before I hand up: “I love you”. I sometimes do not “feel” deep affection at that moment, but that doesn’t mean that my words are untrue or insincere.  I really do love my parents and I want them to know that even when I don’t feel familial affection. Meaning and feeling are not synonymous.

Written and memorized prayers represent nothing more than a way of saying true things to God, things we mean, things that need to be said and that if left to our fluctuating emotions we might never say. They allow us to escape the tyranny of our feelings and praise God as he deserves to be praised.

Jesus would, just like any other Jewish person, have been raised on memorized liturgical prayers but just like any other Jewish person, these prayers would not have inhibited him from praying spontaneously when need or desire or the prompting of the Spirit led him to do so. The two are meant to go hand in hand.

The reason I went through all of this is that the Lord’s prayer, which we have in short form here in Luke 11 and in a longer form in Matthew 6, is given as a set prayer to be said and memorized. Notice the command in verse two is to “say” or recite this. It’s true that the Lord’s prayer also functions as a less formal model or structure for non-memorized prayer, but it is given here, primarily, as a set prayer to be memorized and said. Both/and not either/or. Jesus teaches a set prayer that if memorized and used regularly trains the mind and heart to desire and pray for the right things with the right attitude when praying “spontaneously”. Jesus teaching on prayer joins formal and informal, memorized and spontaneous prayer together.

In the next article we’ll dive into the text and look more carefully at the content of Jesus’ teaching on prayer.