Teach Us To Pray

What is prayer to you? Is it a lifeline, or merely a dull routine?

At its most basic level, prayer is communication. It is communication between human beings and God. And some say, prayer is even two-way communication … that through prayer, God also speaks to us.

I wonder… if you could meet with the world’s foremost expert on prayer, and have him teach you everything he knows about it, would you do it?

That is the opportunity we have today. We have the opportunity to learn from Jesus all about prayer. Listen for God’s word to you from Luke 11:1-4…

He [Jesus] was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” 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 indebted to us.    And do not bring us to the time of trial.”

Introduction

It has been noted that the first word of the Lord’s Prayer in Luke is “Father”. The last word is “trial”. We live between the two.

Prayer is another one of Luke’s major themes. Luke talks more about prayer than any other Gospel. He talks more about prayer than any other author in the New Testament. In fact, Luke talks more about prayer than any other single author in the whole Bible.

The Lord’s Prayer has been the locus for teaching about prayer in the church for most of the last two thousand years. Not only does the Lord’s Prayer contain Jesus’ main example and teaching on prayer for his disciples, the Church has used the Lord’s Prayer, not only in worship, but also as one of the main vehicles for teaching what the Christ life is about.

Along with the Apostles’ Creed, and the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer has formed the backbone and outline not only for the Catholic Catechism but also for the teaching of Martin Luther and the Reformed Tradition as expressed in such documents as the Westminster Confession of Faith.

Allow me to make four general points before we examine Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer line by line…

First, the Lord’s Prayer is both a prayer to pray and a pattern for prayer. I will talk more about this in a moment.

Second, Luke gives us a shorter version, and Matthew a longer version, but neither one of them give us the whole of the Lord’s Prayer as we pray it today. New Testament scholar and translator of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Bruce Metzger, once said there is no doubt that Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer is the original. The reason Metzger said this is because it is unlikely that Luke would have omitted phrases from a prayer taught by Jesus. So that means that either this prayer existed in two forms before the authors or editors of Luke and Matthew received it, or else Matthew has added to Luke (something that would not be unusual at all). The prayer as Luke has it shows signs of translation from a Semitic, that is an Aramaic, original. For example, Luke’s use of the Greek word “Πάτερ” for “Father” is probably a translation of the Aramaic word “Ἀββᾶ” which I will talk more about in a moment.

Third, prayer is something we have to persevere at; it is a process, not an event, a way of life, not a one-time thing. 

I spent four years receiving spiritual direction from a Catholic priest. We would meet once per month and every time we met the priest would ask me, “So how is your prayer life?” When he asked me that question, I always thought he was asking about the time I would try to set aside for personal prayer every day. It took a long while before I finally realized that what my Catholic priest meant by my prayer life was actually my whole life—my ongoing conversation with God throughout every moment of every day. That realization revolutionized my entire perspective and practice of prayer.

Fourth, it has been said that this is the only request in the Gospels for Jesus to give any teaching. Isn’t that something?! I don’t know about you, but I am so glad that the first disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray. The Lord’s Prayer has helped me more than any other prayer I have ever read or prayed. So, let’s take a look at it together, line by line…

Father

The first word of the Lord’s Prayer in Luke is “Father”. Jesus teaches us in this model prayer that how we address God is key. There are very few examples of any Jewish person addressing God directly as “Father” before Jesus came along. And Jesus not only called God “Father,” but he called him “Abba,” an Aramaic term of endearment, equivalent to our “Daddy”. (Mark 14:36) 

As if that were not enough, Jesus taught his first disciples, and he teaches us, to call God “Father”. The result is that the early Christians started calling God, “Abba,” something unheard of among other Jews before that time. (Galatians 4:4-7; Romans 8:15) 

The fact that Jesus taught his disciples to call God “Father” or “Abba,” and the fact that Paul also taught the early Christians to do the same, suggests that we can have a personal relationship with God. We can talk to God with familiarity, just as to an earthly parent.

Now, of course, the fact that Jesus taught his disciples to call God “Father” also raises a question: is God male?

If we go all the way back to Genesis 1:27 we see where it says, “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

If God created the first human beings as male and female, then this suggests to me that God must contain in God’s self both male and female. Why then do Christians address God using male terminology? 

Well, if we try to avoid either masculine or feminine terminology for God, then God becomes an impersonal “It”. If we call God “Mother” or use feminine terminology, we begin to move beyond the Bible. Though the Bible does compare God to a mother on a number of occasions, we are never taught in Scripture to address God directly as “Mother”.

Someone said to me several years ago, “We need to let Jesus shape our understanding of God rather than the other way around.” You see, sometimes we come to our study of Jesus with a preconceived notion of who God is and how God operates. What would our view of God be like if we allowed Jesus to completely define that for us? The bottom line is this: I address God as “Father” and even “Abba” because that is what Jesus teaches me to do.

Now I realize that some people’s concept of our heavenly Father has been negatively conditioned by having a bad earthly father. In fact, there are no earthly fathers who live up to the image of our heavenly Father. But rather than throw out the image of our heavenly Father, perhaps we need to have our concept of Fatherhood healed. I think Jesus helps us to do that. Jesus shows us what a good relationship with God as Father can be like, and he reveals to us the love that our heavenly Father has for us. 

Hallowed be thy name.

The next line of The Lord’s Prayer in Luke is: “let be hallowed the name of you.”

Name represents the character of the whole person. In Psalm 9:10 we read, “And those who know your name put their trust in you, for you, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek you.”

In other words, those who know the character of God in a personal way put their trust in him.

How do we reverence God’s name? We reverence God’s name by the way we use it.

The story is told of a group of children being asked, “What is love?” One of my favorite answers came from a little boy who said, “When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know that your name is safe in their mouth.”

I love that! And what a great explanation that is of the petition, “Hallowed be your name.” When we love God, even the way we say his name is different. His name is safe in our mouth.

So, before we ask for anything else, the reverence due to God’s name comes first. Only when we give God first place will other things take their proper place.

Thy kingdom come… 

The Lord’s Prayer covers all of life. It shows us that God must come first, his kingdom second and our needs third.

So, what does it mean to pray, “Thy kingdom come”?

Let’s think of this phrase for a minute in its Jewish context. Israel had many kings over the years, some good and some bad. But wherever the king ruled, his way of doing things took precedence. Under bad kings, bad things happened. Under good kings, good things happened.

As the song says, we have a “Good, Good Father”. So, it seems to me that asking for our good Father’s kingdom to come, means asking for our Father’s good way of doing things to be carried out here on earth in every situation.

Give us each day our daily bread.

The Lord’s Prayer covers present need. We are to pray for today’s bread, not tomorrow. 

“Give us this day our daily bread,” may have recalled, for Jesus’ Jewish disciples, the story of God giving the Israelites manna in the desert. God gave them just enough manna for each day. If they hoarded the manna, they found it went bad. They needed to trust that God was going to give them what they needed one day at a time.

If you have ever had a time in your life where your refrigerator and pantry were empty, and you were not sure where your next meal was coming from, then perhaps you found that this petition became real for you in an entirely new way. That was certainly the case for Jesus’ first disciples. They did not know where their next meal was coming from. They didn’t have refrigerators or a pantry. They were following Jesus day by day, from town to village, from field to desert, and they had to trust that their heavenly Father was going to provide what they needed each day.

We too, like those first century disciples, need to learn to live one day at a time, instead of weeks and months or even years in advance.

But I should point out that this petition can also be translated in a different way. It can be translated as, “the bread of us belonging to the morrow give us each day,” or even more briefly, “Give us today tomorrow’s bread.”

If this is the correct translation, then “bread” may refer to the messianic bread of the great messianic feast. In other words, “Give us now the food of the age to come.”

One can see how translating the phrase in this way, fits with the petition before it: “Thy kingdom come.”

But I wonder, do we really have to choose one translation over the other? Aren’t both meanings helpful? Personally, I find it very helpful to think of this petition in both ways. I see this petition as a way of asking my heavenly Father to meet all of my needs, and the needs of others, for the present moment and the future, needs both physical and spiritual.

And forgive us our sins, for we also forgive.

The Lord’s Prayer not only covers present need, it also covers past sin. Luke uses the word “sin” instead of Matthew’s “debts” in order to make the prayer more intelligible to his non-Jewish readers.

Luke also makes this petition less conditional than Matthew. Matthew says, “And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Luke says, “And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.”

Either way, one gets the sense that receiving forgiveness from God and offering forgiveness to others is all part and parcel of the same spiritual action. I like to put it this way: when we refuse to forgive others, it is like we are freezing the pipe that would otherwise carry the fresh water of God’s forgiveness to us…

Many years ago, I faced a time when I was under so much stress, I found it impossible to pray in my own words. And so, instead of praying in my own words every day, I would pray the Lord’s Prayer. And every day when I came to this petition in the Lord’s Prayer, I would remember certain people in my life who I was having a hard time forgiving. And so, I decided that when I would pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” I would add to that: “and Lord, I forgive so and so, and so and so, and so and so.” I did that every day in praying the Lord’s Prayer. I would name each of the people in my life I needed to forgive. And I kept doing that until the bitterness in my heart dissipated. And whenever I felt that bitterness rising in me again, I would repeat the practice.

And lead us not into temptation.

So, the Lord’s Prayer covers present need, past sin, and finally, it also covers future trials. 

Temptation means any testing situation. And that helps to answer a question many people have. They ask, “Why should we pray this way? Why would God lead us into temptation? Doesn’t the Bible say, ‘God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one.’?”

Yes, the Bible does say that in James 1:13. And that is why it is important to remember that the word used in Luke 11:4 can be translated as “testing”.

While God does not tempt us, he does, sometimes, allow us to go through times of testing. He does this, not to trip us up, and not so that he can find out if we will pass the test. He already knows whether we will pass the test or not. I think God allows us to go through times of testing so that wewill see whether we will pass or fail. And through the process, we have the opportunity to grow stronger, to grow more like Jesus. Like that silversmith I told you about a few weeks ago, God refines us like silver, until he sees his reflection in us.

This final petition in Luke’s rendering of the Lord’s Prayer shows us again how relational and familiar prayer is for the follower of Jesus. Jesus even invites us to bargain with our heavenly Father, as it were. We know that sometimes God will allow us to go through times of testing, but we would prefer not to go through such times. So, Jesus seems to be saying, it is ok to ask God notto lead us into times of testing.

Still, like a good teacher, God knows when we are ready to face the test, or even the final exam. Sometimes he will prevent us from going through a time of testing because he knows we are not ready. Other times, even though we would prefer not to take the test, he allows the examination to go forward, because he knows it will be for our own good, and the good of his kingdom.

Conclusion

As I said at the beginning of this message, so I say again: the first word of the Lord’s Prayer in Luke is “Father”. The last word is “trial”. We live between the two. And the Lord’s Prayer helps us in our journey in that in-between place.

Let us pray…