(Audio and Text)
Title: How to Pray, Part One
I’ve done it to you again. For those of you who may be newer to HBC, let me share a little tradition that has developed between myself and my beloved congregation. I often begin teaching a sermon on a section of scripture and in the first sermon I say, “Today we begin a two week study over these verses on this topic. I want us to take two full weeks to cover this material because…blah blah blah…
And then, on the second week I meekly approach the pulpit and declare, “After doing some more preparation and study, our two week sermon series has become a three week series…I promise, we will conclude next week. And then the third week arrives, we’ve gone over a grand total of three verses and I say, if you want to fire me, I totally understand.”
Now, the grace of God is upon this place, or at least my head, because I’ve been doing this for ten years and you keep wanting me to come back, so I’m going to ask for one extra week to thoroughly cover the topic of prayer.
Last week we looked at setting the table for prayer. This week we will cover the ingredients that make up the meal, and I promise, next week we will eat.
Last week we set the table by discussing our posture going into prayer. If you recall, we noted three questions that should help prepare our hearts to come before our Lord. As you may recall, the three questions we asked we as follows:
- Where is your reward?
- Where is your body?
- Where is your focus?
Now, there is one thing consistent that runs through each of these questions that will be invaluable in aiding us to have great devotional prayer time with our Lord. And that thing is humility. If you asses each of these questions before you prayer, your heart should be rightly humbled before the Lord; your creator, sustainer, and redeemer, and you should profit greatly from your prayer time because:
If we force ourselves into the habit of considering these three questions before we pray, we will see dramatic results in the depth, sincerity, and sense of communion we have with the Lord in our prayer.
So now, let us look further into what Christ shares with us about what and how we ought to pray once we have come before him in humility.
(read/pray)
- The connection between verse 8 and the Lord’s Prayer
Before we even dive in to what the Lord’s Prayer says and how that should effect our prayer life, let me ask a detective’s question. Look back at what we studied last week, then looking at what Jesus says in verse 8, what do you notice about the Lord’s Prayer?
This is the model prayer for believers, it is how we are to commune with our God, and something about it is somewhat perplexing to me, but when I consider what Christ says in verse 8, it makes much more sense.
This is a tough questions, but does anyone want to take a shot at what I’m hinting at?
Q: What is peculiar about the Lord’s prayer, that connects perfectly with verse 8?
A: It’s short.
After reading the Lord’s Prayer, a huge part of my brain says, “that’s it? I can do that. I can do that several times a day. I can do that several times a day and even mean it when I say it, not just be repeating it vainly.”
So then I start to think, “Maybe there is more to this prayer than I’m realizing.” And that leads me to my first big question:
- Repetition, or Something Deeper?
Verse 9 says, “In this manner, therefore, pray:”
I truly believe that how we interpret the words “in this manner” will have a huge effect on how we understand, apply, and teach the Lord’s prayer.
Now, at this point, being a Biblical detective, let me just say that I would find it peculiar, I would find it strange, if coming off of two sections of teaching where Jesus basically tells his people: Don’t draw attention to yourselves in prayer, and don’t use vain repetitions, that he would then turn around and say, Here’s how you pray: Here’s a short prayer, pray it word for word, and your are all good.
It wouldn’t seem like we’d be building a relationship with God if we just repeated verbatim these few lines of prayer.
I also think it would be strange if in order to build a relationship with God using this model prayer, we simply repeated it several times a day, or several times during a worship service.
So am I suggesting that repeating The Lord’s Prayer word for word is a bad thing? Not at all. They are the words of Christ. But I do think, and I would argue, there’s a better way to understand what Jesus is teaching his followers on prayer.
The Lord’s Prayer is a model prayer in this sense: It uses Hebrew Poetry and parallelism (which we’ve already seen when we studied the Beatitudes) to give Jesus’ followers an outline and order for what elements our prayer should contain.
Now, I understand that’s quite a cliffhanger to leave you with, but after establishing what, exactly, I believe the Lord’s Prayer is, I want to give a full sermon to breaking down each part of the prayer so that you will literally know how and what to prayer when you are in your prayer closet. Therefore, we will close here today and study the actual outline and its implications next week.
(pray, Q/A)