INTRODUCTION
How many of you actually find prayer a delight or a joy? Let’s face it, for many of us prayer is still a duty. We are all so busy, it is hard to find the time to pray, and when we do, it can be boring and hard to focus. It can feel like we are talking to ourselves or reading a Christmas wish list to Santa in the sky. So, we make excuses – “I have young kids,” or “I have to go to work”, or whatever etc. And we feel a tinge of guilt. Then we just pick up our phone and scroll.  

And yet… prayer is the portal to life with God – the life we all crave in the deepest part of our being, whether we identify it as a desire for God, or misidentify it as desire for something else.

Thankfully, Jesus was full of wisdom on prayer. Let’s turn to Luke 11.

TEACH US TO PRAY

Luke 11:1 One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.”

“Teach us to pray.” This is a fascinating request! Jesus did all sorts of amazing things, but did you realise? The disciples did not ask Jesus to teach them how to heal the sick, or to cast out demons, or perform miracles. They ask him to teach them “How to pray”

Right now, I invite you to take a moment, and make the disciples’ prayer your own. “Lord, teach us to pray.” Let us pay close attention to what Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, and how Jesus teaches his disciples to pray.  

Luke 11:2-4
² He said to them, “When you pray, say:
“‘Father,[a]hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come.[b]³ Give us each day our daily bread.
⁴ Forgive us our sins,
   for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.[c]And lead us not into temptation.[d]’”

1. God is our Father

Our Father, or in Aramaic, Abba is what a child would call their dad. In Jesus’ day, that was a revolutionary way to address God. It was Jesus’ go-to name for God. He thought of God as his Father, and he taught the disciples to do the same.

I know this may be hard for some of you due to difficult relationships with your human fathers. But for Jesus, what comes to mind when you think about God will make or break your prayer life. If you think of God as an angry tyrant in the sky, mad at the world, waiting to lay into you, you will not be drawn to prayer. But if you think of God as your father, that’s a whole other story. Imagine a father coming home from work, the kids run up and give the father a hug and immediately start telling him about their day or asking him for things – can we go see a movie? Can we eat ice cream tonight? Because they know that their father has a welcoming heart and good intentions toward them.

The first thing Jesus has to teach us about prayer is that the God we come before has a welcoming heart and good intentions toward us. He is our Father.

Secondly, for Jesus…

2. God is as close as the air.

“Our Father, in heaven.”  

(Luke 11 does not contain this sentence but you may refer to Matthew 6:9. Matthew 6 presents another version of the Lord’s Prayer in a different context. In this series, we've opted for Luke 11 as it smoothly transitions into the next lesson.)

Now, “heaven” is a tricky word, because in English, when most people read heaven, they think of a place that you go to when you die. But while there’s truth in that, in Greek, the word is Ouranos. More literally, it just means the air. Hear it this way: Our Father in the air. Think about it: the air is all around you, up against your skin, inside your body, in your blood. That’s how close the availability of God is.  

Jesus is teaching his disciples that when we come to our Father in prayer, he’s not far away, but closer to us than we are to ourselves.

Third, for Jesus…

3. The first goal of prayer is the worshipful enjoyment of our Father’s company.

“Hallowed be your name.”

Basically, to “hallow” means to revere and respect the holiness of God. To say God is holy is to say there is no other being in all the cosmos more radiant than God.

Timothy Keller, in his book “Prayer”, writes:
To hallow God’s name is to have a heart of grateful joy toward God – and even more, a wondrous sense of beauty. When you start to pray – to commune with God – and you begin to enter into the inner life of the Father and the Son and the Spirit and share in their love and joy and peace… you realize, they radiate beauty…

Think about how different Jesus’ approach to prayer is from our own. Often, we come to  God to get things from God that we feel we need to be happy. This is one of the reasons we  tend to pray mostly when we have problems with our career or relationships or life circumstances. And that’s fine, but it’s also a gentle sign from our own heart that, for most of us, we are still searching for happiness outside of God; for most of us, God himself has yet to become our happiness.

But for Jesus, the first goal of prayer is just to enter into the beauty of God.

Finally, for Jesus…

4. Our prayers really do make a difference.

“Your kingdom come. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Notice, Jesus assumes that his kingdom has not yet come and that his will is not yet done.  In part, yes, but not in full. And he assumes that through prayer, we partner with Jesus to bend reality in the direction of our Father’s good intentions. That through prayer we drag the future age of the Kingdom of God into the here and now.

Now, think of how different this is from how many of us approach God…

Do we think of God as a grumpy dictator or as our Father?
Do we think that He is far away in outer space, or close to us as the air?
Do we think that the main point of prayer is to get things from God or is God himself our happiness?
Do we think that what’s going to happen is going to happen, with or without our prayers, OR that prayer really makes a difference?

Adapted from Practicing the Way (practicingtheway.org)