Teach Us to Pray

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.”
—Luke 11:1

Jesus baffles us as He baffled others. We see Him hard at work—confronting
the powers of demons and men and defeating them, vindicating widows
and orphans, directed by an unknown source of strength and wisdom.
We watch and wonder. Where did He get His authority?

One of Jesus’ disciples overheard Him pray and determined that Jesus’
remarkable powers were related to prayer. Certainly this disciple, as everyone
does, prayed now and then when the chips were down. Even the impious
pray. But he wanted something more and so cried out, “Lord, teach us to
pray!”

The Lord’s Prayer follows, the prayer we’ve been taught to follow in form.
But the Prayer is more than ritual; it’s rather a revelation of the meaning of
prayer. When Jesus called God Father, He was expressing utter dependence
on Him.

Jesus followed no form in His prayers. On those occasions when we hear
Him pray, such as in John 17, His prayers are informal. But if we listen, we
will learn His secret—He prayed out of dependence. Perhaps the most startling
of all Jesus’ statements about himself was His insistence that He too
was a dependent being. Having laid aside the independent use of His deity,
He declared, “By myself I can do nothing” (John 5:30).

And so He prayed without ceasing. Prayer was the environment in which
He lived, the air He breathed. Subject to continual interruptions, busy beyond
comparison, resisted by friends and foes, hassled and harried, He managed
to keep in touch with God. Every situation was an occasion for prayer.
When He held the small supply of bread and saw the multitude to be fed, He
first gave thanks for God’s supply. When He called Lazarus from the tomb,
He first called on the Father. When the Greeks came seeking Him, knowing
He had to come through, He asked God to glorify His name. Prayer was His
principal work, and by this He carried on the rest.

His life was continuous prayer. No demands, only dependence; no clamoring
for attention, only a quiet continual reliance on the Father who always
heard Him (John 11:42).

Saints of the Middle Ages saw in everything a summons to prayer: a church
bell, the flight of a swallow, a sunrise, the falling of a leaf. Our vision of ourselves
as needy, dependent men makes life a matter of continuous prayer, so
much a part of us that we can say with the psalmist, “I am a man of prayer”
(Psalm 109:4).

And so the quintessence of life is prayer, not to demand but to wait with
patience and submission, to long for and expect. By it everything else is
done.

Taken from Seeing God, © 2006 by David Roper. Used by permission of Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566, Grand Rapids MI 4950l. All rights reserved.