A Solid Starting Point For Effective Prayer Series

- A couple opening points for the sermon series as a whole.

- First, the Lord’s Prayer is a good antidote to our limited prayer life.

- Many of us have prayer lives that are largely limited to asking for stuff, whether it’s for ourselves or for others. Now, that's a good thing to do, but prayer is supposed to be more than that.

- One thing this sermon series will teach us as we work our way through the Lord’s Prayer is some of the other things that we should be praying about.

- Most of us would say that our prayer life is not where we want it to be. One way to think about the Lord’s Prayer is that it is an invitation from Jesus toward a more expansive prayer life. He is bringing up more than mere asking. - These are things that can make our prayer life richer and fuller.

- Second, we need to understand that the Lord’s Prayer is more than just a few words to recite.

- That is often how people know the Lord’s Prayer - it’s words that we repeat in church sometimes or maybe at a funeral.

- Look with me, though, at v. 9. There is a key word there that clues us into the point that Jesus is trying to make here. Jesus says that this is “how” we should pray. Notice that He didn’t say “what” we should pray. No, He said “how.”

- Now, this is not to say that it is wrong to recite the Lord’s Prayer in a church service or as part of our private devotions. Absolutely not. There is nothing wrong with that - it’s a perfectly good prayer to literally pray.

- It’s just that reciting the prayer is not the point. Jesus says that this is “how” we should pray, not “what” we should pray. If all we were to do is repeat His words, Jesus would have said that this is “what” we were to pray. We could then repeat “what” He said to say and then we would be done.

- But He said “how.” What’s that mean? It means that Jesus is here saying, “This is the kind of prayer that you should be praying. These are the kinds of things you should be talking about to God. This is a good, basic outline of what a solid prayer would look like.

- Therefore, we aren’t just to mindlessly recite the words and go on. Rather, we are to read and study the Lord’s Prayer, asking, “What would it look like to pray like this in my daily prayer life?”

- Jesus is showing us the way. He is showing us “how” to pray.

A SOLID STARTING POINT FOR EFFECTIVE PRAYER: Prayer is largely asking for help.

- Prayer is an acknowledgement that we need help.

- Now, not all of prayer is that. For instance, part of prayer is praise and as we praise God we might not be doing anything in that part that requires that we were asking for help. (Although it does need to be said that a lot of our praise comes from us being thankful after God met our need. But that isn’t necessarily true in every instance.)

- This is easily proven. There are many people who don’t pray regularly. When do they pray? Is it when everything is going well and even though they don’t fully understand God they feel the need to thank the universe? No, that pretty much never happens. Is it when life is in a reasonable routine and they feel like they have things under control? No, that pretty much never happens.

- People who don’t normally pray will pray for one situation in particular: a need they can’t handle. They pray when they need help.

- Maybe it’s a child who gets seriously sick. They pray, asking for help.

- Maybe it’s potential layoffs at work that seem likely to devastate the family financially. They pray, asking for help.

- Maybe it’s when their marriage starts going sideways and divorce is being talked about. They pray, asking for help.

- We all understand that prayer is asking for help because there are some situations that are bigger than us and make us feel powerless.

- This is not a surprise. After all, the beginning point of becoming a Christian is grace. Grace involves the idea that we can’t earn our salvation so we need to ask for God’s help by receiving what Jesus did for us on the cross.

- So it is deeply entrenched in the fabric of Christianity that we need God’s help.

- In light of that being the nature of much of our prayer, it’s helpful to look at the phrase with which Jesus begins the Lord’s Prayer because it gives us encouragement in that direction. I want to divide that line up into three parts to unpack each.