Introduction to Series
Praying As Jesus Prayed
Every fall I like to take at least two Sundays to focus on some aspect of that most basic of all the disciplines of the Christian life, the discipline of prayer.
I do this for several reasons.
First, building in a specific emphasis on prayer in our worship program makes it certain that it will get some particular attention each year. There are always a host of things that need our attention -- I told the committee evaluating me this year that I never had any problem finding something to preach about – but there are some things that need regular attention. And prayer is one of them.
Second, I choose to do this in the fall of the year because most of us experience this season as frantic. Children are going back to school, the proverbial August vacations that Washingtonians love to take are over, and the pace of life picks up. Frantic! Best of all, those beloved Redskins go back into action! Now that’s frantic!
It just gets frantic in September, trying to gear up for all these things. And that means that the life of prayer becomes even more important. But it also becomes more difficult to do. And so worship and preaching centered on the theme of prayer. Prayer is needed in busy, frantic, vital, vibrant, exhausting, exhilarating times.
This year I have chosen to take us through the world’s best known and best loved prayer, popularly known as The Lord’s Prayer. The Lord’s Prayer seems to have found a place in the hearts and minds of almost everyone who has had any exposure at all to the Christian faith. I find, for example, that when I am leading a funeral service, many Scriptures I quote draw blank looks from some of the folks who are there. They never heard such words before. A few, maybe, can quote the 23rd Psalm. But if I ask them to join in sharing the Lord’s Prayer, even the most pagan and most secular can do this prayer. It seems to have been lodged in the consciousness of just about everyone.
But that does not mean that we understand it. And that certainly does not mean that we pray it with comprehension. And it most certainly does not mean that we have lived the Lord’s Prayer or that we have allowed the Lord’s Prayer to seep in and become the framework out of which we do our praying.
And so my aims for today and for the following two Sundays are:
First, to teach you the Lord’s Prayer in such a way that it will enable and empower a more compelling prayer life for you. A more compelling prayer life, a more profound thirst for prayer, an intensified life of prayer. I want us to experience the Lord’s Prayer and thus experience some of the powerful possibilities in prayer.
Second, I hope in these few weeks to implant some attitudes, some postures, so that as you pray with enhanced understandings about the personalities involved in prayer you will have a prayer life that work better. That sounds awfully practical, I know, to say prayer that works better. I don’t mean magic. I don’t mean prayer that gets you everything you want from a Rolex watch to a new improved model husband! I mean prayer that works better in providing both you and God -- both you and God -- with companionship. I hope to implant some attitudes that will smooth the way for you and your Lord to be together.
And then, third, during these days I will aim toward using the Lord’s Prayer to help you hook up the spiritual life with the real world. I will hope that as a result of our thinking and praying and singing and worshipping together around this prayer that we will find out just how much responsibility there is in prayer... yes, responsibility
in prayer... because, as one of my old pastors used to say, "Prayer may be intensely personal, but it is never private" Think about that ... prayer may be personal, but it is not private. And because so many Christians seem to fall into the trap, as one wit put it, of being "so heavenly minded that they are of no earthly use", I’ll be working with you to help hook up your prayer and worship life with today’s life issues, today’s world, today’s realities.
If you really want to boil down these three aims and know what I’m going to do with three sermons and with three Wednesday evening studies, it’s very simple: to see what kind of God we pray to; to see what kind of people we are when we pray; and to see what we are going to have to do about all those other folks out there as we pray.
In short, to cite the theme for these weeks, we are going to do our best to "pray as Jesus prayed".
First, then, the text of the Lord’ s Prayer as we read it in Luke’s Gospel. It’s not exactly the same as in Matthew. But I want you to hear all that this text says about praying, because we really do want to pray as Jesus prayed.
Luke 11 :1-13
If I am to pray as Jesus prayed, the first thing I must do is to pray to the same God as the one Jesus prayed to.
Yes, I know that sounds weird. Pray to the same God as the one Jesus prayed to? Of course! Who else is there? Is there not but one God? And do I as a Christian not worship the God the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God named in the New Testament as the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ?
Well, yes and no. Yes and no. Yes, we call Him Father. Yes, we understand God to be the creator of this earth and the author of life; yes, we have plenty of correct ideas about God. Yes, we worship the God of Jesus.
But at the same time no. No, I am not always able to see God, experience God, in purity. Much of the time I see Him and experience Him all mixed up with idols. Much of the time I see Him and experience Him all churned and mixed with what I want Him to be. That haunting, troubling, disturbing reality in my life and yours that we call sin creeps in even into our prayer life and mixes our wants and wishes with the purity of who God really is. I do not always pray to the same God Jesus prayed to.
There is no more obvious truth in all of the Scriptures than this: that we are god-makers. We are idol-makers. If our lives are not filled by God as He really is, then we will make a god to suit ourselves. If our lives are not informed and shaped and directed and filled by God as He really is, then we will go out and get a god we like to fill the god-shaped emptiness in our lives. That is written very large all over the Bible and all over human experience. All you have to do is look at the bewildering variety of the world’s religions -- of this city’s religions - and you will see how quickly we make up gods that suit our own likings.
And so again I want to say, if I am to pray as Jesus prayed, I have to begin by praying to the sane God as the one to whom He prayed. I have to let God be God.
So who is that God? And what is that God like? The Lord’ s Prayer helps us see Him and experience Him. If we pray to that God, we can let God be God and can find both pleasure and power in our prayer.
I
First, let God be the God who is the source of a firm warmth
.. a firm warmth. Let God be the God who is both a center of warmth and intimacy and tenderness and compassion and yet who is also firmness and strength and standards and authority. Jesus prayed to a God whom He called "Father". Unashamedly, without any sense of distance, without feeling that He needed to keep arm’s length -- Jesus called this God "Our Father". In fact, the Bible scholars tell us he went farther than what that sounds like to our ears. The scholars tell us that Jesus used the Aramaic word, "Abba", which really is more like "Daddy" than "Father". It’s not just a tie; it’s a relationship. It’s not just acknowledging that God is the source of His life; it’s reaching out to claim a closeness and an intimacy. Our Daddy in heaven .. that’s what He said.
And so I’m saying to you this morning that if you want to pray as Jesus prayed, you begin with the awareness that God is Daddy, God is intimate and close and warm and caring and personal. God is not some marble set of ideals; God is not some abstraction of universal truths; God is God, and God is personal. Let God be that God.
But I am also saying that this God who is Father, Daddy,
is also, for Jesus, firmness, authority, and strength.
"Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name." Honored, held sacred, be your name. And so right after He reaches out to the arms of a loving Father, he also draws back in recognition that God is a holy God. God is not just my daddy writ large, God is God. And He is to be respected. He is to remain a mystery, He is truth itself. And you do not play fast and loose with this God. Let God be God - not a Santa Claus, whose bag of presents is endless. Let God be God, not an indulgent grandfather, who soaks up abuse and never offers a rebuke. Let God be God, who can be wrath when He needs to be. Let God be Father, source of warmth and compassion; but let God be the hallowed name, the honored name, remembering that He is authority as well as mercy .. that He is judgment as well as forgiveness.
Praying as Jesus prayed, we pray to the Father, whose name is hallowed and whose presence is held sacred.
II
Second, if you want to pray as Jesus prayed, let God be God; and let Him be the God who is the source of everything that we need. Recognize this God as the author of every good and perfect gift. And assume that it is important to ask Him for these gifts, even though they seem to come automatically and even though they seem to come both to those who ask and to those who do not ask.
"Give us this day our daily bread". Well, wouldn’t I get it even if I didn’t ask for it? Let’s be tough-minded now. Isn’t it true that my daily bread and my daily ration of light and air and my daily breath -- that it all just seems to come automatically, whether I ask for it or not? And doesn’t’ t everything - sometimes more than enough - seem to go also to the folks who only use the Lord’ s name as an oath rather than as a prayer?
"Give us this day our daily bread". Jesus prayed to receive something He already had. What about that?
I believe that the point of prayer is not so much getting things as it is acknowledging who the giver is so that we know how to look for the next gift that we need. I have a feeling I’d better say that one again! Prayer is not so much asking for things, getting things, as it is getting in touch with the giver of all things so that when you do need something, you know where to look and how to look.
When my children were little, we fed them right on schedule whether they asked for it or not. From those two o’clock feedings when they were babies right on through those lunch boxes we used to pack. when they were in school up to the hot meal every night, no matter how inconvenient it might sometimes have been for Margaret, they got fed whether they asked for it or not. But in the process they were also learning where all the groceries cane from, so that when they arrived at junior high school age, ready to eat everything in sight, they knew where the refrigerator was, they knew how the stove worked, they knew how to look for themselves .
The goodies may not have come quite so automatically any more, because by now Margaret was working and may have had to say sometimes, "Tonight, you’ll have to fix your own dinner. " But they could because they had been trained to know how to look for it, all the while knowing where it came from and who provided it for them.
Maybe the analogy isn’t perfect, but do you see where I’m going with it? Pray, acknowledging that God is the ultimate source of all good things, and you will never be at a loss for finding what you need - because you will know where to look. Pray, letting God be God; pray as Jesus prayed, letting God be the giver of all good things, and you will find yourself in touch with all the resources that the Father has stored up for you, and they will be yours.
Here I’ve learned something profound from the African-American prayer tradition. I’ve so often heard Black folk begin their prayers something like, "Lord, you got me up this morning. You watched over me through the night and you got me up safe and sound and healthy to face another day. ’ Thank you, Lord, thank you."
I didn’t grow up in that particular prayer tradition. It feels like some of us in the Caucasian persuasion felt as though after all the Lord owed us another day; that we had the right to another day. Of course we got up this morning. But we missed something very profound by not seeing that each day, in and of itself, is a gift from God. "Give us this day our daily bread"
Let God be God; pray as Jesus prayed and let God be the God who gives good gifts to His children over and over again, so that we can grow up and know where to look when we really need something!
III
And then, finally, let God be God; and let Him be in a continuing, growing, maturing relationship to us. Pray as Jesus prayed, and let God interact with us, be personal with us. let God call forth from us new growing edges, new dimensions for our lives.
Jesus prays , "Forgive us . . forgive us our trespasses; lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." And when even He who knew no sin prays like that, I know He is grasping for a growing edge relationship with the living God.
Now, breathe easy. I am not going to talk about sin this morning. I am not going to say much at all about our need to be forgiven. I am going to leave that for next Sunday. Next Sunday, watch out! But I do want us to see this: that the question is never, "How many rules did I break, and how can I avoid the penalty?" The question is never, never, "How many of God’s little rules and regulations did I transgress, and how can I wriggle out of the punishment?"
No, the question is, "What have I done to my father?" How have I rebelled against my Creator? How have I pushed God out of my life? How have I slapped in the face the one who loves me so radically, so completely?
Are you hearing this? Sin is not the breaking of rules; sin is the breaking of a relationship. Sin is not infractions of various moral laws; sin is mistrusting God, sin is spitting in God’s eye, sin is going it alone, sin is saying to God, "I don’t need you." And that’s what has to be forgiven.
I’ve thought a bit about my own father this week. Had he lived, he would have been eighty-eight years old this past Wednesday. When I was a kid, if I disobeyed him -- and believe me, I did - when I was a little kid and disobeyed him, my only fear was the punishment I would get if I were caught.
But when I got a little older the picture changed. Punishment was no longer in the picture. Not in the picture at all. I was too big to spank, and he used to say that it didn’t work to send me to my room, because I would just get a book out and read and be happy as a clam. But what began to matter to me more than anything else was what he would think of me. If I disobeyed my father as a teenager, it was not the penalty that he might put on me that worried me; it was the shame and embarrassment and disappointment that my actions would create in his heart that brought me up short. I just didn’t want to hurt him. And because of that, I grew. Or, I should say, he grew me.
Now when we pray the Lord’s Prayer that’s what’s going on. We are in a relationship to God, and that relationship, broken though it is by sin, ought to grow and change and mature. "Forgive us our trespasses, lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil"... grow us up, O God. Grow us up. And mature us. And mature the relationship between us. Put us on the growing edge.
When you pray, let God be God. Grant Him the right to have feelings about you. Grant Him the chance to keep on molding and shaping you into the image and likeness of His dear Son. Let God be God in you and for you.
I got a telephone call the other day. Someone wanted to ask me to do something for Baptist life here in the city. Only, to tell the truth, he called to inform me that I had been named to do this particular task .. he didn’t’ t spend a whole lot of time asking. It was more like telling. And once that was established, he also proceeded to tell me in pretty good detail how he wanted this task done .. what to do and how long to take and some things not to do, and the like. And when it was all over and I had a chance to get in a word edgewise, I said, "Hey, will you let me be me for a minute? Will you let me say yes or no to this assignment? And will you just let me do it in my own way? Do you trust me or not? Will you let me be me?"
When you pray, pray as Jesus prayed, letting God be God, trusting Him with who and what He is, and saying, "Our Father .. hallowed be Thy name... Give us this day our daily bread ... and forgive us, lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil". Be yourself, Father God. That’s a whole lot better than the gods we make for ourselves.
