In our recent Discipleship Survey it was exciting to see that a majority of us here at BBC pray at least once per week. Some of you are pretty spiritual - over 40% pray at least 4 days a week!
But looking at this chart it also appears that a bunch of people still struggle with prayer. A quarter don’t pray at all! Many of us probably feel like we should pray more or that our prayers aren’t very effective. Why is it that we struggle so much with prayer?
For some, it’s simply life circumstances. A Pew Research survey found that daily prayer was highly co-related to not having kids! As a busy mum, Andrea really struggled with feeling spiritually dry when our kids were young. If you find yourself in that boat, go easy on yourself.
I’ve shared before how my experience of the Holy Spirit radically transformed my prayer life. It used to be dry and very difficult, but after what I can only describe as being filled with the Spirit, my prayer life, along with my whole relationship with God, came alive.
But I think another reason we struggle with prayer is knowing how to pray or what to pray for. We come with an agenda for our prayers, but have you thought that God has an agenda for how we pray!?
We’ve been discussing the Lord’s Prayer in our discipleship group and I’ve been struck by how rich it is. Jesus said, when we pray we are to “pray like this.” It sets out our Lord’s agenda for prayer, and we’re going to spend this week and next digging into it.
This week we’re focusing on vv.9-10.
[Read vv.9-10]
:OUR FATHER IN HEAVEN:
The first thing Jesus teaches us is how to address God, and it is radical. We can address God as ‘God’ or ‘Lord’. If I pray when I’m conducting a funeral I’ll often start with ‘Almighty God’ or something because most people there don’t know him. But Jesus invites us to address God not with a name or a formal title, but with a relationship — Father!
This is the beginning of God’s agenda for us in prayer, that we come as his children to their heavenly father.
In Romans 8:14–17, the apostle Paul expands on how this can be:
“For all those led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear. Instead, you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father!” The Spirit himself testifies together with our spirit that we are God’s children, and if children, also heirs—heirs of God and coheirs with Christ—if indeed we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” (CSB)
In John 3, Jesus told Nicodemus, ‘You must be born again.’ Through faith in Jesus we are born again by the Holy Spirit into this adoption as God’s children.
Someone has suggested that ‘Father’ is the Christian name for God. We don’t come to a God who is far away or who doesn’t care. We don’t have to placate Him or bribe Him to hear us. We come as children to their loving father.
If you struggle with prayer, friends, are you living in the reality of the new birth by the Spirit that makes this relationship real?
“Our Father is heaven.” Isn’t this just stating the obvious? Saying God is in heaven isn’t just about where He lives, it’s about His power and glory. We have this intimate relationship with God as Father, but He is also transcendent — far above us. Beginning in prayer not only begins with approaching God as father, but also remembering that our Father runs the universe. He is sovereign, He is powerful, and He is worthy of all glory.
So, in prayer, Jesus wants us to remind ourselves of who God is to us and who we are to him. You can have your prayer time completely sidetracked just by meditating on this address to God, and that’s a good prayer-time!
:YOUR NAME BE HONOURED AS HOLY:
Jesus wants us to linger a little longer on that name with, ‘Your Name be honoured as holy.’ As our Father’s children we should be concerned for his name.
If you’ve grown up with the Lord’s Prayer you may notice a change in language here. The old KJV and some more recent versions say “‘hallowed’ be they name.” I’ve never met someone who knew what hallowed actually means without it being explained.
‘Hallow’ is an old English word that translates the Greek for ‘sanctify’ or ‘make holy’ or ‘set apart as holy’. But God is already holy, we can’t make his name any holier than it is, so the CSB which I’m reading says, ‘Your Name be honoured as holy’, which I think is a pretty good translation. (We still use hallowed when we recite the prayer because everyone learned it that way.)
So why do we pray that God’s name be treated as holy?
The 10 commandments say, “Do not misuse the name of the Lord your God.” The name it refers to is Yahweh (probably not pronounced that way), the covenant name for God. The Jews were so careful about this they wouldn’t even say the name - ever. This has carried over into English so that the name of Yahweh is usually written as Lord in capital letters.
A name carries a lot of weight, or a lot of baggage. Maybe there’s a name that give you bad vibes when you hear it because you’ve had such a bad experience with that person. Or maybe it gives you great vibes! People and companies go to great lengths to protect their name - or their brand or reputation - because having a bad name can ruin them. People treat names with honour or with contempt, depending on their perception and relationship.
This is because a name isn’t just a label we give someone, it represents them. When someone speaks in the name of the Queen, they speak with her authority.
When someone speaks ill of someone we love, it grieves us. When they speak well of them, it makes us happy.
God, by definition, is worthy of all honour and glory. To misuse or abuse the name of God is a grievous sin. I’m sure you’ve often heard the name of Jesus misused and it brings a pang.
When we pray that God’s name is honoured, we’re praying that people will honour Him. We’re praying that people will worship Him! And to do that, they need to recognise him. And when people honour God, we start to get the basis for right order in the world.
God’s agenda for prayer begins with people honouring his name, but not only do we pray for God’s name to be honoured, we honour it with our praise and worship as we begin prayer.
How does that reflect your prayer life? Do you honour his name as you should? Beginning our prayers with praise is a good place to start! If you get no further than that, it’s a good prayer time!
So God’s agenda for prayer begins with acknowledging God as our Father in Heaven and concern for his honour. It moves onto God’s agenda for our world. And that agenda is that his Kingdom be established on earth.
Jesus had a lot to say about the Kingdom of God.
In Matt. 3:2 and many other places he said, “Repent, because the kingdom of heaven has come near!”
In Luke 17.20-21 the Pharisees asked Jesus when the Kingdom of God would come and he said,“The kingdom of God is not coming with something observable; no one will say, ‘See here!’ or ‘There!’ For you see, the kingdom of God is in your midst.”
In Matthew 13:40–42 he said, “Therefore, just as the weeds are gathered and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will gather from his kingdom all who cause sin and those guilty of lawlessness. They will throw them into the blazing furnace where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
When we pray for God’s Kingdom to come, we’re praying that his Kingdom will be revealed in our midst, that his kingdom will come into the hearts of people (that they’ll be saved), and we’re praying for the future to arrive! It’s a big prayer! It’s an exciting prayer.
This is a charismatic prayer, it’s an evangelistic prayer, and it’s an eschatological prayer (eschatology is the study of the end times.)
What does it look like to pray for God’s kingdom to come into our world? Into your neighbourhood or workplace? Into the lives of family, friends or colleagues who don’t know Christ? What does it look like for the Kingdom to come into our homes?
God’s agenda for prayer invites us to dream about these things and ask Him to bring about his agenda for the world, for our families, for our lives. If we let this grip us then it not only changes what we pray but how we pray. Our prayers become more urgent, more passionate.
:CONCLUSION:
Are you praying according to God’s agenda?
Perhaps part of our struggle with prayer is that, very often, we begin with us, with our concerns and the concerns of the world around us. These aren’t wrong — next week we’ll look at how Jesus teaches us to pray for them — but we can’t rightly pray for these things unless we put ourselves and our world in their proper context. God wants us to lift our eyes to heaven. The world is, ultimately, under his dominion and if we’re going to pray with any sort of faith and hope, we need to remember that. In fact, it’s transformational when we do.
This lifting up our eyes is one of the great gifts of prayer.
Eph 2.6 says that God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms — we’re children of heaven, not of earth. When we follow Jesus’ prayer agenda we remember who we are as we acknowledge who God is. We’re given a higher vision to pray into and, in prayer, we’re invited into God’s great mission in the world.
If you struggle with not knowing what to pray for or feeling like your prayers are a waste of time, why don’t you try this for a week or two. Don’t start with you. Don’t feel like you have to pray for anyone else or ask God for anything — just spend time reflecting on what it means for God to be our Father in Heaven and reflect that back to him. Spend time honouring Him in prayer and praying that your life will bring honour to his name.
But you might move onto praying that his name will be honoured in your family and workplace and world. Spend time asking that his Kingdom will come with a greater force into your life and the lives of those around you.
We might just find that when we pray like this, we feel God is more present to our prayers.
