“Lord, Teach Us to Pray”
Prt. 2 of series, “Learning to Pray”
David Flowers
Wildwind Community Church
January 30, 2005
NOTES ON THIS MESSAGE: This message, and all the other messages in this series, were based on Andrew Murray’s book, "With Christ in the School of Prayer."
[Begin with video from The King of Queens, then get back to the message title screen as soon as it’s done.]
So what do you think, is it Doug or is it Carrie who really understands prayer? I think the main problem here is they both think they have it figured out and they’re both really screwing it up. They’re both willing to manipulate God, just in different ways. Carrie will try to manipulate God to get her the shoes she wants, which Doug finds appalling, but he’s okay with trying to manipulate God to mess up Carrie’s prayers. I think they both could have stood to learn quite a bit about prayer, don’t you?
Our message today is called, “Lord, teach us to pray.” So before we get into the four main points of today’s message, let me ask you – did you? Did you pray this week? Did you accept my invitation to make prayer a priority? Did you struggle to actually do it? Did you find that your good intentions to do it last Sunday just didn’t get you through the week? We will naturally gravitate toward whatever will occupy our time and keep us from the work of prayer.
Here’s what I found this week. I found myself with this amazing sense of God waiting for me to come to prayer. God waited for me in my fatigue on Monday. And I had to resist the urge to say God I’m too tired. He waited for me in the pain and loneliness I felt during parts of Tuesday and Wednesday. And I had to resist the urge to say God, I’m too achy. He waited for me in the busyness of Thursday, and I had to resist the urge to say God, I’m too preoccupied. He waited for me through the excitement of Friday and I had to resist the urge to say Not right now God, I’m on a roll here finishing up stuff for Sunday. And he waited for me through the peaceful rest of Saturday, and I had to resist the urge to say, God, I just need some me-time to chill out today.
See, you and I will always be tempted to believe there are things more important than prayer. And the things in your life that will seem more important than prayer will nearly always be whatever you happen to be doing at the moment you think about praying. I have told the story before about the time I was home sick in bed for nearly two weeks with one of the worst flare-ups of my MS that I have ever experienced. I was just too exhausted to get out of bed, so I lay there, holed up in bed day after day. Now at the beginning I thought, “This might not be half bad – I’m out of the office for a while, no expectations of me, nothing to do but lay around. Plenty of time for me to pray and write and concentrate on God. Maybe in a way this time is actually a gift from God. You know what I did that week, and I am not kidding you – I’m serious. I watched the Beavis and Butthead movie several times. I watched several other movies several times as well, but I’ve never stopped thinking it’s kind of fun to say, “Beavis and Butthead.”
Anyway, I watched a bunch of completely worthless movies, laid around thinking about how tired I felt, and wished I was back at work. I don’t think I spent 15 minutes in serious prayer all week long. I have gone out to rustic camps for prayer retreats and found myself literally looking at the ceiling, daydreaming, anything to avoid a few minutes of serious prayer. Then when I do pray I often end up feeling let down, like it was supposed to be different than it actually was. So that’s why I challenged you to pray last week, because most of you need to be challenged. I need to be challenged. There is something in me – something in many of us – that resists prayer at all costs.
As I said the title of today’s message is, “Lord, teach us to pray.” That comes from what the disciples said to Jesus in Luke 11:1. Jesus has just finished a personal time of prayer, and his disciples come to him and say, “Lord teach us to pray.” They didn’t say, “Teach us to fish,” or “Teach us to turn water into wine,” or “Teach us to heal,” but rather “Teach us to pray,” because I think they understood that it was from prayer that Jesus got his power to do all the other things he did. So today’s message is, “Lord, teach us to pray,” not “Teach us to watch Beavis and Butthead,” or “Teach us to clean house,” or “Teach us to fix the car,” or even, “Teach us to go to church.” Christ doesn’t need to teach us any of those things, because we will naturally gravitate toward whatever will occupy our time and keep us from the work of prayer. Let’s work through that request word by word this morning, starting with the last two words. “Lord, teach us TO PRAY.”
What if each of us today owned the conviction that the greatest need of the world in this hour is not people who have learned medicine or psychology or preaching or finance or politics, but people who have learned to pray? Do you believe prayer could change the world?
The poet Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote these words:
"More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of;
Wherefore let thy voice rise like a fountain for me, night and day
. . .For so the whole round earth is in every way bound by gold chains about the feet of God."
Do we believe that? Do we believe prayer makes a difference? I believe the church in America is in the sorry shape it is in because it is full of God’s children who are giving their heavenly Father the silent treatment.
James 4:2 (NIV)
2 You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God.
The disciples said to Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray. As we look into our own hearts and then out at the world, can we come to the conclusion that it is prayer that we are most in need of learning? After all, as great a speaker and teacher as Jesus was, the disciples did not ask him to teach them to preach – even preaching matters little compared to prayer. What is more important - learning how to talk to God, or learning how to talk to men and women?
Andrew Murray writes that it is our early training, the teaching of the church, the influence of habit, and the stirring of the emotions that easily lead to prayer that has no spiritual power and ends up being ineffective. Is anyone here today longing to learn how to pray powerfully and effectively? What if you could learn to pray prayers of healing that really healed? What if you could pray that God would bring others to know his love and count on seeing that happen more often than not? What if you could learn to pray the kinds of prayers that would have life changing results in your life and the lives of your family, your friends, your community, and this world?
If this does not resonate with you right now, if you feel like that would just not be possible, then the problem is that you have no vision for what prayer can accomplish and the reason Christ told us to do it in the first place. In that case I would suggest that your main prayer become, “Lord, teach me to care about prayer. Help me realize it’s important – give me a burden to do it well.” I think American Christianity has gotten so far away from a dependence on prayer, from a true understanding of the role of prayer, that many of us have indeed lost our vision for the dramatic difference it will make when we learn to do it well. In the lives of many who call themselves followers of Jesus, prayer has become just one more thing to be apathetic about. Lord, teach us to pray.
Next let’s look at the word “us.” “Lord, teach US to pray.” We open the pages of the Bible and see prayer being offered to God from nearly the first page to the last, and we see God moving powerfully in response to those prayers. But what do the people who prayed those prayers have in common? The answer: They are all dead. The people who prayed those prayers – every last one of them except Jesus – they’re all dead. It’s strange to think about it but the pages of the Bible are filled with incredibly deep, rich, heart-rending prayers by people who will never pray on this earth again.
The powerful prayers of Moses, Joshua, Paul, Stephen, Abraham, Jacob, Noah, David, Nehemiah, Jeremiah – they are logged for us in the Bible as examples of how passionate and effective prayer can be, but if we do not learn to pray that way, prayer goes the way of the dinosaur. It is now up to you. Lord, teach US to pray. David prayed in his time. Moses prayed in his time. Noah and Paul and Peter prayed in their time. This is YOUR time, and it’s your turn to learn to pray the prayers that stir the heart of God.
Third, “Lord, TEACH us to pray.” As I said last week, though prayer is as simple as the request of a child, it also requires a lifetime of effort, of willingness to learn. How can prayer be both simple and complex, so that the disciples had to ask, so that we have to ask, “Lord, teach us to pray”?
We have the words of the Bible to show us the great prayers of men and women of the past – including the prayers of Jesus himself; and that give us promises about all that God will do in us and in our world as we pray. Our problem is that we don’t always know how to apply what is in the Bible. When it comes to prayer about spiritual things we don’t always pray for what is most needed – in fact we don’t even always KNOW what is most needed for our own spiritual good. And in prayer for our needs in this material world we still find ourselves often incapable of coming to God with what we need. And even when we know what to ask for there are still so many potential barriers, because prayer must be the glory of God, in full surrender to whatever his will is, in full assurance of faith, in the name of Jesus, and with a perseverance that refuses to be denied.
So why must we be taught to pray? Because we must learn how to apply God’s word to our lives. We must learn to discern our own spiritual needs so we can pray for them. We must learn to come boldly before God with our physical needs for life in this world. We must learn how to pray with God’s glory in mind, learn to place God’s will before our own, to trust God in faith, and to persevere until prayer is answered. These of course take a lifetime to learn, so true, powerful, effective prayer takes a lifetime to learn. Consider the Lord’s Prayer. In response to the request of the disciples, “Lord, teach us to pray,” Jesus spoke the famous words of The Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” You all are familiar with the rest. Isn’t it interesting though, that Jesus was not so much teaching them words to say as he was teaching them attitudes to adopt? I mean really, if the actual words of The Lord’s Prayer can be spoken by anyone to summon all the powers of heaven’s armies, the Nazis would have carried these words on their lips into battle, as would every other army in history. The truth is that it’s not the words themselves, it’s the lifestyle, the attitudes they convey. See it takes 30 seconds to say the Lord’s Prayer, but easily more than 30 years to truly learn to mean it.
“Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.” We can say that, but do we always mean it? Do we ALWAYS want God’s will to be done? If so, why do we find ourselves frequently making choices for our lives that fall outside of God’s best for us?
“Give us this day or daily bread.” Is that all we are really seeking? I mean we can say those words, but most of us want a whole heck of a lot more than that – just meet my needs for today? Really, that’s no fun, is it? And what’s the difference between my needs and my wants anyway?
“And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” I think most of us truly want God to forgive our sins, but don’t we find sometimes that we’re a bit less interested if that depends on us forgiving those who have sinned against us?
“And lead us not into temptation.” Think of your favorite pet sin, that thing you occasionally indulge in that you know is wrong for you but you keep doing it anyway because you’re not spiritually mature enough yet to stop thinking it’s fun. Where would we be without temptation – I mean, without it we can’t indulge that pen sin and then claim “the devil made me do it.” Without temptation we’d have to more fully face the reality of our own will to do evil.
“But deliver us from evil.” Yeah, but only in kind of an abstract way – only from the evil that seems evil to me right now – only from evil as I see it God, not from the powerful reality of evil as YOU see it. By the way God, most of the evil I see is the evil others are doing to me – so definitely deliver me from that – but please don’t touch the evil I do to others – I’m rather fond of it.
“For thine is the Kingdom and the power.” Hmm. Really? Always? Are we living more as citizens in God’s kingdom under his power, or still building our own kingdoms where we call our own shots?
“. . .and the glory forever, Amen.” Do we really want God to get all the glory for everything? Don’t we sometimes want to get in on a little of that ourselves? Glory is nice, right? Can’t we have a little of that? And as for “Amen,” well Amen means “so be it,” so to whatever extent we don’t mean the rest of the prayer we can’t possibly really mean it when we say, “Amen.”
You feel like you’ve just been worked over? Because I certainly did as I wrote these words. Romans 3:23 says that “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We all fall so far short of being who God knows we can be and has called us to be – without Him, without His guidance and His spirit and his mercy and leadership, we will never learn to consistently mean even the words of that one prayer, much less all the other prayers we pray. God deliver us from our duplicity – from our will to say one thing and do another – from our comfort with our own sin.
But do you see why we are all in need of teaching? Do you see why we must come humbly before God, through Jesus Christ, by His Holy Spirit, and ask Him to show us what it would mean to mean these words? “Lord, TEACH us to pray,” not with our lips, but with our lives.
Finally, “LORD, teach us to pray.” Every student needs a teacher who knows what he’s doing, who will be patient and meet the needs of the student. In prayer, that teacher is Jesus. No one else can teach us to pray. Christ knows what prayer is. His life on this earth was defined by it, and prayer is still his work in heaven. To pray is simply to communicate with God, and Christ is constantly pleading to God on our behalf.
Romans 8:34 (NIV)
34 Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died--more than that, who was raised to life--is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.
I can’t teach you to pray any more than I can teach you to forgive your own sins. Prayer and forgiveness are both things God does in us. But in both cases I or others who are teachers or leaders can guide you to the place where Christ can do his work, where you can receive forgiveness from Christ, or learn to pray from him.
So the question for you today is if you are willing to enroll in Christ’s school of prayer – to allow God to teach you the attitudes and build in you the characteristics that will make you a person of deep prayer. If you are not yet a Christian, I invite you to let Jesus be the leader of your life, and then to allow Him to teach you how to move God’s heart through prayer.
