1. Introduction
to "The Importance of the Lord's Prayer"
Having kids is a scary thing, and the first time is the scariest. I remember the first time I held my oldest son. His arms were wrapped tightly to his side, and he lay very still. His eyes were very big, and he hardly blinked at all. He stared right into my eyes. It was like he was saying: “Alright, pops, here I am. So now what are you going to do with me?”
I knew this would be serious stuff, having kids; so every night while my wife was pregnant, I would pray over my wife, putting my hands on her stomach, praying for our unborn child. After my children were born, I would lay my hands on them every morning before they got up and every night after they went to bed and pray for them. I prayed for their perfect development, perfect health, protection from sickness and all manner of evil. I continued this until they started going to bed after I did. At that point I only prayed for them in the morning in my own prayers.
It was around the time my first child was born that a pastor named Larry Lea became popular through a book he wrote on prayer: "Could You Not Tarry For One Hour?” He tried to encourage churches to meet for one hour every morning for prayer. The Lord's Prayer formed the pattern for their prayers. That is, they would begin with worship and then move on to a time of reaffirming their commitment to God before they went on to confessions and finally asking for things for themselves.
I never read the book, but I heard about the idea, thought it was a good one, and so I began praying the Lords Prayer every day. The fact that I was praying for my kids everyday made me think about the need to spend time everyday praying for my daily needs. Looking back now, I wondered what I did before that.
The more I prayed the prayer and thought about it, the more I saw things that I hadn't seen before and that I never heard anyone else talk about. Now that can be scary, thinking that you see something that no one else has. But then, what do you do? Say that you didn’t see it? I began to see how really important this prayer is.
Often when people talk about prayer, they would bring up all the stories about times when things didn’t happen the way they prayed. Prayer seemed a lot like playing the lottery. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but you can’t win if you don’t play. But there was certainly not that much of an expectation that what you would pray for, you could expect to get. There was always this sense that we don’t know what to ask for, God has other (and better) plans for us, and there are a lot of trials and tribulations that we need to go through first (for our own good, of course). So we pray and hope that things will turn out better because we prayed.
We know prayer isn’t just about asking for things. In prayer, we worship God. We thank Him for everything. We confess our sins. And we ask for things. And we ask for things. (And, yes, I repeated that last sentence.) Not because we are selfish, though that too. But we ask, because we are aware of how much life is bigger than we, how little control we actually have over things, over our lives.
The fact is, life is hard. And we are dealing with a God who is infinite. By His very nature we are not going to understand everything about Him. The book of Job is probably the earliest book of the Bible that was written, and no wonder. The questions the book deals with are the most fundamental of all the questions we have about God. What do you do when you don’t understand what is happening in your life? What does God mean to you? Is He someone who is just supposed to take care of you, or is He someone who is worthy of your worship, your praise, your obedience, your all, even when things are not going your way, when things are going completely out of control, when you have no idea what the heck is happening in your life? Can you still love Him when you don’t understand what He is doing or even like what He is doing? Can you give Him the benefit of the doubt? Or do you serve Him only because of the benefits?
It’s like the rich person who doesn’t know who his friends are. Do they love him for what they hope to get from him, or do they love him for who he is? God has a bit of the same problem. God is big and mighty, and those who believe in God can easily look at the sky or a mountain and recognize the glory of God and acknowledge the greatness of God.
But recognizing God’s power and majesty and being in awe of them does not mean that you actually love God. God’s greatness can instill a sense of awe and wonderment, even a sense of fear. You recognize your smallness in His presence and that He is the Almighty God, the Creator of the universe. So you worship God. You offer Him your praise. How can you not?
But do you love Him? Do you actually like Him? Can you trust Him with your life? Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden couldn’t even do that. God said not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and they did anyway. They believed that God was holding back on them.[1]
Job could not understand what was happening in his life, things were falling apart, and his friends concluded that surely Job had done something that made God respond in displeasure to punish him. But Job felt that he certainly was no worse than anyone else, and people far worse than he were not experiencing such tragedy. So what is going on?
In the end of the book, God finally spoke. But He didn’t answer Job’s questions. Basically He just reaffirmed the fact that human beings will never understand everything that God does. At some point you are just going to have to trust Him.
The point is that, when we pray, or anything else that we do, we are dealing with only one small part of the universe. Job never found out apparently, but the readers of the book did, that there are unseen spiritual forces at work in the world that have a major influence on our lives down here.
So when we talk about prayer, I think we need to be careful about thinking that we have all the answers, that we have all the loose ends tightly wrapped up, and that we have covered all the contingencies. We like to think in terms of formulas. We like to have things simple: Give me a rule, something to do, a program, 3 easy steps.
I like to think of the analogy of a sports team. I remember the Chicago Bulls basketball team when they were at their best. They set a record of 72 wins in one season. I believe the old record was 69 or even 70. This is truly an amazing accomplishment. But do you know what? That still means that they lost 10 times that year.
I remember watching the 1985 Chicago Bears. Myself, I don’t like close games. I don’t like games where the outcome is undecided until the final few seconds. I feel like someone is about to rip my heart out. It was fun to watch the Bears either dominate their opponents or rally from a big deficit and come storming back to win.
But I remember quite well that one Thursday night they played Miami
Why I am talking about sports and prayer? Because I believe life can teach us many things about God. When Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God Kingdom of God
And prayer is a lot like sports. Even the best teams never win all their games. The best teams can even lose a lot of games. But the best teams always win most of their games. The best teams may fall behind during many of their games, but they never give up and usually they can come back and win.
So I would never say that this book or this prayer will solve all your problems, answer all your questions, or keep you from having any more problems the rest of your life. What it will do is turn a losing season into a winning one, a losing team into a winning team. It will give you tools and a direction. It will make a significant, noticeable difference in your life. It will encourage you in your prayer life and motivate you to pray more and more, because you will know that prayer really does change things.
One of the biggest difficulties with prayer, I believe, is knowing what to pray for. On the one hand, we are often told to be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it. We are warned often about the need to seek God’s will and that if something isn’t His will, either we won’t get it anyway, or worse yet He might actually give it to us, and then we would be in trouble.
But yet, on the other hand, we are told to pray in faith, and not to doubt. In the book of James, we are told to pray in faith, nothing doubting, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, tossed about by the wind, and that that person should not expect to receive anything from God.[2]
But how can you have faith for something if you don’t know what God’s will is? I think too often we act like there is no real pattern to God. One day or in one case He might want one thing, and then the next day or in the next case, He might want something totally different.
We talk about how we know people, our spouses, our kids, our friends. If someone told us something about our spouse, I think most of us would be able to tell right away if the thing were true or at least consistent with their personality. God gave us a Book to tell us what He is like as well as coming in the form of a Human Being Himself. If you wanted to communicate with the ants that are crawling on the sidewalk outside your house, you would need to become an ant yourself. So God took on the form of a man, the man Jesus, to show us what He is like.
So we have a written word and the Living Word (Jesus) to tell us and to show us what God is like. We have often watched people and we may see the things they do, but we never really know them until they tell us what they are doing and why, what are they thinking. So too God has to tell us what He is like and explain the way He works in the world.
Obviously there is a limit to what we can understand and know. But still, if we are to know Him, there must be some pattern to His behavior, some consistency so that we might know what to expect. Otherwise we realize we don’t know Him at all.
How many times have we heard of someone telling another person, “I don’t know you at all.” They did something so unlike what we expected that we realized that they could do a lot more things just like that.
So too with God. We Christians talk about having a personal relationship with God, yet so often we have no idea from one day to the next just what we might expect from Him. Yes, like Job, we realize this gap between the finite people we are and the infinite God that He is, but far too often we act like we know nothing at all about God
How many times in the Gospels did Jesus chide His disciples or the people in general because they had no faith? They worried about food and clothing, and Jesus says they were people of little faith.[3] They forgot to bring food and were concerned about that, and Jesus said they had little faith.[4] They were in a boat close to sinking in a storm and Jesus asks them: “Where is your faith?”[5]
Faith in these contexts means nothing if a person had no reason to believe that God would take care of them. And how would they know, apart from God somehow telling them that, yes, He would take care of their food and clothing. You can’t believe that God will do anything, unless He first says that He would.
I know this can cause some hesitancy in people. We are afraid of becoming too certain of what God wants to do in our lives. Sometimes things may appear contrary, and we think that if we say something is or isn’t God’s will, we are being impudent and rash, thinking that we can tell God what to do.
But it is this uncertainty which brings God’s displeasure more than our certitude. It is this uncertainty which brings fear, and worry, and anxiety. When people worry about having food and clothing, is it not because they are not sure that God will take care of them? And if they are not sure, how can they have faith that God will? The fact is that life often brings people into situations where indeed it looks like they might not have food or clothing.
So when Jesus says that we should consider the lilies of the field and so trust God to take care of our needs,[6] all this means nothing if life doesn’t often look like our needs won’t be met. What is faith anyway? You see a situation and it looks bleak. When things look bad, what do we do? We worry; we become afraid; we get sad, depressed, and angry. Now how does faith change any of this? If we don’t know or believe or think that God will change the situation, what happens? Nothing. We still have our worry, fear, sadness, depression, and anger.
But isn’t faith in God just trusting God, without knowing the outcome? So going back to what Jesus said about the lilies of the field, if we don’t know whether God will provide our food and clothing, what do we do when it looks like we might not have food and clothing? Can we actually not be anxious, not knowing whether God will provide or not? So if God actually said to you, “Okay, you are on your own here. I won’t provide your needs. You will need to just hope for the best like the heathen.” Do you mean you could do that without fear and anxiety?
The fact is we do have expectations of God, vague images based on countless sermons and Sunday School lessons that give us some sense of a God who cares. Our problem is just that: they are vague images. And too often when we get in a tough spot, we have no idea just what we can actually believe that God will do. No, He probably won’t let us starve to death, but hasn’t He been known to do that before?
I am suggesting that Jesus, when He taught His disciples this prayer, what we call the Lord’s Prayer, intended to give them information about God that they could take to the bank, information that they could use in times when things look bleak and the natural human response is to be afraid, to worry, and even to become depressed as hope slowly dissolves.
We know from the story of Job that we are supposed to love and serve God apart from any rewards or other benefits, because it is the right thing to do. But does that mean that whenever God does anything for us, it is to be totally unexpected, like winning the daily Lotto, or seeing a parking space right in front of the store, or finding a dollar bill in the street.
The fact is that in many places in the Bible God actually makes a covenant with His people, where He tells them what He will do for them and what He wants us to do for Him. The problem here, of course, is that we always see our part as something unattainable, as keeping all His commandments (who can do that?), or there is the stipulation that something must be in accordance with His will, and who knows what that is?
If you want to build a house, you start with a foundation and build the walls brick by brick. We may not know and understand everything about God, but that does not mean that we cannot know and understand some things about God. We need to start somewhere, and I think the Lord’s Prayer is a good place to start.
First of all, we have Jesus Himself speaking to us. And secondly, He is specifically addressing the question of how to pray. And prayer is that area in which we are dealing with reality as we see it and the reality that we hope to see.
I think too often in our desire to be humble and teachable, we are afraid to think we have ever learned anything. Either we live in fear, or we live in confidence. To live in confidence, we need a level of certainty. To have any kind of certainty about God, we need to go to the Bible and ask: what does it say? We may not understand everything, but we need to start somewhere. And when we find something that we understand and believe, we need to hold on to that, because as sure as anything, a circumstance will rise in your life which will challenge you and deny that. And you have to decide what is true: The Word of God or how things appear to you. We need to ask ourselves: just what do I know about God? And what exactly does that mean in this situation?
Many of us have lost any sense of boldness in our relationship with God, because we have come to associate that with presumption. We have no faith to move mountains, because we are never sure if God really wants that mountain to be moved. We have lost much of our joy in God, because we have lost our sense of His will in our lives. We never know what He wants for us anymore. The only pattern to His will is that there is no pattern.
I believe our look at the Lord’s Prayer will change all of this. There is a pattern to God’s will. God’s will is certainly far more knowable than we are acknowledging. But we have a responsibility to lay hold of this. It’s like God is the utility company that provides our house with gas or electricity or water, but we have to plug in the appliances or turn on the heat before we will see the power work in our lives.
We often talk about how God’s ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts our thoughts; how as far as the heaven is above the earth, so His thoughts are above ours, and His ways above our ways.[7] And we understand this to mean that we can never be sure what God might want in a situation, because He is so vastly different from us.
Yet that is precisely the reason that we have the Bible and why Jesus came to us in the flesh: to tell us and to show us what God is like. No, we will not know and understand everything about what God is like or what He wants to do, but there is certainly a lot that we can know. And God expects us to know it and to act on it.
There will be a test and frequent pop quizzes. So like the disciples, let us ask Jesus to teach us to pray.
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