2. Teach Us To Pray
Luke 11:1 He was praying in a certain place, and when he ceased, one of his disciples said to Him, "Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples." [1]
Have you ever asked anyone to teach you how to do something? Being a man I can admit to a little reluctance at times in asking for help, at least until I have tried to do it myself. There are some things, though, that I have just looked at and said: “There is no way I can do this on my own. I need someone to walk me through this.” It’s not that I am stupid. It’s just that there is only so much time in life to do everything that we want and need to do. It's like reinventing the wheel. I am sure a lot of us can do it, but why? The faster we can learn the things that others know, the more time that leaves us to do the things we want to do.
So back to our question: have you ever asked someone to teach you how to do something? Sometimes we don’t want to admit we don’t know how. We are afraid that people will think less of us. We want others to admire, respect, and love us. It’s easy for some of us to feel like others will love us less because we don’t have all the answers or we are not as smart as we would like them to think we are.
Let me ask a different question: do you know how to pray? “What kind of question is that?” you might say. I am sure many of us would think: “What is there to learn? Isn’t prayer just talking to God, like a child to a father?”
Jesus’ disciples asked Him to teach them how to pray. And He does. And by doing so, He forces every one of us essentially to rethink everything we think we know about God and prayer.
This raises questions that go to the very heart of our faith. Isn’t prayer just talking to God? What is there to learn? And what difference does it make if a person is taught or not taught how to pray? Will God answer more prayers of the person who has been taught how to pray than of the person who has not been taught?
But what made them think in the first place that they even needed to be taught? Yes, the passage says that John the Baptist taught his disciples how to pray. But that still does not answer what made them think they needed to be taught how to pray. The only answer seems to be that they could see things change as a result of Jesus’ prayers.
I know there is a lot of talk today about how prayer changes us, and that is the reason we should pray. But if you go through the prayers of the Bible, you might be hard pressed to find a prayer where someone didn’t ask for something. And the people who didn’t get what they prayed for were considered sinners and the like.[2] I would go so far as to say that asking for things is at the heart of prayer, and that the idea of praying just to change ourselves is a very modern concept.
In fact, in the Old Testament one of the recurring problems that existed was idolatry. And God, speaking through the prophets, often mocked those who worshipped idols and mainly for the reason that the idols could not deliver their people in a time of trouble.[3] The idols could not answer prayer. They could not help the person who prayed. The idea that the chief benefit of prayer is changing ourselves is something foreign to the Biblical writers.
The Bible talks about people worshipping God, offering sacrifices, and singing songs of praise to Him. But it does not call these things prayer. These same people may have begun their prayers with worship and confession, but they always ended them by asking God for something. And if there is a rare case when they don’t, then it is just that, a rare case.
Six times in the Gospel of Luke prior to this question by the disciples, it talks about Jesus praying. Once the heavens open up, and once Jesus is transformed into a shining figure and famous people from the past appear with Him.[4] If indeed the disciples wanted to pray like Jesus just to change themselves, what they were trying to change themselves into was certainly far more than what we might expect today. Jesus wasn’t just a nicer, kinder person than they. He lived and moved and taught in the power of the Holy Spirit;[5] and when He called the disciples to follow Him, he performed a miracle that prompted them to leave everything immediately and to follow Him.[6]
So why did they ask Him how to pray? What made them think they needed to be taught? Do you need to be taught how to pray? Isn’t prayer just talking to God anyway?
Let’s just say that in 90% of the prayers that people pray, they ask for something. And this is not a bad thing. The prayer that Jesus taught the disciples has petitions. The whole thing is petitions, unless you regard the first few statements in the Lord’s Prayer as pronouncements. So at least half of the prayer that Jesus taught His disciples (us) to pray is petitions, asking God for things.
So what if we never learned how to pray? Say we go through our whole life never stopping to ask if prayer is something we need to learn. And, even if we do take a class or two on prayer, sometimes people don’t learn their lessons well, right? At least that’s the way the schools I went to were.
So the question is, does it make a difference? And what difference would that be? If half or more of all prayer involves going to God asking for His help, and we need to be taught how to do this, will that affect how God answers these prayers? Will we receive the same things anyway, or will what we receive from God in answer to our prayers be affected by how well or if we have learned how to pray?
After all, what would be the point of teaching them, if it didn’t make any difference? And if it does make a difference, how might this affect how we interpret the answers or non-answers to our prayers? Might we have expected different results?
Imagine two people, John and Mary, who are in pretty much similar circumstances. It could be the same illness, or both of them are out of work with families to support. Whatever. If two people have as much in common as they possibly can, and the only difference is that one person has been taught how to pray and the other has not, and they both pray for the same thing, will it make any difference ?
And if then the one person, who had not been taught how to pray, learns how to pray and goes back to God, should we expect a difference?
I wonder how many people pray and when they get their answers or non-answers say that this must be what God wanted for them in their lives, but if they had only known that they needed to be taught how to pray, they might have had a very different outcome. How many things might people call God’s will when, if they had been taught how to pray, the outcome might have been different?
Now frankly, I know this is not the kind of stuff people like to hear. We believe that God is a merciful God and that His grace, His unmerited favor, flows down on all of us. And if something happens or doesn’t happen to us or for us, it must have been His will. Yet, the disciples who spent more time in close, intimate contact with Jesus, the Son of God, felt that they needed to be taught how to pray. And He taught them. He did not say that they would learn as they went along, or learn from their experiences.
We want to shy away from any kind of responsibility for what happens in our lives. We are always quick to say that something must have been God’s will. The fact is: life is hard. We all experience things that we can’t understand why a loving God would allow it. And, unlike Job’s friends, we don’t want to be too quick in pronouncing in any situation why things happened the way they did. Too much of the time we just don’t know enough.
But then, on the other hand, I think it is dangerous to be so quick in saying that something is God’s will just because it happened. For that matter, every rotten thing that ever happened in the world, from the Holocaust to starving children to terrorist bombings has been allowed by God. The fact that God allows something has nothing to do with whether this is what God wants.
If everything that is, is allowed by God, then does that make it the will of God? Then why pray at all, but if not to change some things? And if things can be changed because we perceive they need be, how are they changed but by prayer? Then does it now follow that if we need to be taught how to pray, that if we are not taught, things may not change as they might otherwise?
Have you ever been blamed for something that you didn’t do? Maybe at work something went wrong and it wasn’t your fault, but you were fired anyway? Maybe at school somebody didn’t like you and they made up a story that got you into trouble? I wonder how many times something goes wrong and people say it is God’s will, and they are doing the same thing to God. I can imagine God wanting to say, “Hey, I didn’t want that to happen.”
At this point, the theologians among us will step in and tell us about the sovereignty of God and the providence of God. But what exactly are they trying to say: that everything that happens is God’s will? God is not willing that any should perish, but that all come to repentance,[7] and He desires that all men be saved.[8] Yet people do perish, and there are men who are not saved.
I think we often misunderstand the concepts. If prayer doesn’t change things, then the Bible must be wrong. And if we need to be taught how to pray, then, if we are not taught how to pray, things may not change like they could have..
Is everything that happens what God wants to happen? If they were, then there would never be any reason to pray for anything different, would there? And does prayer change things? The Bible certainly shows many, many instances where it does.
Then, the question is, does it matter how I pray? I certainly don’t want to say that, if you do this formula, say your prayers this way, God will suddenly hear them and is bound to answer them the way you ask.
But we have to go back to the original question. Do we need to be taught how to pray? We don’t have all the answers. None of us does. But the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray. If prayer changes things, and it does, then we have to conclude that if we learn how to pray, prayer, our prayers, will change things more, or differently, or better, or something.
When things are going well in your life, you have a job you like, the kids are not in trouble, everyone is healthy, it is easy to say that all is right with the world. But if you start looking around, you soon see that there are a lot of things in the world that are broken, that need to be changed. You can work to do that, and you can pray to do that. Ask Jesus to teach you how.
Over the years I have done a lot of teaching in churches. And I have asked the question: can I actually be teaching if there is no learning taking place? So often in churches, I have gotten the impression that we already know everything we need to know. We just need to be reminded of it.
I believe there is still a lot that most of us need to learn. And for learning to take place, either of two things needs to take place. Either we say: “I don’t know,” or “I was wrong.” Hard things for any of us to say.
But the disciples came to Jesus and said: “Teach us to pray.” We too need to be taught, and the Lord’s Prayer is the place to begin.
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