The Single Most Important Lesson on Prayer You Will Ever Hear

Does prayer actually change things, or is prayer really about changing you?  Does God actually do things just because we have prayed for it, or does God just do what He wants to do, and the point of prayer is just learning to like what He does?  The question is rarely put so bluntly, but the idea that prayer is more about changing us than changing things is very strong in the United States and growing. 

There is such an emphasis on the sovereignty of God, where God does whatever He wants, and our main purpose is to try to align ourselves with what He is planning on doing that there is a lot less expectation that He is really answering our prayers, as in doing the thing that we asked Him for.  We can certainly ask for things, but if it isn’t His will, we won’t get it, but even if we don’t ask, He does His will anyway, so the result is the same but we just missed the personal benefit of this interaction with God of bending our will to His.

This kind of thinking is not voiced too loudly in churches today, because people are still taught to pray about everything, and to actually come out and say what is generally implied would be like the child who tells everybody that the king has no clothes. Everybody is thinking it to some extent, but they don’t want to think about what this really means.

When something happens that corresponds to our prayers and the result is amazing, the feeling is on the level of winning the lottery.  It is entirely unexpected and nothing to give you any direction on future prayers.  There is no general pattern that we could apply to future situations.  God’s will is entirely on a case by case basis, and what He does in one case has no bearing on what will happen in a similar case down the road.

In Luke chapter 11, Jesus’ disciples asked Him to teach them to pray.  And He does. 

What does that mean?  Does that mean that we have to learn how to pray?  Isn’t prayer just talking to God?  Isn’t prayer just the cry of our heart?  What is there to learn?

More importantly, does it matter if we are taught to pray?  Does this mean that things will be different in my life if I am taught to pray and pray according to these principles? 

Imagine two people in essentially identical circumstances.  One was taught how to pray and the other wasn’t.  They both pray.  Will they get different results?  Wouldn’t God just give them according to His will in each case?  If that was the case, why would Jesus think it was necessary to teach His disciples how to pray?  It wouldn’t matter.  Just pray the way you have always prayed.

But, no, they asked Him, and He proceeded to tell them.  So learning how to pray will make a difference in how God answers your prayer. 

Note too that prayer in this case, the prayer that Jesus is teaching His disciples involves asking and receiving.  A lot of Christians today have essentially given up on the idea that prayer changes anything.  They say that prayer changes us, but we shouldn’t think that our prayers actually change things. 

Because if prayer did change things, or could change things, then we would be responsible for things not being changed that should be changed, and most people can’t handle that or don’t want to.  They feel it would burden them with guilt, or they would feel that certain things were their fault, because they didn’t pray ‘hard enough.’ 

They would rather say that everything is God’s will.  So if things didn’t go the way they wanted, it was God’s choice and not their own. 

But if our prayers were meant to change us rather than circumstance, wouldn’t Jesus have told us this right here?

But let’s go on.

In verse 2, Jesus says, whenever you pray, say this, and He gives us what we have come to call the Lord’s Prayer.

I wouldn’t take that to mean that every time you ever pray, you use only these words and exactly these words.  But I would say that at least once in a day, and I will explain why in a minute, you should use these exact words, just to be sure that you are praying for what Jesus wants you to pray for.and how He wants you to pray for it. 

But doesn’t it then just become vain repetition, the mindless saying of words that you no longer mean or even think about?

Well, there are a lot of things that we do every day that we don’t even have to think about.  I drive the same way to work every day.  I could drive there in my sleep.  But I don’t.  Why?  Because I am driving to work.  I brush my teeth twice a day, and I could just go through the motions, but I am brushing my teeth. 

When I pray this prayer every morning, what we call the Lord’s Prayer, I could just rush through it on autopilot and mumble the words, but I am praying, and I know that my prayers, this prayer, makes a difference.

It begins by calling God Father.  Not Lord, not God, but a word based on a human relationship that hopefully we will all have experienced in a positive way.  Not everybody grew up with a father, and not all fathers were good fathers.  But with very few exceptions, they all wanted to be good fathers.

But I think that anyone who did not have a good father knew what they wished they did have from that father.  But life is designed so that if we don’t learn what it is to be loved unconditionally while we are children, then for most of  us we get a second chance when we become parents and we love our children unconditionally.  All this is meant to teach us about God’s love.

On a side note here, this could be the greatest single reason for the statement that children need their natural fathers in their life.  Now not all natural fathers are good fathers, but I do think that our fathers do and can do a lot in shaping or helping to shape how we feel about God and how we respond to Him.   I think it would be wrong and unwise to think the role of a natural father is not important in the life of a child.

But thinking of God as father should affect how we talk to Him.  We are not talking to Him as the King of the universe, which He is, but as our father who doted over us as a child and taught us how to ride a bike and then riding with us.  Someone we can talk to.

The first thing we are to pray for is that God’s Name be hallowed.  Or you could say honored, or respected.   This draws attention to the bigger picture.  Read the examples of prayers in the Bible, most of which are in the Old Testament, whether Abraham praying for Sodom and Gomorrah, or Moses praying for Israel on several occasions, or Hezekiah praying for Jerusalem.  They prayed like they were lawyers arguing the case before God as to why God should do what they were asking, and the reasons all stemmed back to God’s glory, God’s reputation, God’s Word, His promises. 

I plan to talk more about that at another time. 

But yes, you have needs, and yes, God wants to meet your needs.  But you will find that gradually as you see God meeting your needs, your focus will get off your needs and your problems to those of the world, and your concern will be that God will be exalted through the addressing of these bigger needs. 

But don’t for a second think that God doesn’t’ want to meet your needs.  I know a lot of Christians are concerned that their needs are not really needs but just wants, and that God often doesn’t do wants.

That question should get a separate lesson as well, but this one might answer it for you. 

The next petition is “let Your kingdom come.”  Now this same prayer is also found in the gospel of Matthew, chapter 6, and there the prayer contains a few more lines.  Without going into all the reasons why the two prayers as they are given in most English Bibles are different, for the sake of this lesson, I am going to combine the two.  I don’t think Jesus forgot what He said on the other occasion, and I believe He intended everything He said on that other occasion to have been a part of what He said on this occasion.

So after He said, Let your Kingdom come, He said, Let Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Now why would He tell people to pray that God’s will be done if it already is done?  If everything that happens is God’s will, then why pray for it to be done?

Some will say this is just a way of getting us to conform our wills to His.  Well, if that is the case, then why didn’t He just come out and say it, without leading people on to think that their prayer could actually bring about God’s will? 

Some seem to see the purpose of life as an inward exercise of shaping our souls and spirits through trials and tribulations managed or caused by God for our personal benefit.  I see the purpose of life as bringing God’s Kingdom to the world and God’s will to be done.  When we do that, we will see trials and tribulations brought about by those who would try to keep us from doing our job, and our spiritual growth comes from our overcoming the obstacles that hinder the spread of the Kingdom.

But I think to say that God’s will is always done doesn’t square with Jesus telling us to pray for this every time we pray.  That would also mean that every evil thing done in the world, every murder, every rape, every disease, every war, every person sold into slavery was God’s will, and I don’t think that is even close to the truth.  We are here to change all that.  Nobody said it would be easy.

There are two times in the Bible, I believe, when a prayer to change things wasn’t answered:  Jesus’ prayer in the garden and Paul’s prayer about his thorn. 

But Jesus knew what God’s will was before He even prayed.  He knew the best thing for everybody was for Him to go forward with the plan about His death.  But that still didn’t make it any easier.  So we get to hear His struggle.  This is not meant to get us to doubt whether God will answer any of our prayers because there is always the possibility that this thing wouldn’t be God’s will.  We have this thousand page book to tell us about God and His will, and we should have a pretty good idea of what God would want even before we start to pray.

As for Paul, God told him right from the start that he was going to go through all kinds of junk, and he too prayed to get out of it.  People raise a lot of questions about this thorn in the flesh, and I spent 5 chapters in my book on healing talking about it.  So if you want more information on that, please read my book, The Importance of Healing or go to my blogsite Theimportanceofhealing.blogspot.com, where I have all those chapters posted.

Then the prayer says: Give us this day our daily bread. 

First we need to look at this expression ‘daily bread.’  This is clearly a reference to the story of the manna in the Old Testament.  The Israelites spent 40 years wandering in a wilderness prior to their being brought to a land that God had promised them.  Every morning God would send a wafer-like substance on the ground as food for them.  They had to go out and collect it every morning.  They couldn’t keep it for the next day.  It would spoil, except on the sixth day when it would keep for another day, so they wouldn’t have to go out to get it on the seventh day, the Sabbath.  And they had to get it early in the morning before the sun got hot, otherwise it would melt.  

If they didn’t go out, they wouldn’t have any. 

So Jesus says that we are to pray for our daily bread.  We are supposed to do this every day.  And I would say also early in the day.

But what if we don’t pray for it?  Will we still receive it?  If we will get it anyway, why would He tell us to pray for it?  If it doesn’t matter whether we pray for our daily bread, why would Jesus include this petition in a prayer meant to teach us how to pray?  If the Israelites had to go out and get their daily bread early in the morning every day if they wanted to have some for the day, why would it be so hard to think that God wouldn’t expect the same for us today?

The disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray.  And He does, implying that learning how to pray makes a difference.  And what does He say? 

He says that we need to pray every day for our daily bread, early in the morning.  And if we don’t, will we still get it?  Well, we live in America, where when we have a drought, the price of bread may go up 20¢. 

But what if we don’t get it, would that be God’s will for us?  After all, He told us to pray for it every day.  And why would He do that if it didn’t matter if we prayed for it or not?

And if He told us to pray for it, we should expect that we will receive it.  And if we don’t pray for it, well, don’t be surprised if you don’t get it, and don’t say it was God’s will that you didn’t.  Because He told you to pray for it.

Is God being petty?  Maybe prayer isn’t like a picture of God sitting on a throne hearing our petitions and deciding whether or not to grant them.  Maybe prayer itself is what unleashes the answer, like writing a check or cashing a check releases the money, and it isn’t the bank deciding to grant our request for money.

Now over the years of praying this prayer, I have learned to be specific, such that I pray for my family, my health, my house, my car, my job, all kinds of things, and a lot of other people as well.  First thing in the morning. 

Now there is a petition further down that says: deliver us from evil.  I know that the modern English translations read this as ‘deliver us from the Evil One.’  Out of context, it can be translated either way, but the idea of a general deliverance or protection from evil itself is found a number of times in the Old Testament and would certainly cover the idea of the Evil One at the same time, while limiting the prayer to the Evil One would seemingly allow for evil not caused by him.  So praying for deliverance from evil is quite consistent with other passages in the Bible.

And Psalm 91, which is one of those Old Testament passages, had already been referred to in both Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels before Jesus taught us this prayer.  

So we have already established that we are supposed to pray this prayer every day and early in the day before the sun gets hot.  So every day early in the day we are supposed to pray for protection from evil.  Before the fact.

So what if we don’t pray for it?  Might we experience evil that God never intended for us to experience?  After all, He told us to pray to be delivered from it.  Why would He tell us to pray to be delivered from evil if it wouldn’t matter whether we prayed for it or not?

Now if we don’t pray for protection from evil and we experience it, could we say that this was God’s will?  He already told us to pray that we wouldn’t.  If Jesus tells us to do something, let’s just do it.  This is certainly one of the easiest things He told us to do.

As I said before, I have learned to be very specific here.  I don’t just pray every day for my health and the health of my family.  If they have had specific issues before, I will specifically mention those areas.  I pray, as I said, for our house, our property, our cars, my job, a lot of other people, and other things as well.

I have an entire chapter about this in a book that I wrote about this prayer.  The book is called The Importance of the Lord’s Prayer, and you can find the chapter on my blog, LarrysBibleStudies.blogspot.com. 

Now after telling us specifically things that we should pray for and how often we should be praying these things, Jesus tells us a little bit about what to expect when we pray.

First of all, He is very emphatic in telling us to expect to receive the things we ask for.  I believe Christians have grown very skeptical here.  They seem to be forever cautioning people from, first, even thinking they know what to pray for, and, secondly, that we will actually receive it.  Every prayer requires an if-it-be-Thy-will attached to it, to explain why the prayer wasn’t answered and to serve as a subtle rebuke for presuming to know what God’s will is in the first place. 

But Jesus is quite insistent that we should believe God for what we ask.  Just like our regular parents, which Jesus uses to prove His point.  We keep thinking that we will ask for things that God will refuse to give us, because a) obviously we have no idea what we are asking for, and b) God’s will for us is so different from anything we would imagine that we might wonder if we should even pray at all.

But Jesus tells us a story to show us what prayer will often look like, a picture we just don’t see anywhere.

He tells a story about a man who went to a friend’s house in the middle of the night to borrow food.  This may seem strange to us, but this was not so strange at that time in that culture.  The man had a guest who came to him late at night, and he needed to take care of him.  And this was a very serious matter in that culture.  You don’t scrimp on company.

Now for that friend to get up and give this man anything, he would have to disturb his entire family as well as a lot of his animals who would all be sleeping.  Their houses were not like ours.  If he got up, everybody would wake up. 

But because of this man’s shamelessness by coming in the middle of the night, he gets up and gives him what he wants.  The word used here for shamelessness is often translated as persistence, but that is only implied, because the man in the house told him to stop bothering him.  And he didn’t.  Call it shameless persistence.

Some Bible scholars believe that this story contrasts the man in the house with God, because God is far more willing to answer our prayers than he was.  But that is not what Jesus is saying here, because immediately after He says that this man will get up and give the other man however much he wants, He says quite emphatically that we should keep asking, keep seeking, and keep knocking. 

The fact is that the answers to our prayers may not come as quickly as we would like.

When you pray for something, how long do you wait before you decide that God has answered your prayer?  A day, a week, a month, a year?  And then what do you do?  Do you say that whatever happened or didn’t happen was God’s will?  The point is that what appears to be a no may not be a no at all.  Prayer may often require the persistence of a person who is not going to be denied.

That man in the story who went to his friend’s house at midnight was not going to return home without getting what he came for.  Perhaps the big difference between that man and us is that that man knew what he needed and wouldn’t take no for an answer, and we easily find ourselves questioning whether the thing we are praying for really is God’s will or not.

A lot of Christians will hear/read this and think that I am encouraging whiny, selfish prayers and people who think they can tell God what to do, like God is supposed to serve us and not we serving Him.

Yet look again at the petitions in the prayer that Jesus gave us.  Grammatically speaking, they’re all imperatives, which means a command. 

Some are third person commands, like Let your Name be hallowed, let your kingdom come, let your will be done.  This is like when God said “Let there be light.’  He wasn’t asking anybody to turn on the lights.  He just commanded it to be done, and His word brought it about.

And the rest are second person imperatives, like: Give us today our daily bread, forgive us our trespasses, and deliver us from evil.  These are not requests like we often ask people if they would please pass the salt, or maybe they could loan us five dollars.  Not even a please in sight.  Just one person telling another person to do something.   There is no uncertainty here about the outcome or the willingness of the person to do what is said.  No one is being asked anything here.

I think we often misunderstand how life works.  I think a lot of Christians look at the world and think of God orchestrating its every move.  They call it the sovereignty of God.  I would say that, while the natural order of things shows God’s handiwork, the human side of life is a complete mess, and God expects Christians to jump in and try to change things.

The fact is we live our lives every day, making hundreds of decisions without asking God in every single case what His will is.   And when we pray for something, it is generally something that we would do anyway if we could.  So to see God’s will as a constant deal breaker is inconsistent with how we live the rest of our lives

Yet there are a lot of things that we don’’t know what is best, things that any wise person would want God to show us what the best thing is and to lead us when we don’t know what to do or where to go.

And I have no doubt that if we pray for something that is stupid, wrong, shortsighted, or that would keep or distract us from something bigger and better that God wants to do for us, if we are paying attention, I am sure God will let us know.

But why the need for this shameless persistence?   Is God playing games with us?  In the book of Daniel, it tells of a time when Daniel prayed with fasting for something for three weeks before the answer came.  Daniel was then told explicitly that the answer to his prayer was held up because of opposition in the spirit world.  It does not say what would have happened if Daniel had stopped praying.  Would the answer still have come?  We don’t know.

Jesus doesn’t come out and say why this possible need for shameless persistence, and I am not even sure that we need to know why.  But we do need to know that we shouldn’t be surprised if or when we find ourselves praying for something that shows no signs of changing.  The truth is that we should not take that as a sign that this is not God’s will, that things shouldn’t change or wouldn’t change.

We need to look again at what we are praying for and, if the need is still the same and we haven’t received any word from God to the contrary, then we need to knock a little louder.  Like we mean it.

No, God’s not deaf or hard of hearing.  Maybe He’s not even the one who needs to hear us.  But Jesus told us that prayer may often require a will and persistence that just won’t quit.

There is a story in the Bible about a man named Jacob.  He was returning home after 20 years.  He left because his brother was planning to kill him.  He had no idea what to expect, and he was afraid.  On the night before he was to meet his brother, the text says that he was alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.   

Who was this man?  In another text, it says that Jacob wrestled with an angel.  Jacob looking back on what had just happened said that he had seen God face to face. 

They wrestled all night.  At daybreak, the man told Jacob to let him go.  Jacob said that he would not let the man go until the man blessed him.  And the man did.  And he even gave Jacob a new name: Israel.  And Jacob became the father of a new nation by that name.  The name means God will strive, or God will contend, but it was given to Jacob, because “you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed.”

The question is: is this just some nice story about a man who had an encounter with God, or is this meant to teach us something important about God and our relationship with Him?  

Compare this with the story that Jesus just told about prayer.  In both cases you have a person who will not take no for an answer.  Christians commonly see this as a person telling God what to do.  I don’t think God sees it that way or even sees that as a bad thing. 

But Jesus said that prayer can be like going to a friend’s house in the middle of the night.  It takes a sense of urgency that overrides any sense of propriety.  If you are praying for something that you just have to have, until God clearly shows you something else, don’t let up.  Don’t quit. 

And as I said earlier, I didn’t say this was the only lesson on prayer you will ever need, just the most important.