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The Disciple’s Prayer, Part 3

Sermon by Rev. Doug Pratt — November 30, 2008
 

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One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.”
²He said to them, “When you pray, say:
            “ ‘Father, hallowed be your name,
                  your kingdom come.
            ³Give us each day our daily bread.
            ⁴Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive
                  everyone who sins against us.
            And lead us not into temptation.’ ” (Luke 11:1-4)

Introduction
Dave and Harry were having a few beers at the corner pub after work one day. After a little lubrication they started to get into an argument and insult one another. At one point Harry said to Dave, “You’re nothing but a no-good atheist. You never go to church. Why, I’ll bet you can’t even say The Lord’s Prayer.”

“I can, too,” Dave protested.

Harry whipped out a $20 bill from his wallet, slapped it on the bar, and said “Prove it. It’s yours if you can say it.”

“Alright, you’ve got a bet,” Dave replied. He wrinkled his brow in deep thought for a moment, then began in a tentative voice, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep...”

“Doggone it,” Harry muttered, as he walked away from the bar. “I didn’t think he knew it.”

In spite of the poor memories of those two barflies, the fact is that most Americans who have been raised with any kind of church participation or even cultural awareness have probably managed to memorize what we commonly call The Lord’s Prayer. The majority of us here today have heard and even recited this prayer hundreds of times. It’s so familiar that we can take it for granted, and it can easily lose its meaning. This prayer, derived from our scripture text for today, is probably the most frequently-spoken portion of the Bible—more so, even, than the 23rd Psalm (The Lord is my Shepherd…). And our brains have a tendency to switch into “auto-pilot” when the familiar words are heard.

This is the third and final message based on this well-known prayer we are calling The Disciple’s Prayer. Learning how to talk with God in a way that really connects and communicates is not something that comes easily or naturally. It requires effort, concentration, some guidance and assistance from others, and time to master it.

Into Uncharted Territory
The history of Christian missionaries is quite an exciting and inspiring one. Though today we have thousands of Americans who are serving God in other countries—sometimes in very challenging and even dangerous situations—the hardships are nothing compared to what they were centuries ago, when the very first missionaries went into truly uncharted territory.

One of them, whose biography I read not long ago, was named Adoniram Judson. In 1812, he and his wife Anne boarded a sailing ship in Salem, Massachusetts and set off on a long journey to distant southeast Asia.

They first landed in Calcutta, then traveled on to Burma as the first Christians in that country. When they moved into a house in Rangoon, they began intensive study of the Burmese language. For 12 hours each day the two of them labored to master these strange sounds and characters. Burmese is a devilishly hard language for westerners to learn to read or speak. All the letters are strung together without a break for words or punctuation. The vowel sounds are tonal and difficult for our ears to distinguish. And to make their study even more challenging, the Judsons’ teacher was an old Hindu who spoke not one word of English! But at last, after months of effort, the language began to make sense to them. Some of you who have mastered other languages understand the process first-hand

.

Learning to Pray
Learning how to pray is a bit like learning a new language. It’s a spiritual language that doesn’t come naturally to any of us. We have to learn the principles of its grammar, we have to hear it being spoken by others to grasp its rhythms and cadences, and we have to work at it ourselves—just as if we were trying to learn Burmese or Spanish or Japanese or Swahili. If you ever feel inadequate or self-conscious because it doesn’t seem easy or natural for you to pray, don’t worry about it. It’s not easy for anyone! It’s a second language that all humans have to learn. But the time devoted to it will always pay off.

Even the 12 disciples in the New Testament—those men we revere today as St. Peter and St. John and St. Andrew, whose names we attach to churches and hospitals and universities and cities, whom we see etched in stained glass and admire as spiritual giants—even those guys struggled to learn how to talk with God. That is why we find them, in our text for today from Luke 11, going to Jesus to ask Him for a “language” lesson: Lord, teach us to pray. What Jesus gives, in these well-known words of the Lord’s Prayer [or the Disciple’s Prayer] is really “Prayer 101”—the basic foundational principles for developing genuine, honest and effective communication with God.

Last Sunday we looked carefully at the first half of this outline or model for prayer, and we discovered that it is focused on God—who He is, and what the foundation of our relationship with Him is. It’s appropriate that we start our prayers in that way.

Sharing our Life with God
In the second half of the Disciple’s Prayer the focus shifts to our own situation, our needs and concerns. By encouraging us to pray about our own needs, Jesus assures us that God cares very much about us, and about every aspect of our lives. In fact, the three dimensions of time are all covered in these short petitions. When we pray, “Give us this day…,” we are bringing the needs of the present to God. When we ask Him to “forgive us” we are seeking His healing touch upon our past. And when we ask Him to “lead us” we are praying about our future. Present, past and future: they are all appropriate to talk with the Lord about. What a fantastic comfort this should be to us to know that our Spiritual Father wants to share in every detail of our lives. Nothing is unimportant or insignificant to Him.

Our natural tendency is to go it alone, to try to handle everything in our own wisdom and strength and resourcefulness. But every one of us discovers at times that life is bigger than we are, and more complex and difficult to handle than we are equipped. How reassuring it is to hear in the Bible that we are not alone, and we don’t have to try to handle everything in our own strength. The Lord is with us, right here, waiting for us to give Him access to our needs. When we neglect His help, we are missing out on a great source of blessing. As the words of the classic hymn, What a Friend We Have in Jesus, put it:

Oh, what peace we often forfeit; oh, what needless pain we bear;
All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

A Christian author tells about a fall afternoon when he and his 6-year-old son went into the woods behind their Vermont home to cut some firewood for the winter. The father had been swinging his axe to reduce some trees to logs, and he planned to haul them back home to their yard to split them there. Each log must have weighed 40 or 50 pounds. At the end of the cutting the father took a break from loading the logs on the wagon. He watched with amusement as his son, wanting to emulate dad, tried mightily to lift one of the logs and wrestle it onto the wagon. For several minutes he tried, grunting and sweating, laboring with all his might. But the load was just too heavy. Finally, he turned in exasperation and said to his father, “Dad, will you help me?”

“Of course, son,” the father replied. “I was just waiting for you to ask.”

How often we must look like that little boy: trying to do it all ourselves while God our Father waits patiently by our side for us to turn to Him and say, “Dad, will you help?” Prayer is giving God access to our needs.

Let’s look, then, at the three categories of things that Jesus encourages us to pray for: the Present, the Past and the Future.

The Present (Give us each day our daily bread)
The first petition, for our daily bread, really encompasses all our human needs. We are invited to share with God our needs in every area: health and our bodies; our families, spouse and children; our jobs and our financial situation; our homes and our possessions. God cares about every part of our lives, large and small. At times, He meets our needs directly; at other times, our needs are met by the gifts and talents He has given us and the other people He brings into our lives to assist us. Ultimately, all of life and its blessings do come from Him.

Notice the little word “daily” that Jesus slipped into the Disciple’s Prayer. It reminds us that our relationship of prayer and dependence on God is not something we do once-for-all, but something that is a regular and daily reality. All of us come to crisis moments when we feel “at the end of our rope” and cry out to the Lord for His help. But He wants us to build into our regular routine the daily discipline of talking with Him and presenting our needs to Him.

What about praying for our “wants” as well as our “needs”? Most of us are blessed with far more abundance than we require for survival. It’s appropriate to share with God our wants and dreams and desires. But He is not the mythical genie in Aladdin’s lamp, obligated to grant all our wishes. At times God does grant to us the fulfillment of dreams. But sometimes He says “No” to our desires—the way a loving parent sometimes has to say no to his or her child. Sometimes God tells us to be patient, to keep waiting and praying. And sometimes God’s response to our desires and requests is to change our attitudes and values—helping us to become content with our circumstances.

No matter what answers we get today or tomorrow to our requests, we need to keep on praying, “Give us each day our daily bread.”

The Past (Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us)
When we turn from the present to the past, we all find that in our closets there are skeletons of which we are ashamed. And so, just as the body’s greatest need is for the “bread” of daily nourishment, so the greatest need of the guilty conscience is forgiveness. What a wonderful gift of our Father this is, to be able to confess our sins and have them washed away.

Forgiveness is essential to maintaining a healthy relationship with the Lord. Every time we disobey Him, it is as if we lay another concrete block on a wall that separates us from the Lord. If we let a long time go by, the number of blocks can rise to eye-level and beyond—and we feel far away from the Lord. We also feel ashamed whenever we think of God, and find ourselves trying to avoid Him completely. When we confess and ask His forgiveness, we are putting a stick of dynamite under that wall and blowing it up. Forgiveness is what clears the way between us and our Father, and what relieves the burden of our conscience.

Not only does Jesus teach us to ask for forgiveness for ourselves, He also teaches us to give forgiveness to others. That is the natural response of a heart that has been touched by God’s grace.

Yet there are times when we struggle to forgive. We want to hold on to the bitterness or hurt others have caused us. When we refuse to forgive, however, the consequences are significant. It can keep us shackled to the past, stuck in our feelings about something that happened and cannot be undone. I believe that’s why Jesus couples the receiving of God’s forgiveness with the granting of forgiveness to others: both of them are essential for us to be truly free from the past and free to move on.

It is neither our right nor within our power to punish another person and seek perfect justice. That is up to God. If you have been struggling with this area of forgiving another person, you might find the current novel The Shack (by William P. Young) to be of great help. It tells one person’s journey from hatred to forgiveness—a journey Jesus invites all of us to take, for our own happiness and completion.

The Future (Lead us not into temptation)
The final petition of the Disciple’s Prayer looks ahead to tomorrow. And it is a prayer that God might guide us into His path and protect us from straying. It is a prayer for victory over the temptations that come from the devil, the enticements of the material world around us, and our own selfish desires.

We are so fortunate in our times to have a wealth of help available to us. We have the written Holy Scriptures, Old and New Testaments, to help “lead us not into temptation.” We are blessed by wonderful books and teachers, friends and counselors to give us their wisdom. The Spirit of God lives inside every Christian and whispers His guidance to us with His “still, small voice” in our minds and consciences. And I believe no temptation that comes to us is ever irresistible, if we turn to the Lord for His help. God will always show us the way out. When we sincerely pray about our tomorrows—”Lord, lead me in the right paths and away from the wrong and dangerous ones”—and when we are willing to follow where He leads us, then our way will be the right one: the narrow path that leads to a fulfilling and joyful life.

Conclusion
We have taken a brief look this morning at the final portion of the great Disciple’s Prayer. We have discovered that Jesus calls us to open our lives to the Father who loves us, to do so daily, and to share with Him openly all our needs in the present, the past and the future. The only way to learn how to pray like this is to practice it, to try it, to keep on at the task—even if at times we feel so inadequate.

Here’s a touching true story from the early days of the 20th century. A little girl named Emily had just begun to take piano lessons. She tried hard and practiced faithfully, but her skills weren’t developing very quickly. At times Emily got frustrated by her inability to make the notes on the page come out of the piano correctly. One day her parents saw a notice in the newspaper that the great Polish pianist Jan Paderewski was coming to their city to perform a recital. They quickly purchased tickets for themselves and their daughter, hoping that Emily would be encouraged in her practicing by hearing the great master.

When the night of the concert came, the sell-out crowd jammed the auditorium, facing a stage that was bare except for a beautiful grand piano that waited silently to be played. In the crush of the crowd, Emily became separated from her parents. They looked all over for her, to no avail, when suddenly they caught sight of her walking onto the stage. She went right up to the piano, sat down at it, and began to play Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. The parents cringed in embarrassment, and the audience grew awkwardly silent as she continued to play.

Then suddenly Paderewski himself slipped onto the stage. Coming up softly behind the little girl, he wrapped his long arms around her to reach the keys and whispered in her ear, “Don’t stop. Keep playing. Don’t stop. Keep playing.” And then his hands began to run up and down the keys, adding a rich and incredible impromptu harmony to that little melody the girl kept plunking. Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star had never sounded like that before! The audience roared in delight.

Sometimes we feel about as competent in our prayer lives as little Emily was at the piano keyboard. And at times we’re tempted to give up in frustration or distraction. But Jesus the Great Master wraps His arms around us and whispers into our ears, “Don’t stop. Keep praying.” And He helps us turn our simple prayers into a beautiful symphony to the Father. Not only has our Savior taught us how to pray, He also helps us pray. So don’t stop; keep praying. Take your needs—present, past and future—to your Lord every day.