Life of Prayer - Matthew 6: 5-13

At the center of our life of devotion to God is prayer. It’s our chief way of communicating with the Holy One. The key word being communication. Sadly, most of our prayer lives don’t look anything like a healthy living relationship. Take a moment to think about your prayer life in terms of how you talk with your friends. Does it mortify you? Because it most certainly mortified me. When I talk with my friends there is a lot of talking back and forth. I feel like I need to apologize with God for my prayer life, because up until recently it didn’t look anything like a healthy conversation. It was me. Talking. A lot. I was like the energizer bunny, talking really fast, but not listening. Prayer is defined as a relationship with God, and folks, if I had to self-score any relationship that was as one-sided as my relationship with God, I would give it a ‘F’.
For some reason so many of us refuse to listen to God. We either quickly run through our list of requests just to throw them out there and make sure God knows what they are because, well, we’re just too busy for anything else. Or we take prayer and reduce it to a model, such as the ACTS method – making sure to have adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication (or requests) in our daily prayers. Once again pause and think about that in comparassion with your other relationships throughout the day. Are your friends and family feeling cared about if you don’t listen to them? Or don’t follow the line of the present conversation because you have a set method you want to follow or are afraid that what you deem needs to be said will be forgotten.
But even not listening, as detrimental as this is, isn’t as overwhelming among Christians today as not believing God will answer prayers. Beth Moore, a noted author, describes what she heard God saying about her prayer life one day when she wrote, “I sensed God saying, ‘My child, you believe me for so little. Who are you trying to keep from looking foolish, Me or you?;” Brothers and sisters are we believing God for so little even today? Are we putting the breaks down on our prayer life because we are afraid to ask God for big things? Do we only pray for those things that we will expect him to answer, or don’t care if he doesn’t answer. Or worse when we pray for something big do we expect God not to answer at all? And friends, that is a tragedy is the words of John Wesley are true when he said, “It seems that God is limited by our prayer life, that he can do nothing for humanity unless someone asks him.”
Because if we look back at the scripture passage for today, Jesus was teaching his disciple to pray a very big prayer. “Your kingdom come, Your will be done.” Is not exactly as simple a phrase as it comes off our lips being, more times then not. This is Christ telling God, the Most High King, that his Kingdom was the ultimate will of the disciplines. Not their own plans or agendas. But God’s and God’s alone. And let’s face it, if we don’t know the promises of scripture and can’t identify how God has worked for good for us in the past, saying “Your will be done.” Could be very frightening.
I want to just take some time and break down the Lord’s prayer, line by line. Revealing the relevance and power that it holds. The credit that we all so often don’t give it once the words are memorized.
“Our Father, who are it Heaven, Hallowed be your name.” Even in teaching his disciples how to pray Jesus is being controversial as well as teaching a radical lesson. Jewish culture lesson, God’s name was considered to be so holy that it wasn’t even to be spoken out loud, yet here Jesus is taking the name that wasn’t to be spoken and adding this intimate twist to it, by addressing the Most High God as Father. He made God approachable.
When I think of this statement I immediately think back to the book of Exodus. In Exodus 3:5 God told Moses to take off his sandals because he is standing on Holy Ground. As Moses goes on in verse 13 to ask what God’s name is, God responeds, “I am who I am. That is what you are to tell the Israelites, I AM has sent me.” Here God’s holiness was precieved as a boundary between himself and the Israelites. He was so Holy that he didn’t even have a recognizable name. Yet, in the Lord’s prayer, we find that we can have a deep, close relationship with God, and it doesn’t diminish his holiness as the Israelites had feared for so many years.
“Your Kingdom Come, Your will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” When you read the Gospels you see that there is a tension in Jesus’ talk about the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven is present and not yet. All too often we get caught up in the future, and just passively wait for Christ’s return and for him to fix everything. But if are agents of God’s will, we recognize that we have a place in his present kingdom. In the book of Jeremiah, God speaks through the prophet saying “I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness, in the earth for the things I delight in.” If this is the way God loves and if this is what brings him honor, then we should act as he does, pursing justice, righteousness, and mercy fervently. The Church, as the bride of Christ, exists to bring honor to God both now and in the future.
This verse also gives me pause when Christ prays that “Your will be done.” I think very few people pray this and mean it. We pray this, because well we think we should, but really our heart isn’t behind it and we still get upset when things don’t turn out our way. But here’s the thing. God will never do anything that isn’t in our best interest. We need to trust in this. When we let our own will supercede God’s will we are settling for second best. And we shouldn’t want to settle.
Personally in my life, I have been challenged by my prayer partner over the past year to commit my prayer time to God and set aside any agenda I have for prayer. Asking the Spirit to lead me to pray what is on His heart. And some really crazy things have happened quite frequently. I’ll be led to pray for people who I have become disconnected from. I have been led to repent of attitudes that were so hidden in my heart that I would never be able to see them on my own. And I’ve been led to pray for circumstances in the lives of those close to me that I didn’t even know were happening. God’s will has superceded my will and I’m being led by him. It is a beautiful time when my heart meshes with the heart of God.
“Give us this day our daily bread.” God has created us with basic needs. We need food, water, and oxygen. And he sustains us by giving us these things. And this little line should take us back, once again to Exodus, causing us to remember God’s pervision as the Israelites wondered in the wilderness for 40 years. He reigned down Mana, a bread like substance, from Heaven and the Isralites were to collect what they communally needed to sustain them for one day. We’ve become such a glutoness, self-centered society. We hoard food and don’t think about the needs of our neighbors. But notice that the word “our” is used in this phrase instead of “my”, therefore, we should be praying for the provision and sustaining of our neighbors as a way to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
“And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.” The power behind this statement is two fold. First it serves as a reminder that we must daily ask God to help us examine our hearts and point out our sins. And we must trust in his forgiveness. For some reasons we tend to cling to guilt of stains that Christ’s blood has long washed away. This examination of our heart also lets us fully give our sins over to Christ and be absolved of them.
The second, and seemingly harder part, of this phrase is probably best explained by Luke in Chapter 6 of his gospel when he says, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged, do not condemn, and you will not be condemened. Fortive and you will be forgiven, give, and it will be given to you.” And he goes on to ask “Can a blind person guide a blind person? Will they both not fall into the pit? A disciple is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully qualified will be like the teacher. Why do you see the speck in your neighor’s eye but do not notice the plank in your own.” Human nature after the fall is to write off our sins, by pointing out the bigger sins of others. Adam blamed Eve. Eve blamed the serpant. God is reminding us that we are not to judge others for their wrongs, but to forgive them time and time again. This takes the humility of being able to identitfy that we are fallen and screw up just like the person who has hurt us. We are all in need of forgiveness, because none of us is more holy then another.
“And lead us not to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.” Life is not easy. No where, and I really mean no where in the Bible does it say that the life of the Christian will be smooth and free of temptations and struggles. But it does promise that God will protect us. I think this is what it boils down to when Christ tells us that we need to have childlike faith. When I am a child, my life is in the hands of my parents and I trust them fully. I trust them not to lead me across the street when traffic is flowing and there is a “Don’t Walk Sign”. And I trust them to recuse me if I do become in danger. But when I become an adult I become independent, thinking that I can do everything on my own, even if this is not the case. I don’t ask for help and in my stubbornness I try to defeat the things that far too grand for me. I trust no one but myself. Childlike faith calls us to dependance, and we must certinaly depend on God to help us avoid the traps of Satan.
So may we have our eyes opened to a new way of praying. May we talk less and listen more. May we give our relationship with God the attention and honor it deserves. And may we pray big prayers, showing our trust and dependance on God. For our teacher in Christ showed us that God can handle big prayers when he gave us the example of the Lord’s prayer. May we never see the familiar the same again.