Sermon: Jesus’ teaching on Prayer part 1

Text: Luke 11:1-13
Title: Jesus’ Teaching on Prayer part 1
by Matt Kennedy
July 25th, 2010

Last week Luke answered the question: How do disciples welcome the Lord? Mary was Luke’s model. When Jesus entered her home, she did not do what she’d always done. She didn’t serve as she would’ve normally have served. She didn’t play the role she normally would’ve played. She let drop everything she knew from the past, sat at Jesus’ feet, and let his word define everything—right and wrong, good and evil, what kind of service pleases God and what does not. You welcome the Lord by letting him redefine every aspect of your life, thought, words and deeds. No part of the disciple’s life remains the same, unshaped, unformed, untransformed by the word of God.

Today we’re given one of those rare gospel passages in which the disciples do something right. They follow Mary’s example. They don’t assume that prayer, the prayers they learned in synagogue and from their parents—the way of prayer practiced by their teachers and peers, the way of prayer they’ve always known—will remain the same. Everything else in their lives has changed since they followed Jesus. They understand that the way they pray will, must, also be redefined by their new Lord.

Prayer can be a very frustrating thing. John Macarthur says that when God brings new birth to a sinner, creating a new heart of flesh, drawing him to faith in Jesus Christ, a completely new type of human is created. We may look the same on the outside but inside we’re new creations. And as new people we have two pressing needs that must be satisfied. Just like a newborn baby, needs air in the lungs and milk in the stomach, so a Christian, from the moment of new birth needs prayer and scripture. The word of God is milk. Prayer is breath. We cannot live without either one of them.

It is not that we “should” pray and study scripture, that’s true, but we must pray and study scripture. Not to study scripture, not to hear the word preached and taught, results in the same kind of weakness, confusion, and irrationality to your spirit that comes to your body from not eating. What happens when you don’t eat? If you don’t get food ultimately, you collapse. In the same way, the new life without scripture collapses. Scripture is our food.

Prayer is our breath. Not to pray brings the same kind of pressure and discomfort and difficulty into the believer’s spirit that holding your breath brings to the body. How long can you hold your breath? I can do it for about a minute and then I just have to breath. The believer must pray.

And that’s the rub because most Christians I speak to, myself included, express dissatisfaction with prayer. I wake up early and take about an hour to read my bible and pray. Many times I emerge from that hour without a sense that I’ve communicated with God. I know that I have but I don’t always feel it. On the other hand, when I don’t pray I always feel it. When I go a for any length of time without intentionally communicating with God, I get pent up and frustrated and things start to break down until I realize that I’m not breathing. I haven’t prayed. So the common frustration comes from the fact that we need to pray, its something we desire and long for while at the same time often prayer as we do it does not satisfy the longing.

This morning, let’s join the disciples and set aside what we think we know about prayer, sit at Jesus’ feet and let him teach teach us pray as if we’ve never prayed before.

The text opens with Jesus himself praying which all the gospels record as a prominent feature of Jesus’ earthly life. As a man Jesus is utterly dependent on his Father. He knows that. When he is weary he prays. When he is frightened, he prays. When he needs to make a decision, he prays. When the people in his life need help, he prays.

We’re not told the content of Jesus’ prayer in v. 1. We’re simply told that he is praying in a certain place and when he is finished one of his disciples, speaking on behalf of the rest of his followers makes a request.

“Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”

We do not know how John the Baptist taught his disciples to pray. But we do know that it was common for famous rabbis, and it still is, to teach both an attitude or way of prayer and specific set prayers to their disciples. The set prayers served to differentiate them from followers of other rabbis. They became distinctive, defining, marks of the followers of that particular school of thought. John the Baptist followed this custom, teaching his followers a community defining prayer and way of praying that would have included both a way to approach prayer and some rehearsed or memorized prayers.

Today many Christians believe that prayer must always be spontaneous and unrehearsed in order to be authentic; that true prayer cannot be read and repeated without falling into “vain repetition”. In Matthew 6, Jesus says “When you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words.” (Matthew 6:7). The King James version translates “empty phrases” as “vain repetition.” Many assume that Jesus had in mind all written prayers and all prayers known through memorization—that these necessarily represent the kind of prayers Jesus condemns as empty or vain repetition because when you pray using words that you know from habit, you’re not praying “from the heart.” You’re just repeating words.

It is true that when you’re in the habit of using a prayerbook or reciting set prayers, they can become empty. You can just say the words without meaning them. You can repeat them over and over again with no thought, mindlessly saying words you’ve never cared to understand. And if that is what you do on Sunday morning then, in fact, you’re not praying. You are just heaping up empty phrases. Prayer is communication with God. He’s a living being. You’re addressing him when you pray. Written prayers are not meant to be used as incantations that if said a magical number of times get God to do what you want him to do.
And it’s true that if you only use written or memorized prayers, prayer quickly becomes really weird and impersonal and never produces intimacy with God. How would you feel if your best friend were to invite you over for lunch and instead of speaking to you, he simply pulled out a sheet of paper and started to repeat: “you are my friend. I like you. Please get me a glass of water”...and that’s it for the entire conversation. It’d be annoying and weird. And so if you never depart from the prayerbook or written prayers of some kind then even if you mean what you say it defeats one of the primary purposes and privileges of prayer which is to be in real true, friendship and fellowship with God.

At the same, to keep going with the analogy, its not as if we’d never read something when addressing other human beings. If, for example, I were to address a world leader, a president, a king, someone in high authority, I’d want to be very careful with my words. It’d be handy to have a formal, written way to say what I mean. How much more so with God? There are times, especially when we come together as a body in public, when we want to take care with the words we use to praise God and speak to him because we want to rightly reflect the truths that he has revealed about himself and if we’re just freestyling it all the time, not everything we say will be true, holy, and reverential toward God. We want to honor God in prayer. We want to praise him in spirit and in truth. Written or memorized prayers help us to do that.

The division between Christians who use written prayers and those who do not would’ve been very strange to the disciples because both were an integral part of the prayer life of first century Jewish people. Even today, orthodox Jewish worship is full of rich written liturgical prayers, many of them going back to Jesus’ day and before. Jesus from a very early age would’ve learned by rote prayers that he would’ve repeated every day and every Sabbath in the synagogue.

Luke 4 tells us that Jesus’ custom during his ministry was to attend synagogue on the sabbath where he would’ve necessarily continued the habit of using memorized set prayers and we can be sure that Jesus was not engaging in vain repetition or empty phraseology. (Acts 2:42)

The key to the modern confusion comes from the fact that we tend to equate emotion with sincerity. If I don’t feel it, I don’t mean it. That’s not true. Sincerity comes from your will not your emotions.

When I speak to my mom on the phone, before we hang up, I always say the very same three words. “I love you”. I may not feel them at the moment. I may even feel the opposite, but that doesn’t mean they are not true or that I don’t mean them.  I really do love my mom and I want her to know that even when I don’t feel the feeling love. Meaning words and feeling words are not synonymous.

Written prayers represent nothing more than a way of saying true things, things we mean, things that need to be said that if left to our emotions we may never say to God. They allow us to escape the tyranny of our emotions and praise God as he deserves to be praised.

Jesus would, just like any other Jewish person, have been raised on set, liturgical prayers, but just like any other Jewish person, these prayers would not have inhibited him from praying spontaneously when need or desire or the prompting of the Spirit led him to do so. The two are meant to go hand in hand.

The reason I went through all of this is that the Lord’s prayer, which we have in short form here in Luke 11 and in a longer form in Matthew 6, is given as a set prayer to be said and memorized—notice the command in verse two is to “say” or recite this. It’s true that it is also a model for the way to pray and the types of things to pray for when not saying a set prayer but it is given here as a set prayer to be memorized and said. Both/and not either/or.

What’s beautiful about verses 1-12 is that Jesus teaches a set prayer in vv 2-4 that if used regularly trains the mind and heart to desire and pray for the right things with the right attitude when praying without a prayerbook or without a memorized prayer—the type of praying Jesus has in mind in vv 4-. Jesus teaching on prayer joins formal and informal, memorized and spontaneous prayer together.

Application

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