Jesus’ disciples ask him to teach them to pray. They are alert to the fact that John the Bsptist had done this with his disciples. It’s fascinating that these young men, stepped in the worship and Scripture of Israel with their access to Psalms, Lamentations and the intercessions of Daniel and Nehemiah needed help.
I asked a group the other day what they found hard about prayer. Apart from all the practical stuff about staying awake, knowing what to say, feeling like you are talking to yourself, I got two particularly insightful answers.
- “I find it hard to pray because it is hard to ask”
- “I find it hard to pray because it is hard to say sorry.
We then talked about why those two things are hard. Responses to the first included that it’s hard to know if it’s okay to ask, is this just selfish? Our requests can feel insignificant against the big things in the world. What if we do not receive what we asked for? We also talked about how we want to be self reliant. Just as we don’t want to be dependent on other people, the same can be true with God. Saying sorry is similarly hard because it is humbling. Also, some people admitted to struggling to know if the things they felt guilty of were sin or not.
We then moved to talking about Luke 11:1-13 and the clues it gives us to help us to keep on praying when we find prayer hard.
First, Jesus tells us to pray to “our father”. God is the true and better father and so, if even weak, failing human dads can manage to not give their children bad things when they ask for the basics of life, even more so, we can trust in God’s goodness.
Secondly, Jesus tells us that the father is “in heaven” (in Matthew’s version) and that he is “holy.” All of our prayers are to the Holy Father in heaven. This is the context for our requests,“ give us our daily bread” and our repentance “forgive us as we forgive them.” If God is in heaven and holy, then this points to his supreme power and authority as well as his complete otherness. God is near or imminent but he is also transcendent.
In other words, we pray to the Father who loves us. We pray because God is good and we pray to the holy one in heaven. We pray because God is great. He is all powerful, unchanging, eternal, infinite. The primary reason we can pray when it is hard, is God’s character. It is because he is both good and great that we can trust in him.
Faithroots 