The Lord's Prayers

This is the message given in the Wheatland Parish on Sunday, September 8, 2013.  The Bible verses used are John 17:1-25 and Luke 11:1-4.

Welcome to a new sermon series, “The Power of Prayer”.  We are going to talk about things like why it is that we pray, what our attitude should be when we pray, and what we expect to happen when we pray.

In starting this sermon series out, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what Jesus said when he prayed.  And what I found out is that there are very few instances in which Jesus' prayers are recorded for us in the Bible.  The one we read today, from the gospel of John, is one of the few times we have one of Jesus' prayers written down.  Now, we know Jesus prayed.  In fact, we know Jesus prayed a lot.  But when we read about that, we usually read things like, “and Jesus went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.”  “Jesus withdrew to a lonely place and prayed.”  Jesus prayed, but he usually prayed by himself, not with a crowd.

And it struck me, too, that when we read the few public prayers Jesus prayed, like the one we read today, they read more like speeches than like prayers.  I think there's a reason for that.  I think Jesus knew that people were listening, that people would be paying attention, and that people would remember what he said.  That does not make Jesus' prayers invalid or anything.  Jesus was still praying to the Father.  It's just that he knew there was an additional audience.

I suspect—there's no way to know—that this may have altered the way he prayed.  Now, Jesus still meant everything he said, and he still wanted the Father to hear everything he said.  It's just that most of us pray differently when we pray in public than we do when we pray in private.  I know I do.  There's nothing wrong with that.  Our prayers in public are neither worse nor better than our prayers in private.  They're just different.  It's one thing to pray when we know others can hear us, and it's another to pray when we know whatever we say will stay between us and God.

There's no way to know what it is that Jesus said when he prayed in private.  There had to be something different about it, though, because we're told, in our reading from Luke, that the disciples went up to him and said, “Lord, teach us to pray.”

Now, the disciples had prayed before.  Some of them had been praying all their lives.  Religious Jews of that time had lots of prayers they were supposed to say on various occasions or sometimes just as their day went along.  It's not like praying was some sort of foreign concept to them.

And yet, they asked Jesus to teach them to pray.  Somehow, they must've known that when Jesus prayed, it was different.  There are lots of ways that could've happened.  It could be that they overheard Jesus praying sometimes, and wanted to be able to pray like that.  It could be that even though they couldn't hear Jesus praying, they could see him, and they saw some sort of change come over him when he prayed.  It could be that they neither heard nor saw Jesus pray, but when he came back from praying, they could see there was something different about him.  They could see that he had a sense of peace, or a sense of purpose, or something that had changed, and they wanted to have that, too.

Whatever it was that they saw, they could tell Jesus' prayers had power, a power that the prayers they'd said their whole lives did not have.  And they wanted that.  They wanted their prayers to have that same power Jesus' prayers had. So they asked him to teach them to pray.  And he did.  Now, the prayer that we've come to call the Lord's Prayer is not exactly the way Luke quotes it.  For one thing, Matthew has a slightly different version, and we've incorporated that.  We've also added a last line, a concluding sentence that was common to prayers back then.  Still, the prayer that we pray now is very much in the spirit of what Jesus told his disciples to pray.

We pray the Lord's Prayer every week.  It's a good prayer to pray.  Well, I mean, Jesus taught it to us.  What, I'm going to stand here and tell you it's not a good prayer?  Of course it's a good prayer.  We should pray it every week.  We should probably pray it every day.  And it can have a lot of power.

But here are a couple of things about the Lord's Prayer.  For one thing, it's really short.  Even in the longer version that we pray, it only takes about thirty seconds.  Now, that's not a bad thing.  After all, Jesus told us not to wear God out with a bunch of words.  It's not wrong to pray a short prayer.  Not at all.

The thing is, though, that because it's so short, and because we pray it so often, and because many of us have heard it and prayed it so many times that we know it by heart, a lot of times we don't really think about the Lord's Prayer.  Sometimes we do, but a lot of times we don't.  We pray it kind of a perfunctory way.  We say it by rote.  I know I do that sometimes.  We don't put any thought into it, and we don't put any effort into it.  And so, as good the Lord's Prayer is, there are times it does not do us much good to pray it.  There's not much power in prayer when our hearts are not into our prayers.

If we want our prayers to do us any good, if we want our prayers to have power, if we want them to have the effect on us that Jesus' prayers had on him, we need to put some effort into them.  We need to put some thought into them.  Not every time we pray, necessarily.  It's okay to pray some quick prayers, too, depending on the situation.  But sometimes we need to spend some time with God.  We need to spend enough time with God that we can get past the perfunctory platitudes that we're tempted to pray and really tell God what's in our minds and in our hearts.

I always go back to Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane.  We've talked about this before, but we're told Jesus was praying so hard that he was sweating.  And we're not just talking minor perspiration here, either.  We're told he was sweating so hard that his sweat fell to the ground in huge drops.

Now that's praying.  That's a prayer that has power.  And that's what we need to do.  It's fine to pray the Lord's Prayer, but what we really need to do is follow the Lord's prayers.  We need to pray the way Jesus did.  Again, not every time.  We cannot do that every time, and we don't need to do it every time.  But there are times when we do.  There are times when we need to put all of ourselves into our prayers.  There are times when we need to completely open ourselves up to God.  There are times when we need to be completely honest and open with God.

We cannot do that in thirty seconds.  We may not be able to do it in thirty minutes.  We cannot do it by simply saying words we memorized when we were kids.  Just saying words without thinking about them, without paying attention to what the words mean, is not really praying at all.  The words are fine, they're good, but there's no magic in them.  They're just words unless we mean them.

You see, prayer involves being conscious of God's presence, of God's love, of God's direction, and of God's grace.  That's why Jesus went off by himself to pray.  That's why Jesus put all of himself into his prayers.  And that's why Jesus' prayers had power.

Again, it's not that we always have to do that.  It's okay to pray for thirty seconds, or even less, if that's all the time we have.  But sometimes we do need to do it.  Because we need to feel God's presence in our lives.  We need to feel God's love in our lives.  We need to feel God directing our lives.  And we need to feel God's grace in our lives.  And we need to take whatever times it takes, and however much effort it takes, in order to do that.

Jesus taught the disciples to pray by giving them words.  But Jesus also taught them to pray by giving them an example.  Jesus taught them to pray by showing them the power prayer can have, both on us and on others.

Jesus continues to teach us to pray.  It's good to use The Lord's prayer.  But it's even better to follow the example of the Lord's prayers.  When we do that, we've taken the first step toward unleashing the power of prayer.