why pray J.JOHN
WHY PRAY? It s not just religious people who pray. Even those who say they have no religious faith will, at some time or other, find themselves inclined to pray. Whether simply looking heavenward or exclaiming thank God, people find themselves wanting to plead with a mysterious somebody out there for help in a difficult situation or to give thanks for a good thing that happened or even a bad thing that didn t. The instinct to pray seems to be deep rooted in us human beings. But what exactly is prayer? Is it a repetition of a set formula of words? And who, or even what, do we pray to? For two thousand years, many millions of people have been guided by the teaching of Jesus. In John s Gospel, Jesus made an astonishing statement about Himself and said, I am the way, and the truth and the life (John 14:6). All three claims are relevant to prayer because, Jesus is the way to God. He gives His followers access to God; His death and resurrection clear the way for those who trust in Him to go to God. Jesus is the truth about God. People have speculated widely about God. Jesus, however, knows God in a way that is trustworthy. Indeed, through Jesus we see who God is. Jesus is the life in our relationship to God. Prayer can sometimes seem formal and dull. Jesus, however, brings energy and reality into it! So when it comes to prayer, we need to go to Jesus for the answers. A man of prayer, He taught His followers to pray. At the heart of His teaching is a prayer, written in the Bible, which is widely known as The Lord s Prayer.
The Lord s Prayer This, then, is how you should pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. The Lord s Prayer can be found in the book of Matthew, in chapter 6, verses 9 13. Dividing The Lord s Prayer into seven parts helps us understand it more clearly. If you would like to know more about prayer, how to pray and the benefits of praying, you might find it useful to try reading one of the following parts each day over the next week.
Our Father IN HEAVEN 1 THE RIGHT APPROACH According to Jesus, prayer is fundamentally about a relationship. Those who have come to know God through Jesus can relate to God as Father and on that basis prayer is quite simply communicating within that family relationship. It is talking to God using either spoken or unspoken words. This opening phrase helps us understand what prayer means. To call God Father is to accept that God is a person, not a program or a force. And as He is a person, a relationship with Him is possible. Indeed, the big story of the Bible centres on the idea of relationship. In the beginning, human beings broke a perfect relationship with God by rebelling against Him. In Jesus, God was able restore that broken relationship. The logic is simple. The Bible teaches us that by putting our faith in Jesus we become part of God s family (see the Bible passages: Galatians 4:5, Romans 8:15 and Ephesians 1:5) and as such we have the right to address God as Father. Prayer is all about a family relationship.
The word Father, however, also goes deeper: it refers to God s desire to love us as the perfect parent. All human fathers and mothers fall short of God s perfect pattern, some disastrously so. Yet that needn t stop us from understanding that in the word Father God is saying that He loves us deeply, that He can always be trusted and that He wants the best for us. Some people think of prayer as being like a negotiation: we promise to do little things in the hope that God will do big things in our lives, but (fortunately for us) that isn t how being a Father works. What is more, we need to hold on to that little phrase in heaven. Three ideas should grip us: The first is reality: heaven is not something far off, fragile and transparent but instead heaven is the reality that lies behind the universe we see. The second is authority: because heaven is the place where God is, it is the place of awesome and irresistible power. What heaven says, happens. The third word is purity: heaven is about holiness and goodness. It is an evil-free zone. In The Lord s Prayer, every word counts and the word our in this opening certainly does. It is at the very heart of relationship. The purpose of prayer is that we know God and can say, He is my God. And that s a great basis to start prayer on.