“Lord, teach us to pray”

In Matthew 6, the disciples of Jesus make the request, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Their request reveals something critical about prayer, namely that our practice of prayer comes out of the context of relationship. Prayer is conversation with God. Whether you’re praying on your own, with friends, or even in a large group, prayer remains primarily a vertical conversation between you and God. In prayer we enter into the intimacy of a relationship built over the course of our journey of faith and through the act of prayer that relationship grows ever deeper.

This is why I can’t/won’t mourn the loss of the Lord’s Prayer in our school system or engage in debates about keeping the Lord’s Prayer as part of government meetings. Prayer should sound strange or even weird in a society that worships individual autonomy, freedom, and detachment. Prayer should feel out of place in a culture that pressures us to live as though there is no tradition or larger narrative, and that we are accountable to nothing outside of the self. Does this mean that we shouldn’t pray for or even with government leaders, teachers, students, or even the general public? Of course not! In fact we should be bold in our prayer for the world around us fervently asking God to move. But in prayer we are ourselves undergoing change – being transformed as Paul says, “Into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)

When we pray, we are making ourselves vulnerable before God and inviting the Holy Spirit to speak into our needs and also to bring change where needed. For example in the Lord’s Prayer – a prayer that many people, even people who know little about faith in Christ can likely pray – we keep being confronted by the oddness, the radical nature of learning to pray as Jesus taught us. When we speak the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to pray and further begin to nurture a life of prayer, our lives are being bent towards God in a way that we are not naturally inclined to do.

So what if we would regularly take the posture of the disciples and ask, “Lord, teach us to pray”? Together, let’s allow the activity of prayer to bend us towards the Father and let’s be prepared for the how the Holy Spirit might challenge and change us along the way.

(Adapted from an article I wrote for the Listowel Banner, January 30, 2015)