Thoughts on Prayer I - The Right Motivation

I filled in for our Sunday School teacher again the other day and I thought I would make more than one blog post out of the lesson this time. The topic is a very important and also a very practical one--prayer.

I chose the topic as a challenge to me both because I do not pray often enough and also because I have lots of thoughts on prayer which would be beneficial to others if I were to actually coalesce them and present them in an orderly and challenging fashion. This I attempted to do last Sunday and this I will attempt to do here.

I am the worst example when it comes to faith because, while I easily presume upon God's goodness, I am often way too confident in self to actually depend upon God, or recognize the fact that I do. I suffer from a self-deluding conceit. I know as a concept that I depend upon God for everything (as does the entirety of the universe) but in practice I am far too often deluded by self-sufficiency. To a degree all of us are this way (though hopefully you are not as bad as me). This is why God often brings problems into our lives which are beyond our ability to solve. These problems remind us of our need for him.

Back to prayer. If we are going to learn to pray or how or what to pray, the first place we should go is to Christ. This is what the disciples of Jesus did as recorded by St. Luke in Luke's gospel chapter 11:

Luke 11:1 Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”

John had taught his disciples to pray in a unique way as his disciples. Jesus's disciples want to know if Jesus has something similar for them--something unique as his disciples.

This is where our ears should perk up. What Jesus is about to teach is not just for them, but also for us, for we are his disciples as well. How should we pray? What should we pray? How often should we pray? How long should our prayers be? All these questions and more will be answered in this passage and in its cousin passage in Matthew 6. Let's look there now.

Matthew 6:5,6 “And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

First a few quick lessons.

(1) Prayer is not for our own glory. It is not a religious exercise designed to make us look good before others. This type of prayer is not prayer at all, it is pretense. The key phrase is, "to be seen of others." Here Jesus condemns the motivation, not so much the action. Motive is everything.
(2) Private prayer is more important than public prayer. There is a place for public prayer, but as Christians we also need a place for regular private communion with God.
(3) There is a real, heart-felt, genuine faith that motivates us to pray and commune with God. This faith, which comes from God, is the faith that will be rewarded by God.

In the Sermon on the Mount, which is quoted above from Matthew's gospel, Jesus is addressing an audience of self-righteous people. This is why he emphasizes true religious exercise over pretense. He is both teaching about prayer and also condemning their self-righteousness. But over in Luke 11 we have a private scene between Jesus and his disciples and in that passage nothing about the pretense is mentioned, presumably because the sincerity of the disciples was evident in their question.

"Lord, teach us to pray."

Personalize that. I challenge you. Make it your prayer, right now. "Lord, teach me to pray." Both the desire to pray and the knowledge of how to pray correctly come from God.