Personal prayer doesn’t have to be so personal

In a recent post, I claimed that the only truly Christian prayer is the prayer of Christ.  This idea is difficult to grasp, and its implications are not entirely obvious.  Does this mean that I don’t have to pray?  Does it mean that my own efforts are futile?  If Jesus has already done it all, then what exactly is my role?

We tend to think of personal prayer as something we create by ourselves; it should just bubble up from within our souls.  So we begin by composing a prayer to God.  But we don’t hear anything back. We don’t feel much of anything.  We begin to think, “Something is wrong.  I guess I’m not praying hard enough. Gotta get more intense! Gotta get more sincere!” As we try to do better, we continue this process of self-evaluation.  The focus turns inward. Our prayer becomes introspection, a conversation with the self and about the self.

Wikipedia says (and they’re always right, you know) that the most common form of prayer is supplication. Supplication means asking God for favors.  When we supplicate, we focus our attention on what is being sought.  I have heard Christian leaders, some very respectable ones, talk about how important it is to imagine the item you are seeking, to visualize it and brood over it.  The purpose of this brooding is to help yourself believe, because Jesus said in Mark 11:24, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”  Perhaps that is helpful in certain cases, but as general advice it leaves much to be desired.  That doesn’t sound like prayer to me.  It could easily cross the line and veer into idolatry.

Some of us don’t know how to pray because we were never taught.  At some point, personal devotion became just that – a personal matter between me and God – and we were supposed to figure it out on our own.  By default, we modeled our prayers after the verbalized prayers of people around us. That’s very understandable, but those people around us might not have known how to pray either.

The disciples of Jesus confessed that they didn’t know how to pray (Lk 11:1).   This is very curious, because Jewish people in the first century had well developed spiritual disciplines.  But when they saw Jesus praying, they must have realized that his was very different from theirs.  In response, Jesus gave them this model (Lk 11:2-4):

Father,

hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread.

Forgive us our sins,

for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.

And lead us not into temptation.

The Lord’s Prayer is amazingly simple. It takes the focus off of self. (Notice that there is no “I” or “me”.) And it does not begin with supplication; it starts by turning attention toward God and his people.

This prayer more than any other seems to profoundly impact believerss who actually pray it.

The first word of this prayer is stunning. Who has the audacity to call God “Father”?  Jesus does.  It surprises me when Christians approach God in a casual manner, wearing informality on their sleeves like a badge of honor.  Yes, the New Testament teaches us to come to the throne without fear.  And holiness is not the same as formality.  But neither is it the same as informality. It is easy to forget that, despite our Christian faith, we still have no right to approach God except through Jesus.  And when we do, we are coming into the Holy of Holies.  This is exactly what Jesus taught when he said, “Hallowed be your name.”

The next line is a beast: “Your kingdom come.”  Do we really want God’s kingdom to come?   Do we want him to rule over us?  Do we want Christ to return and radically transform everything?  There are plenty of things we don’t like about our lives, and we would change them if we could.  But would those changes be to God’s liking?

From the standpoint of biblical teaching, God’s kingdom has already come, and it is still coming.  The full revelation or unveiling of this kingdom will occur when Jesus returns.  It is not merely a possibility, but a sure thing, and it will happen whether or not we pray.  So why should we pray for it? I think this is a prayer intended to purify us, to bring us out of a self-centered fog into the spiritual clarity that knows God is King.

One line that may seem perplexing is, “Forgive us our sins.” When Jesus used the pronoun us, did he intend to include himself?  We understand that Christ is without sin.  But I do think that he meant to include himself, because he took our sins upon himself. He is God who stands in the place of humans, and the human who stands in the place of God.  The dominant notion of sin taught in Western Christianity is a breaking of laws and commandments by individuals.  But the biblical concept of sin is much broader; it includes national, cultural, and corporate sin and the tragic warping of Adam’s entire race.    When praying the words, “Forgive us our sins,” take some of the focus off of yourself and all your personal mistakes and deficiencies. Consider the implications of Jesus praying these words on behalf of the entire world..  Your understanding of this prayer and your faith will broaden, becoming more universal and God-honoring.

I have studied the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6 and Luke 11 many times.  But it was not until I actually started to pray it that I began to understand how to pray.  We have legitimate needs to bring before God, and those are not to be neglected at all.  But supplication no longer dominates my personal devotions.  Adoration, praise, and contemplation now seem much more basic, a more authentic response to the message of the gospel.