If a new believer asked you to teach them to pray, what counsel would you give them? One standard approach to teaching prayer in evangelical churches sounds something like this: “Prayer is just talking to God. Talk to Him like you would a friend.” I have heard this many times and have probably given the same advice repeatedly. I no longer think it is very good advice, nor do I think it is completely true, though it certainly contains what we would call a “kernel of truth.”
First, notice the word “just” in the phrase ”prayer is just talking to God.” Why is “just” thrown in there like that? I believe we say “just” because we want to encourage prayer, and we feel that if we make prayer out to be something very difficult or complicated, we will discourage its practice. So instead we insert “just” to imply the very opposite – that prayer is easy and uncomplicated. I do not deny that prayer is not complicated, but to paraphrase Tom Hanks, if it was easy, everybody would do it.
Talk to 100 evangelical Christians about their prayer lives and 99 of them will tell you that their prayer lives need a lot of work. Yet those same 99 will tell the new believer that prayer is “easy.” “Just talk to God! He’s your friend!” Who are we kidding? Everything in our lives conspires against our having healthy, robust prayer lives. Neither the world, the flesh, nor the devil wants us to pray and they bring all their powers to bear to keep God’s children from praying. Prayer is war. What commander would send an untrained soldier into battle? “War is easy, son, just aim and fire!” No it’s not easy, and pretending that is helps no one.
Fortunately, we do not have to wonder how God would have us learn to pray. Jesus’ disciples noticed that he was very good at something they did not find easy – prayer. So they did the logical thing and asked the guy who knew how to pray well if he would teach them to pray. In fact, this was an expected part of a disciple’s curriculum. Jesus’ disciples reminded him that John (the Baptizer) had taught his disciples to pray, and they wanted (needed) the same instruction.
And what was Jesus’ instruction? How did he teach his disciples to do the hard work of prayer?
He gave them a prayer (Luke 11:1-4).
We must be missing something here, because that is the last thing many of us would do to help someone learn to pray. Think about that for a moment. Why is our method of discipleship in prayer completely opposite to the method Jesus employed? It would take books to answer that question, but the short answer is this: we live in a culture that idolizes informality. Anything we idolize, we project onto God, so we assume that God values informality as much as we do. But He doesn’t. If God opposed set prayers then he would not have given them to us in Scripture. Not only the Lord’s prayer, but the Psalms, many passages in the prophets, and many sections of the New Testament epistles are pre-written prayers given by the Holy Spirit to teach God’s children how to engage in the tough work of prayer to the Father in Jesus’ name.
When I taught my oldest daughter her ABC’s, it was my hope that she would in time learn to use the alphabet for more advanced things: like reading. Fundamentals have to come first. Boot camp comes before battle. Scales come before symphonies. For Jesus, learning his set prayers as a young Jewish boy came long before the anguishing spiritual conflict of Gethsemane. His Father had taught him to pray, and now he offers us the same basic training. Let’s not spurn the means he has given us to learn his ways of prayer.
Let your merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of your humble servants; and that they may obtain their petitions make them to ask such things as shall please you; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
