LORD, TEACH ME TO PRAY

Sermon Summary (11/3/19) “Lord, Teach Me to Pray” (Lk 11:1-8)

Did I tell you about my granddaughter?  After living with her wedding sermon for three weeks, I couldn’t get it out of my head to get going this week.  On Wednesday I finally decided the direction I was going, but found a book on Prayer and spent all day Wed and Thu reading it.  I didn’t get to my sermon until Fri, the slides Sat, the bulletin Sat morning.  Even while walking the dog, I had the wedding sermon in mind.

It did include a passage about prayer.  “Prayer includes God in you lives.”  It is a means of grace by which God changes us.  It is a means by which God nurtures a relationship with us, affects our hearts, leads from where we are to where God is leading us to be.  A bishop asked a ministry candidate, “Are you going on to Christian Perfection?”  He said, “No.”  The bishop quickly replied, “Then where are you going?”  Good question.  If we are followers of Jesus Christ, what is our destination?  Prayer is one of those tools God uses to lead us there.

Jesus said, “When you pray, say ‘Father..’” With this first word, Jesus had already turned the disciples world upside down.  From an Old Testament God that was feared, “Moses, you go up on the mountain.  We are in fear of meeting God face to face.”  Jesus gave us a personal God, one who was Abba, Daddy, Poppa, a God with whom we can have a personal relationship.  Picture your prayers that way.

‘Father, hallowed be thy name.’  Jesus is calling with this first phrase to Order our Loves.  We do that with Praise and Adoration.  We begin our worship, both corporate and private with words of adoration, a Call to Worship or a Psalm in private, “I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart, I will tell of his wonderful deeds.  I will be glad and exult in him.  I will sing praises to his name O most High.’” (Ps 9:1-2)  Adoration and Praise encourages us to make God first in our lives.  Order our loves.  If God is not first in our lives, he cannot change us.

‘Thy kingdom come.’ We are called to bring our will into alignment with God’s.  We do that when we read Scripture and come to know the life and teachings of Jesus.  But we are called as part of our devotional to meditate, to ponder passages that have leaped off the page at us during our reading,  Meditation is defined as “affecting the heart through intensive use of the mind.”  When verses touch us, God changes our minds, we take on the mind of Christ.  Our will comes into line with God’s.  They kingdom come.

Adoration and praise, scripture reading, meditation.  ‘Give us this day, our daily bread.’  We are now ready to pray, to petition God for the needs of the world, the church, our own.   We are learning to pray.  It is a life long process.  He is teaching us.  As we are learning he tells us in the story to be persistent in prayer (really, to be shameless in our prayer!)  Talk to God, feel his will for our prayers, but be shameless in our requests.  Prayer is cooperating with grace, cooperating with the Holy Spirit, cooperating with God.  God has created a world in which prayer is a vital part of it.  Pray.