“Lord, teach us to pray,” Jesus’ disciples asked as they beheld both his dedication to and effectiveness in the practice of prayer. (Luke 11:1) From that request issued the prayer we call the Lord’s Prayer, which still guides and forms our praying today.
Rabbis share a touching story that helps me remember how all of us need to keep learning. It is about an uneducated Jew who wanted to pray but did not speak Hebrew. Tradition stressed the importance of praying in Hebrew, although the Talmud states that one can pray in any language he or she understands. So this devout man began reciting the only Hebrew he knew: the alphabet. He continued repeating the alphabet over and over until a rabbi asked him what he was doing. “The Holy One, Blessed is He, knows what is in my heart. I will give Him the letters, and He can put the words together.”
All of us have much to learn — but it is important to start, and to cultivate our practice of prayer.
Prayer’s privileged place in a disciple’s life — or a church’s — simply cannot be overstated. It does not exist only for us to tell God what we want or think we need. God needs no reminders; we do. We need to be reminded of our dependence upon God and our responsibility for each other. Prayer does this in ways nothing else can. As William Temple wrote: “We do not pray in order to change God’s will, but to bring our wills into harmony with God’s.”
I think when God answers our prayer according to our specifications, it is not because our prayer “worked,” as if we had mastered a technique to get what we want. It is because our petition is consistent with God’s intentions for us and for God’s kingdom. God responds to our prayers from an eternal perspective, with a knowledge of how our lives are knit together with the lives and prayers of others.
The Bible reveals how God answers us personally and specifically while also responding to the prayers of others, carefully knitting lives and events together to achieve God’s ends in time. We see this come to pass in the scriptural accounts of people like David, Hannah, Elisha, Solomon, Nehemiah, Daniel, and others. These are biblical people who faced troubling personal and community circumstances and turned to God for forgiveness, hope, direction, purpose, protection, wisdom, mercy, healing, deliverance, and justice.
Their prayers inform our own in remarkable ways. Like us, sometimes only their hearts could pray, hanging onto a thread of faith. They prayed, as we do, trusting God to understand what words could not express. This winter, we will study the examples of scriptural pray-ers to help guide not only our words but, more importantly, our hearts, as we gain new insights into God’s intentions in prayer.
Grace and Peace,