Prayer begins with its answer. . .

The discipline of prayer is a difficult one.  Nearly every Christian feels guilty about not praying enough or not praying rightly.  Nearly every Christian admits that prayer does not come easily.  So nearly every Christian has lived with the guilt and the frustration of knowing prayer is good but not knowing how to pray and knowing he or she should be praying more but does not really want to.  Pastors are hesitant to scold their congregations about prayer because they are in the same boat.  The devotional lives of pastors are at least as difficult as the devotional lives of our people.  What then shall we do?

I fear that the real answer is that we do not know what prayer is.  There is a certain amount of audacity in the presumption that we pray to God to inform Him of things He does not know.  God apparently knows everything except the things we have not yet told Him.  So we pray to inform Him so that He is not in the dark and we can be assured that He knows what it is that we want.  Is that what prayer is?  An exchange of information?  If our God is not powerful enough to know what we would pray before we pray it, I am not at all sure that He is worth being called God.  And if we are so powerful as to inform God of that which He does not already know, then perhaps we should be called gods.

It is for this reason that prayer has become so one sided -- the telling of information to a God who does not know it and the waiting for information from God that we do not know.  In the end, the disciples who asked Jesus to teach them to pray were being more honest than we are.  We assume we know how to pray but just cannot find the time.  The disciples were at least forthright enough to admit that they did not know what it means to pray -- and this coming from a tradition in which prayer played a pretty big role!

Scripture tells us the Spirit intercedes when we do not know what to pray for or how to pray -- interpreting even groans and sighs into the phrases of a prayer comprehensible to God even when it is not to us.  Scripture tells us that the Spirit prompts our prayers when our hearts are weary and our minds preoccupied -- certainly most of the time!  But who could be prepared for Jesus' answer to the request to be taught to pray?  When you pray. . . say. . . Our Father, who art in heaven. . .   That must not be enough nor must it be all that important because we quickly tire of the Our Father and think that the best prayers are the unscripted ones that flow immediately from our hearts.

What Jesus was teaching us is something that ought to be obvious to us.  All prayer begins with the answer -- not with the need or the request or the justification for that request.  Jesus is God’s answer.  And the prayer prays for faith to believe God’s answer.  When we pray in Jesus' name we are not giving a coupon code to get God to loosen up the strings on His purse of grace.  God is not by nature stingy or reluctant.  He is just the opposite.  He is lavish and generous -- so much so that we are scandalized by His generosity and indiscriminate giving.  Yet it is this knowledge of God's giving love that both prompts our prayers and forms them.  We pray what we know and none of us really knows what is best for us but we know God does.  We pray what we know and though we think we know our hearts and desires, we know them only for the snapshot of the moment.  Only God can see past, present, and future.  So to pray begins with the name of God,, the name above all names, the name of Emmanuel, the name that opens the shackles of sin, the book of life, the gates of heaven, and the door of the grave.

To pray in Jesus' name and with the words He has taught us is to pray the answer before the request.  That is because Jesus is our only and every answer.  There is no need or want that Jesus does not answer and there is no worry or fear for which Jesus is not the answer.  When we pray Thy will be done we are praying as Jesus prayed because, unlike us, Jesus knew the will of God to be good and gracious.  We are not praying some kind of passive request if it be Thy will but the confident voice of faith says to the Lord what we desire and yet at the same time looks to Jesus and adds, but not what I think or desire, what You, O Lord, will.  We do this not as some sort of regretful end to cover our butts at the end of a wish list but as a people who know the Father through the Son and by the power of the Holy Spirit.  We know God's will -- it is good, gracious, and merciful.  To speak the name of Christ is to call upon the Father to give us what Christ has promised.  This is not some what if but the grand because of faith.  I am fully confident for myself and for every Christian that if we began our prayers in this way, it would not only be easier for us to pray thus but we would pray more.