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August 25, 2020 - October 15, 2021
Prayer is not mainly for an inner state but for conformity to God’s purposes.
Prayer is the way to experience a powerful confidence that God is handling our lives well, that our bad things will turn out for good, our good things cannot be taken from us, and the best things are yet to come.
Here is an illustration that might help us think about this. When you flick the light switch, the bulbs illuminate. Does the light switch provide the power for the bulbs? No—that comes from the electricity. The switch has no power in itself, but rather it connects the bulbs to the power. In the same way, our prayers have no virtue to procure us access to the Father. Christ has done that.
For as soon as God’s dread majesty comes to mind,
To pray in Jesus’ name means to come to God in prayer consciously trusting in Christ for our salvation and acceptance and not relying on our own credibility or record.
This means that what is true of Jesus is true of us.
“Who would break forth into such rashness as to claim for himself the honor of a son of God unless we had been adopted as children of grace in Christ?”
As name bearers they represent a good and holy God, and so we are praying that God keep us from dishonoring the name by which we are called, that he would empower us to become ourselves good and holy.
“Grant us grace to bear willingly all sorts of sickness, poverty, disgrace, suffering, and adversity and to recognize that in this your divine will is crucifying our will.”
He submitted to his Father’s will rather than following his own desires, and it saved us. That’s why we can trust him. Jesus is not asking us to do anything for him that he hasn’t already done for us, under conditions of difficulty beyond our comprehension.
Luther sees a social dimension to this prayer as well. For all to get daily bread, there must be a thriving economy, good employment, and a just society. Therefore, to pray “give us—all the people of our land—daily bread” is to pray against “wanton exploitation” in business, trade, and labor, which “crushes the poor and deprives them of their daily bread.”
For Luther, then, to pray for our daily bread is to pray for a prosperous and just social order.
Both prosperity and adversity, then, are sore tests, and each one brings its own set of enticements away from trusting in God and toward centering your life on yourself and on “inordinate desires” for other things.
I fear that many contemporary books on prayer try to give readers a “key” or some kind of experience of “Aha! So that’s the secret of prayer!” Such a thing simply does not exist.
The idea is this. Just as faith in Christ cannot accomplish or merit our salvation but is necessary to receive it—so a commitment to put God first and love and follow him supremely is necessary before God can grant our prayers without harming us. If we are living lives in which God does not have our highest allegiance, then we will use prayer instrumentally, selfishly, simply to try to get the things that may be already ruining our lives.
There he says, in short, that you should not begin to pray for all you want until you realize that in God you have all you need. That is, unless we know that God is the one thing we truly need, our petitions and supplications may become, simply, forms of worry and lust.
Nonetheless, if prayer is to be a true conversation with God, it must be regularly preceded by listening to God’s voice through meditation on the Scripture.
Prayer became not just a time of going through his list of requests but also a time of adoration, confession, and simply enjoying God.