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The Lord’s Prayer invites us to ask God for everything from “daily bread” to the “kingdom come,” for ourselves (petition) and for others (intercession).
We’re taking a map with us, of course. The world’s most famous prayer—the Lord’s Prayer—was given to us by Jesus himself for this very purpose: to “teach us to pray.” In these old, familiar words we are going to discover nine different paths of prayer: Stillness, Adoration, Petition, Intercession, Perseverance, Contemplation, Listening, Confession, and Spiritual Warfare. Our journey is going to be paced around an easy, four-step rhythm: P.R.A.Y.—Pause, Rejoice, Ask, Yield.
THE BEST BIT of advice I ever received about how to pray was this: keep it simple, keep it real, keep it up.
basic building blocks in the Christian approach to prayer: simplicity, honesty, and perseverance.
To start we must stop. To move forward we must pause. This is the first step in a deeper prayer life: Put down your wish list and wait. Sit quietly. “Be still, and know that I am God.” Become fully present in place and time so that your scattered senses can recenter themselves on God’s eternal presence. Stillness and silence prepare your mind and prime your heart to pray from a place of greater peace, faith, and adoration. In fact, these are themselves important forms of prayer.
There are several simple practices that can help you to center your scattered senses as you prepare to pray. It may be helpful to think of them in four steps: relax, breathe, speak, and repeat.
Hallowing the Father’s name is the most important and enjoyable dimension of prayer. Linger here, rejoicing in God’s blessings before asking for any more. Like an eagle soaring, a horse galloping, or a salmon leaping, worship is the thing God designed you to do.
The way we view God affects everything about everything,
the God to whom we pray is extravagantly kind, a father who comes running toward us with arms flung wide, whenever we approach him, wherever we’ve been, and whatever we’ve done. He assures us that God—Yahweh, the Holy One of Israel, the Creator of the cosmos, the sustainer of the universe—is (drumroll please) on our side.
He is a loving Father who greets us with a smile and not a scowl, who sees our hearts and interprets our scribbled prayers. But he is also “in heaven” and “hallowed”—sovereign, awesome, and mysterious, which means that we can trust him even when we don’t understand him. The invitation to adoration means greeting our heavenly Father by name, meeting his smile with a smile, receiving him as the loved one he truly is, and responding to his kindness with kindness, his presence with presence, and his love with our own. What joy we can bring to the Father’s heart!
our primary privilege as God’s children is to ask audaciously and repeatedly for everything we need, expecting him to answer, naturally or supernaturally, by whatever means he sees fit.
Third, asking is intentional. It involves the activation of our wills. We are not automatons: mindless bots preprogrammed and powerless to resist the Creator’s genetic coding. God respects us too much to ride roughshod over our free wills, and he loves us too much to force us to do his bidding. He comes where he is welcomed and waits to answer until he is called.
Praying in the name of Jesus means wanting what God wants, aligning our wills with his will, our words with his Word, and our personal preferences with his eternal and universal purposes. It also speaks of family privilege. To ask in the name of Jesus is to approach the Father in the company of his own dear Son.
in the original Greek, these verbs were written in the present active imperative tense, which means that they literally mean: “Keep on asking, and you will receive. . . . Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you.”[25] There is a sense of habit, of repetition, of a
“If we truly love people, we will desire for them far more than it is within our power to give them, and this will lead us to prayer. Intercession is a way of loving others.”[1]
To intercede is to “mind the gap” between heaven and earth. It is to intervene or mediate between two parties as the equal friend of both.
And then instead of telling God what you think he should do for them, you can just join in with his prayers, which is way easier and more effective.”
In his Great High Priest prayer, Jesus prayed for us: “that they may be brought to complete unity.”[5] But clearly, tragically, we remain bitterly divided. It’s an extraordinary thought that Jesus himself sits at the right hand of the Father today, carrying the pain of unanswered prayer. Surely we can be honest, therefore, about our own frustrations and disappointments with God?
“We shall come one day to a heaven where we shall gratefully know that God’s great refusals were sometimes the true answers to our truest prayer.”[17]
petition is prayer at its simplest, and intercession is prayer at its most powerful, contemplation is prayer at its deepest and most personally transformational.
First, that contemplative prayer is consumed with God’s love. Second, that it is mostly a “quiet,” “wordless” form of silent meditation on Christ in which we just enjoy his presence without doing or saying anything. And third, that it is experiential rather than logical—“an intimate sharing,” “a trusting openness,” a “feeling [that] comes to the foreground.”
being present to God on another’s behalf, listening for the prayer of the Holy Spirit that is already being prayed for that person before the throne of grace, and being willing to join God in that prayer.” Referring to the apostle Paul’s description of the Holy Spirit interceding for us in groans beyond human vocabulary, she continues: “As I enter into the stillness of true prayer, it is enough to experience my own groaning about the situation or person I am concerned about and to sense the Spirit’s groaning on their behalf.”[20]
The more we see Christ in prayer, the more we see him everywhere we go and in everyone we meet. The whole of life becomes an invitation to worship.
“Scripture is God’s way of initiating a conversation; prayer is our response.
The relative slowness and solitary nature of journaling ushers us into a more creative, less reactive state in which the hand of God is more easily discerned and the whispers of his Spirit can often be more clearly heard.
Listening means yielding willingly to whatever God tells us to do.
Our greatest need and God’s greatest gift are the same thing: forgiveness of sins. And to receive it, we have only to ask and pass it on. But to ask for it, we must first admit that we need it.
more grace in God than sin in you. “God never tires of forgiving us,”
Generally, I find it more useful, therefore, to pray Where? rather than Why? prayers. Where were you, Lord, in our medical appointment today? Where are you now in our weariness and disappointment?
we simply cannot separate our prayers for the coming of God’s Kingdom from Christ’s radical call to be reconciled with those who sin against us. Reconciliation is what the coming of his Kingdom looks like!
If God continues to work toward the fulfillment of our prayers, long after we’ve forgotten praying them, there must be occurrences and apparent coincidences in your life and mine most days that are direct answers to prayers and questions we don’t even remember asking.
