The Importance and Power of Prayer
Do you know how powerful prayer is? Prayer is our intimate and personal relationship with the God who created all things and who loves us enough to change everything. There is very little prayer can’t accomplish. The amazing thing is that we always have the potential for prayer. No matter what is going on in your life, no matter what your abilities are or limits you can always turn to prayer. So through your relationship with God, you are powerful. What are you struggling with? What are your friends and family struggling with? Turn to God in prayer and trust him to help you work through it. Sometimes we are not in the mood, or sometimes we feel like we are too busy, but what amazing help we miss because we don’t turn to God in prayer. I have seen both amazing, miraculous things result from prayer and also the continuous everyday wonderful practical results. Something as simple as taking 10 seconds to recognize God’s presence and inviting him to guide me before entering into any task, I have seen transform my work. Only imagine what a continuous relationship with the creator and sustainer of everything could do for your life and you will begin to realize the power of prayer.
Before Jesus teaches us how to pray, he warns us how not to pray. “Do not be like the hypocrites who pray in public places to be seen by others”, rather “Go into a private place and pray to your father and your father will hear you”. This might be confusing at first because it seems like a contrast between public and private prayer, but these are both important. Private and personal prayer is really important because God wants each of us to have a relationship with him, but he also wants communal prayer, because he tells us whenever two or three ask anything in my name I will hear them. The two biggest things Jesus is saying here are 1) prayer is first and foremost about our relationship with God as our Father and 2) it is about what God can do for us, not what others can do.
The second warning is “not to pray, babbling on and on like those who don’t know God, thinking that God will only hear because we speak so much”, rather “know that God knows your needs even before you ask”. This does not mean that we shouldn’t spend long periods in prayer. Jesus himself would leave everyone and go up on a mountain all night to spend time in prayer with God. I have seen what spending consistent and long periods of time in prayer can do for my relationship with God, because of this I have been blessed to hear God’s voice and know his guidance. In fact, prayer is one of the only reasons I ended up here. After interviewing at many churches, God led me to pull out of the running for all of them, because He told me that he had something else waiting for me. Notice something in what Jesus said that even though God knows our requests already, he still wants us to pray. What Jesus is trying to tell us is that we should know who it is we are speaking to. We should know that God hears us, we should know that God knows our needs, we should know that God wants to do the best for us and ultimately we should trust in that knowledge as we pray and not in our own words.
This brings us to the Lord’s prayer. It starts with the amazing recognition that God is our Father. Sure God created us, but these two words are such a recognition of closeness, intimacy, and love, that for most through history, even now, it would barely seem possible. Jesus Christ, God’s only true son, is inviting us this day into His relationship with God. He is inviting us to become like Him in a closeness with God that changes everything, ourselves included.
“Who art in heaven”, at the same time we recognize God’s closeness, we also recognize his otherness, his greatness, and his supremacy. So in 6 words, we have recognized God’s immense love and care to act for us, but also his ability to act on that love and care. This is the root of everything, of every prayer and every hope.
“Hallowed be your name”. Notice that this is both a statement and a request. God’s name or his identity, his character, is revered, holy, majestic, above all, but we are also asking that the world might know this. May the whole world be changed and shaped through knowledge of God’s amazing character. The difficult part for us is that WE need to recognize God’s glory and put him in his rightful place in our lives. That means that we can’t put anything in his way - not our family, not our identity, not our hopes and dreams, nothing. Everything can become an idol if put in front of God. But when we put God first and foremost in our lives, we are strengthened and equipped through the knowledge of God, and the world is transformed by it.
That is exactly what we see as the Lord’s prayer unfolds, “Your Kingdom come”. Again both a statement and a request. God is bringing about his Kingdom. God does reign above all things. This world is being transformed, even if people may resist it. We need to trust in that. Yet, we also ask for God’s Kingdom to be fully known in us and around us. We ask that God’s faithfulness and love might reign over our hearts and over the hearts around us so that peace, justice, and mercy will envelope us.
“Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”. This is how God’s reign, how God’s kingdom is seen and realized. When God is king over our hearts and lives and over the world, it means that people will listen to him as their king and so of course, it means his will is done. Here we are recognizing that God always accomplishes his will and yet we want the world to live into his will too. This includes us. We are meant to do God’s will throughout our whole lives and we should be praying so that we can do it. Prayer helps us to know God’s will, but it also gives us strength and courage to live it out. Oftentimes living into God’s will just requires faith to trust what God is guiding us into, but it can also require us to put our own will and fear to the side. Remember Jesus’ prayer just before he went to suffer and die on the cross. He didn’t want to suffer and die and yet He prayed, “Not my will but your will be done”. Similar words should be on our lips, especially since God usually asks us for less. God’s will being done, should be more important in our lives than any other desire or demand.
Notice something here. In this request, we are also speaking of our future hope. What we are asking for is that the earth be transformed to become like heaven. We are asking for nothing less than heaven on earth and we trust in God’s will to do that. We are also trusting in God’s heavenly host who live and move to do God’s will. This means that just as we have our Father in heaven, we also have this great host of angels helping and lifting us up and guiding us through our lives. We have an angel army standing behind us.
“Give us today our daily bread”. This is of course asking God to feed us, but it is more than that. It is asking God to provide for our daily needs and trusting that He will do it. There is one line in this prayer about our physical needs because we recognize that an answer to all of these spiritual needs is an answer to our physical needs. God’s will be done, his Kingdom being lived out, will mean that we have everything and more. Notice that it is praying for us and our needs, not me and my needs. We pray that we might all be fed together. Since we often pray this as a community right around communion, our liturgy is a special reminder that our ultimate physical needs are filled through our receiving Jesus into our hearts and flesh. He has always been the one that fills our needs, but it is through his life that we are filled.
“Forgive us our debts, our trespasses, our sins”. Each word points us to a different way that we turn away from God and we recognize our need for him to show mercy and come to us. In debt, We owe God more than we could ever repay, especially considering our misuse of God’s gifts. In trespasses, We step into situations and actions that we were not meant to, we trespass on something that is not our land or place. In sin, We turn away from the goodness of God seeking our way, so we sin, we miss the mark, we miss the goodness of God.
Just as God has forgiven us, we are meant to forgive others. We are meant to forgive others as we have known forgiveness. Others do sin against us, but compared to what we have done to God, their debt is minimal. There is a big question here, if we do not forgive others for their little sins, do we really know, experience, or live in God’s forgiveness? No. We are forgiven as, at the same time as we forgive others, because it is our natural reaction. On the other side, our living out God’s forgiveness for others actually helps us to realize God’s forgiveness for us. How great and grand of a gesture God's forgiveness truly is. God forgives us freely, but we need to forgive others to fully realize it, to see it, and to know it.
Lastly, we pray and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Here we are asking God to help us to avoid temptation. God draw us away from those things which would lead us astray. Protect us from what we can’t handle or where we don’t have enough faith. We are asking God not to test us, but knowing that sometimes we need testing. Sometimes it is through our testing and trials that we become stronger and more faithful, so we are asking God to give us faith not to fall into that temptation. Yet, we recognize our weakness here at the end. We know that we can fall into temptation, we know we will go wrong and that we are surrounded by a broken world and so we ask God to deliver us, that we are not consumed, that we are not lost, that our hearts are turned back to God, so that we might once again see His Kingdom, do his will and dine together.
Two quick notes: 1) We normally end the Lord’s prayer with “thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen”. This is not included in the Bible’s Lord’s Prayer, but it is a common prayer that has existed and been used since the apostles. 2) When Jesus reiterates the need for forgiveness after telling us the Lord’s prayer, he is reminding us that forgiveness is an essential way that we live out the entirety of the Lord’s prayer. Forgiveness is how we create peace and are God’s children, it is how we realize his kingdom, it is how we do his will, how we are fed, how we escape temptation and it is how we are delivered. Forgiveness is a central part of God’s work, mission, and identity and so it should be ours.
So, today Jesus has taught us how to pray. He has shown us how incredibly intimate and close God is in his love. He has shown us how we can trust in God’s immense glory and power. He has shown us that it is through our singular relationship with God that the world and our hearts are changed. We have seen that it is through God that we are given everything we need. We have seen it is through prayer that we are reconciled and saved from temptation and evil. Prayer is immensely important and powerful as there is nothing it can’t change. Today, Jesus is inviting you to turn to God in prayer and to watch for the results.
Do you know the power of prayer? Prayer is our personal relationship and conversation with the God who created and sustains all things. There is practically nothing that relationship can’t do. Yet, prayer is something so simple and so accessible that literally everyone can do it. You don’t even need to be able to get out of bed. You only need a minute. You only need to know and trust God and your life and world can be forever changed.
So why don’t we pray more? Why don’t we spend more time in prayer? Why don’t we trust God with our whole lives in prayer? Important questions to ask, because as Jesus teaches us how to pray, we will realize that through prayer we join God in creating heaven on earth.
