Monday
Luke 11.1 “One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.”
Details matter. Jesus regularly prayed “in a certain place”, and the disciples knew where to find him. Part of the training of the disciples was regular exposure to Jesus’ way of praying. Prayer is a habit of the heart turned towards God. Prayer is also a turning from our immediate concerns towards our heavenly Father, in trust, in praise and in love. “When he finished…” The disciples knew better than to interrupt the communion between Jesus and his Father. They show reverence for the focused intimacy of such prayer, one of the key lessons in learning to pray. God comes first!
Tuesday
Luke 11.1 “Lord teach us to pray.”
Twenty years ago a book was published titled Christian Prayer for Dummies. It was part of a long series of books introducing everything from gardening to neuroscience. Yes prayer can be taught. But leaving aside even the most helpful books on prayer, it remains true that prayer is first and foremost a relationship with God. What the disciples saw and heard when Jesus prayed was the exchange of loving trust and enabling grace between Jesus and the Father, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Yes, there are spiritual disciplines which help. But prayer is first a loving relationship.
Wednesday
Psalm 17.6 “I call on you, O God, for you will answer me; give ear to me, and hear my prayer.”
The Book of Psalms is the prayer book Jesus knew best. There too, prayer takes place as communication within a relationship of love, trust and praise; but because life and our own hearts often go wrong, prayer is also confession, repentance and the cry for forgiveness. In other words, like all our deepest relationships, prayer depends on trust, faithfulness, costly love, and mutual commitment. These make this relationship real, rich and resilient enough to cope with whatever circumstances put a strain on that same relationship. The confidence of the Psalm poet is in God. Prayer isn’t a relationship of equals. God’s hand is stronger than ours, and his patience longer.
Thursday
Psalm 17.7 “Show the wonder of your great love, you who save by your right hand those who take refuge in you from their foes.”
God’s answer is often simply to draw us into a deeper experience of his great love. No refuge is safer. Christian prayer takes place, no matter where we are, in that place made safe by God’s great love revealed on the cross, and declared with power in the resurrection. I told you God’s hand is stronger! Paul’s take on what it means to take refuge from all our foes is that long chain of disclaimers that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Rom 8.38-39 is the eternal guarantee that our prayers are heard, and we are held in God’s great love!
Friday
Psalm 17.8 “Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings.”
When I trained for a while as an engineer one of the first lessons loudly hammered into a teenage brain too dismissive of risk was, “Wear your goggles!” The image of God as eye-protector is unusual and memorable. God protects that which is precious and irreplaceable. God is also likened to a protective mother hen, an image from which a later paraphrase gave us the prayer, “O spread thy covering wings around, till all our wanderings cease.” Prayer presupposes God’s protective presence.
Saturday
Ephesians 6.18a “Pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.”
Paul loved the word ‘all’! No half measures, “all occasions”, not just when you feel like it. Yes prayer can be taught, and learned; and yes practice makes perfect so long as we realise perfect refers to improvement, growth, maturity, the wisdom of experience. But the energy and vitality of prayer is generated by the Holy Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God. We pray to our heavenly Father, in the name of Jesus, urged and sustained by the communion of the Spirit of God. In that sense we are always being taught how to pray, and our prayers, from the most articulate and satisfying to the most stammering and perplexing, are drawn into the eternal triune love of God where they and our hearts are sifted, and safe.
Sunday
Ephesians 6.18a “Pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.”
That word ‘all’ again! Every relationship depends on communication, and our deepest relationships are richly textured by years of conversations. All kinds of conversations – about our hopes and achievements, our blessings and complaints, about other people and ourselves, about the trivial and the life-changing. Paul is urging that our prayers should reflect that same rich texture of a friendship in which we are open, free to speak, confident in being heard, willing to listen, able to laugh or to cry, and without embarrassment. To pray in the Spirit is precisely to speak in the freedom of God’s children, in God’s presence, about anything, and everything.
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