Bible Studies for Life
Armstrong Professor of Religion, Samford University
Transformed in My Prayer
Matthew 6:9–15
In one of the most helpful books on prayer that I have ever read, titled simply “Prayer,” author Ole Hallesby says the foundation of prayer is helplessness: “For it is only when we are helpless that we open our hearts to Jesus and let Him help us in our distress, according to His grace and mercy.”
Prayer doesn’t need to be a beautiful soliloquy in which we know exactly what to say and use all action verbs in our sentences.
Prayer focuses on God and His kingdom. (9–10)
Worship does not speculate on God’s character. Worship is deeply moved by a sense of God’s being and His ways. Claus Westermann says in “Praise and Lament in the Psalms” that worship is “speech directed toward God … and speaks of God’s majesty and grace.” We come to God with absolute assurance of His love and so we pray to Him as a “Father” and use the child’s name for God, “Abba.”
Worship is expressing our love toward God and our reverence for God who is to be revered as holy. Worship arises out of our human experience of God and is the very heart of prayer. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism expresses it, “Our chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.”
Present all your needs to God. (11–13)
God accepts our prayers just the way we are. We pray to a God who loves variety. This means that ways of praying will be as varied and different as there are people. There is no “right” way to pray. God never comes to us with an “off-the-shelf” method of praying that we have to use regardless of our personality, gifts or needs.
We come humbly but we come honestly expressing our physical needs and spiritual desires. So we ask God to give us our daily bread and to forgive us our sins and enable us to face trials and temptations in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Prayer is both simple and profound. The Lord’s Prayer can be recited in a matter of minutes, but at the heart of the prayer is a lifelong search for God and an attitude which seeks to bring our whole lives in line with His will. So we pray, “Your will be done on earth (in my life) as it is in heaven.”
Forgive others. (14–15)
Once again Jesus indicates that our relationship with others impacts the reality of our experiences of fellowship with God. If we refuse to love one another in the same way in which He has loved us then we miss out on what being a Christian is all about.
When Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of “Treasure Island,” lived in the South Sea Islands he would always conduct family worship in the mornings for his household. It always concluded with the Lord’s Prayer. One morning in the middle of the Lord’s Prayer he rose from his knees and left the room. His health was always precarious and his wife followed him, thinking he was ill.
“Is there anything wrong?” she asked.
“Only this,” he said, “I am not fit to pray the Lord’s Prayer today.”
He sensed that a lack of forgiveness toward another person was hindering his prayer life. Go with the encouragement from Volume 67 of The Chinese Recorder, a missionary journal published in Shanghai:
“Love ever lives, forgives, outlives
And ever stands with open hands
For this is love’s prerogative
To give and give and give.”
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