April 6, 2012
Teach Us to Pray
Kevin T. Bauder
Mark Twain is supposed to have said that everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Among Christians, almost the same thing could be said about prayer. We know that we ought to pray. We know it is important to pray. We talk about prayer, preach about prayer, and even publish books about prayer. For most Christians, however, not much praying gets done.
Indeed, most Christians have little idea how to pray. Usually they have been told that prayer is “talking to God.” That is true enough, but how many of us can carry on much of a conversation with an invisible, inaudible partner? Sure, we know that we are supposed to talk to God, but what are we supposed to talk about? What are we supposed to say?
This perplexity is not unique to modern Christians. Evidently Jesus’ disciples experienced something like it. After observing the Lord in His conversations with His Father, they presented Him with a petition: “Lord, teach us to pray” (Lk. 11:1).
Jesus did not despise their request. He neither rebuked nor ridiculed His disciples. Instead, He taught them to pray. He even provided them with a template, a model prayer into which they could insert their own concerns and locutions.
Jesus’ disciples had to be taught how to pray. Prayer did not come naturally to them. They did not intuitively know how to do it. If even the disciples had to be taught how to pray, then it is not unreasonable to suppose that Christians in the twenty-first century also have something to learn. Praying is not something that we do by instinct, the way that geese migrate to their destination. If we are going to pray effectively, we must be taught how.
We know that prayer is important. We also know that prayer has to be taught. Consequently, we might suppose that the Christian world would be filled with mature believers who are training younger believers in the life of prayer. If that were what we expected, however, we would certainly be disappointed. Even among Christians who pride themselves upon their allegiance to God and to the gospel (not to mention their separation from compromise), prayer is rarely taught in any systematic or formal way. Contemporary Christians operate plenty of colleges and seminaries that train pastors and missionaries, but hardly one of them requires any formal instruction in prayer. Is it surprising that these institutions have produced a generation of leaders characterized by haphazard prayer lives?
Of course, some do learn to pray. Typically, however, they learn, not because they are taught, but because they are driven to prayer. Providence permits such adversity and hardship in their lives that they have nowhere to turn but to God. The affliction of their souls floods out of their hearts in their cries to the Almighty. They batter at the outer barricades of heaven (or so they feel) until they discover that they have actually been standing in the holy place the entire time.
Desperate people learn to pray. Under the compulsion of circumstances they search the Scriptures for teaching about prayer. Once they begin to pray in earnest, they receive answers. More than answers, they also receive a more acute awareness of the character of the God to whom they pray. They also become increasingly sensitive to His presence in their lives—indeed, all of life becomes part of their conversation with God.
As we have seen, some learn to pray because they are forced by circumstances. To be fair, a handful are also drawn into prayer by their reading of Scripture. Others fall almost by chance under the mentorship of some praying Christian. These few learn to pray.
That they are few, however, is beyond dispute. We require no polls from Gallup or Barna in order to know that. All that we must do is to eavesdrop on the prayers that are actually being uttered within the churches.
The notion of a prayer meeting is, of course, long since defunct. Even those churches that pretend to hold prayer meetings almost always have altered the format of the meeting into a Bible study. Prayer time is relegated to a fraction of the meeting, and most of it is taken up with the verbalization of requests to one another rather than to God. We spend more time asking each other to pray than we actually spend praying.
The prayers themselves are appalling, though we might consider it bad manners to say so. Critiquing other people’s prayers is thought to be rather like criticizing their selection in deodorants or underwear—far too personal to be any of our business. Nevertheless, if people got into the habit of wearing their underwear on the outside of their clothes, we might well have something to say about what was appropriate in its effect upon the assembled saints. The same is true of prayer: what is uttered in public is no longer merely personal, but affects the entire body of praying believers.
Besides the prayer meeting, almost no other public venue offers such a display of speech disfluency. We may believe that prayer is simply talking to God, but the proportion of thoughtless repetition, empty clichés, and non-lexical fillers would stultify a normal conversation. Even the utterance of genuine heresy is accepted with bland indifference (e.g., “And, Father, we thank you for shedding Your blood for us on the cross. In Your name we pray, amen”). In normal conversations, this level of thoughtlessness would be taken as discourteous or even insulting.
Contemporary Christians appear to face two problems related to prayer. One is that many simply do not pray. The other is that, when they do pray, they pray badly. By no means are these problems confined to isolated instances. They are pervasive.
One wonders what would happen if contemporary Christians experienced a sudden outbreak of prayer. How would we change? How might God respond? What answers might we see? We will only know if we actually pray, and we will only pray when we know how.
Lord, teach us to pray.
Hark! The Voice of Love and Mercy
Jonathan Evans (1749-1809)
Hark! the voice of love and mercy
Sounds aloud from Calvary;
See, it rends the rocks asunder,
Shakes the earth, and veils the sky:
“It is finished!” “It is finished!”
“It is finished!” Hear the dying Savior cry;
Hear the dying Savior cry.
“It is finished!” O what pleasure
Do these precious words afford;
Heav’nly blessings, without measure,
Flow to us from Christ the Lord:
“It is finished!” “It is finished!”
“It is finished!” Saints the dying words record;
Saints the dying words record.
Finished all the types and shadows
Of the ceremonial law;
Finished all that God had promised;
Death and hell no more shall awe:
“It is finished!” “It is finished!”
“It is finished!” Saints, from hence your comfort draw;
Saints, from hence your comfort draw.
Tune your harps anew, ye seraphs,
Join to sing the glorious theme;
All in earth, and all in heaven,
Join to praise Emmanuel’s Name;
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Alleluia! Glory to the bleeding Lamb!
Glory to the bleeding Lamb!
This essay is by This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. , Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
