Is There a Right Way to Pray?

Reference

Luke 11:1-13

Luke 11:1-13 Prayer Questions: Is there a right way to pray?

Follow the Instructions?
There are certain things in life that, if you don’t follow the instructions, don’t work out very well. Take for example, the assembly of a barbeque pit. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to put one of those things together, but they come in quite a few parts. Follow the instructions precisely, and soon you are grilling tasty steaks and great hamburgers.

But if you don’t follow the instructions, you could end up with quite a mess.

On the other hand, there are things that you can approach in any manner of ways, and still end up with something quite workable. Take pizza for example. There are a lot of different ways to cook a pizza: you can do deep dish, you can make a square, you can put anchovies and olives on it, or you can just make it cheese. Lots of approaches, all still pizza.

Or, consider a shirt. There are a lot of different ways to make a shirt, and yet all these items still qualify as a shirt: a Hawaiian shirt.

A t-shirt

Even Jerry Seinfeld’s puffy shirt.

When it comes to talking to God, I think prayer works more like the latter than the former—more like pizza than a gas grill. That is I don’t think there is any one right way to pray. When it comes down to it, I think there are a lot of different ways to speak to God. You can pray silently, or out loud. You can pray in groups, or by yourself. You can pray with your eyes closed, or with them open.

When it comes to what you pray, there are different possibilities as well. Some prayers are “arrow prayers”: short little prayers that you barely have time to shoot to heaven, like when your car hits a patch of ice and you say “Jesus, take the wheel.” Some prayers repeat familiar lines: like the bedtime prayer “now I lay me down to sleep”. Some prayers follow patterns, like the ACTS prayer that encourages you to include Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication.

Like I said, I don’t think there is any, single right way to pray.

But, we can still learn about how to pray. We can still go to an expert and get coaching on how to pray. There is not a single, right way to pray; but there are pointers to help us grow in our prayer lives.

That’s how the disciples of Jesus felt. They were spending time with the greatest Pray-er ever. Jesus wasn’t just the Son of God come to earth, He was also a man of great prayer. The gospels tell us that Jesus often went off by Himself to pray (i.e. Mark 1:35); that He prayed before performing miracles (i.e. John 11:41), and that He wrestled with God in prayer before going to the cross (Luke 22:41). In addition, long prayers of Jesus, such as the High Priestly prayer of John 17, are recorded for us to learn from.

So, it makes sense that the disciples would come to Him and ask Him to teach them to pray. That’s what happens in Luke 11: Jesus is praying when His followers ask Him for some pointers on prayer. Let’s look at the passage. Luke 11:1-13:

1One 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."

2He said to them, "When you pray, say:

" 'Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. 3Give us each day our daily bread. 4Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. And lead us not into temptation. ' "

5Then he said to them, "Suppose one of you has a friend, and he goes to him at midnight and says, 'Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, 6because a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have nothing to set before him.' 7Then the one inside answers, 'Don't bother me. The door is already locked, and my children are with me in bed. I can't get up and give you anything.' 8I tell you, though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man's boldness he will get up and give him as much as he needs.

9"So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 10For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.

11"Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? 12Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!"

Like I said, I don’t think there is a single right way to pray. Jesus isn’t giving us the Lord’s prayer and saying that these are the only words we should ever speak in prayer. And yet, when the expert on prayer gives pointers, we ought to listen. So let me share with you 4 lessons on how to pray from this passage:

Continually Magnify
First: Prayer should always be God-centered and God-exalting. Our prayers should be more about God than they are about us. I get this from verse 2:

2He said to them, "When you pray, say:

‘Father, hallowed be your name..’

The first thing that Jesus includes in His sample prayer--the first thing, the thing that comes before all others, the most central, supreme, overarching thing we can pray—is a prayer of praise.

It is good and proper and right to start your time with God by recognizing that He is God and you are not.

The word Jesus uses is “hallowed.” Hallowed be your name. It’s a word that comes from the word “holy.” God is holy. That means He is separate. That He stands apart. That He’s not like you and me. He has no sin. He makes no mistakes. He never gets tired or weak.

And so, in our prayers, we praise Him.

You know, there’s something about flattery that we find a little off-putting. We’ve all been in situations where a co-worker is always telling the boss how smart he is or another student is always paying compliments to the teacher. We call that sucking-up. And we recognize how shallow it is—because no boss or teacher is deserving of all that praise, and because we can see that the motivation is less than pure.

But when we come to God with praise, it’s something different. It’s not flattery when it’s all true. It’s not sucking up when we are simply giving Him the glory He already deserves. Remember, the day is coming when every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. So we might as well begin now.

Notice, Jesus says “when you pray.” That word could be translated “whenever.” In other words, this isn’t just a formal prayer that we pray every now and then, this is the summary content of normal daily prayer. Whenever you pray you should express a desire for the name of God to be valued more in your own heart and in the church and the world.

I realize that if you are praying a quick arrow prayer—“Jesus take the wheel”—you probably don’t have time to express the glory and power of the Lord; but it still should be our underlying heart attitude.

Listen to this verse from the Psalm 40:16:

16 Let all who seek You rejoice and be glad in You;
Let those who love Your salvation say continually,
“The Lord be magnified!”

Those who love God’s salvation should be continually saying: “The LORD be magnified!” Our passion should be for the glory of God to be revealed. Our heart’s cry should be for God’s will to be done on the earth.

That word, “magnified”, is an interesting word. You can magnify something with a microscope. When you do that, you are making something small look big. You are making germs or cells that are normally hard to see look bigger. That’s not what the word means here. It’s not like God’s glory is small and microscopic and we need to blow it up and make it look bigger than it really is.

But the other way you magnify is with a telescope. In that case, you are taking something that is really very, very big—but appears to be small—and making it appear more like it really is. Like a star which is actually astronomically huge, but appears in our night sky to be small, no bigger than a pinhead, because it is so far away.

That’s a better analogy for what this verse is talking about. God’s glory is enormous. His love and grace and power—His name—knows no end. But for a variety of reasons, mostly springing from humanity’s sinfulness, He can appear to be small and distant. So our job—the job of our prayers—is to telescope God’s glory. To magnify His name in a way that helps us to see Him as He really is.

I’ve been saying throughout this series that the point of prayer is not to get more things from God, but to get more of God Himself. By making our prayers God centered and God exalting we are acknowledging this to be true. Philip Yancey writes: “If I seek God more than anything else, I will eventually seek more of what God wants from me, and be content with that.” (Prayer, p. 108)

So, that’s the first lesson from Jesus on prayer. Our prayers should always center on God.

Prayer for Pardon
Second, God answers prayers for penitent sinners, not perfect people. God doesn’t expect us to be free from sin, but He does want us to be sorry about it. Verse 4:

2He said to them, "When you pray, say….

4’Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.’

I included the first part of verse 2 here because I still think it applies. Jesus is saying this should be part of our prayer, “whenever” we pray. A regular part of our prayer life should be going to our Father and confessing our sins to Him.

It is because of sin that Jesus came to earth. Because of sin that He was taunted and beaten. Because of sin that He died on the cross. He did that to take our place and pay the penalty our sins deserved. But just because God offers us forgiveness doesn’t mean we should take it for granted. The cross doesn’t give us a free pass to sin as we want. Instead, we should recognize the huge debt our sins incur and come to Him humbly seeking His pardon.

Bingham Hunter, in a book called The God Who Hears, writes:

Those who will see God are the pure in heart who mourn over their sin. A prayer enabled vision of God is never attained by eyes which have not known such tears. Effective prayer begins with confession offered by one who knows genuine contrition. There is no other way. (p. 27-28)

I’ve often said that one of the scariest words in the Bible is the little word “for”, or “as”, in this part of the Lord’s Prayer. We ask God to forgive us our debts, FOR we also have forgiven our debtors. There’s an important qualification there. A reminder that if we desire God to show mercy, we must also be willing to extend mercy to those around us.

Perhaps that is one of the biggest sins many of us need to confess: our bitterness and resentment towards those who have hurt us. Part of our prayer should be asking God to give us the grace we need to offer forgiveness to people who have done us wrong.

The good news is “God answers the prayers of sinners, not perfect people…you can become perfectly paralyzed in your praying if you do not focus on the cross and realize this.” (John Piper, “When God says: ‘Not Now’”, March 24, 1996)

Notice the way Jesus calls us evil in verse 13. He doesn’t mean that we are out of fellowship with Him. He’s not saying that we are irredeemable. But He is recognizing that as long as we live in a fallen world we’ll have to deal with sin. John Piper writes:

We are simultaneously evil and redeemed.We are gradually overcoming our evil by the power of the Holy Spirit. But our native corruption is not obliterated by conversion. We are sinners and we are beggars. And if we recognize this sin, fight it, and cling to the cross of Christ as our hope, then God will hear us and answer our prayers. (Ibid)

We don’t have to be sin-free, but we should be sorry for our sins.

How Much More?
The third lesson we can learn about prayer from this passage is this: Our Father in heaven never gives us a snake when we ask for a fish. In other words, God knows what is best for us, even when He doesn’t give us exactly what we ask for. Verses 11-13:

Imagine a hungry child going to his father and saying: “Dad, I’m hungry.” And the father says: “Sure son, I’ll fix you some fish.” But when he sets down the plate, there’s a poisonous viper on it. Or the father says: “Sure son, I’ll fix you some eggs.” But then he sets down a bowl, and there’s a scorpion. That would be like the world’s worst practical joke. We’d say a dad who did that was cruel, abusive even.

And Jesus is saying—not to put too fine a point on it: “Look, you guys aren’t exactly superstars of virtue. But even you know how to do what is best for your child. So if you can do that, don’t you think your Father in heaven can do the same?” He’s a perfect Father, not a defective parent like the rest of us. So He’s not about to play a cruel joke on us.

Now, notice, this does not necessarily mean that whenever we ask for fish we’ll get fish. Or, to put it another way, just because we ask God for candy it doesn’t mean He’ll give us candy. Human fathers know better than that, too. God’s not always going to answer every request exactly the way we ask it, but he’s not going to give us a snake or a scorpion either.

God is a perfect Father, and that means He will always give his asking children what is good for us. Listen to John Piper:

We must keep this simple fact before us: God is Father and we are children. The Father always keeps the right to do what is best for the children even if they don't understand why it is best. If this were not so, then we would be saying that we should run the Father's house. We should be the Father and he should be the child. Which in this case would mean we should rule the universe and God should learn from us how to do it.

Prayer has never meant that God should stop being God. We do not have the wisdom or the grace to run the universe. God is God. And he will continue to decide how to run the universe in the best way. If we ask him for a fish, he will not give us a snake, but he may give us Pepto Bismol or ibuprofen or grapefruit. He will give us what is good for us. (Ibid)

What this means is that if you have been praying for something to happen, and it doesn’t happen, or indeed the very opposite thing happened, what this means is that God did not give you some booby prize. He’s not playing a joke on you. Maybe you prayed for someone to be healed, but they died. Maybe you prayed for a job, but it went to someone else. Maybe you prayed for a relationship, but it still went south. You might feel like God gave you a snake. But He didn’t. You have to believe that your Father in Heaven knows what is best for you.

This is one of the reasons we pray “thy will be done” or “if it be your will.” That’s not a copout. That’s not an escape clause we put into our prayers so that if things don’t work out we let God off the hook. That’s not why we pray that way. Rather, we say “if it be your will” because we recognize He’s God, and we’re not. He’s got all the information. We don’t.

But as His children, we can trust that He knows what is best.

Never Give Up
Then, the fourth lesson from these verses: God wants us to persist in prayer. God desires for us to keep praying, and never give up. This is the point of the strange little parable about the neighbor. Verses 5 and 6:

This was a culture that placed a high value on hospitality. If someone showed up at your house at midnight—which wouldn’t have been all that unusual in a hot desert climate where it would be preferable to travel in the cool of the evening—there’s really little question that you would welcome him in. To refuse to show hospitality would bring shame upon you and your village. But you might not have bread ready at hand, so now you have to go check with your neighbor. Verse 7:

7"Then the one inside answers, 'Don't bother me. The door is already locked, and my children are with me in bed. I can't get up and give you anything.'

This would have been considered outrageous behavior. Since hospitality was so highly valued, it was considered a neighbor’s duty to help out whenever there were guests. Nobody in Jesus’ audience would ever have considered acting so rudely. Then comes the punch line. Verse 8:

8I tell you, though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man's boldness he will get up and give him as much as he needs.

The point is not to say that God is like a cranky, sleepy neighbor. Rather, as we just saw from verse 13, God is so much better that we flawed, imperfect, evil humans. So the point is that if even a sluggard of a neighbor will eventually respond to persistent and bold requests, how much more will God respond to your bold persistence in prayer?

This is Jesus’ point in verses 9-10:

Jesus is saying: Keep on asking, keep on seeking, keep on knocking; keep on asking.

God has His reasons for waiting. God has His reasons for answering our prayer differently than we might want. It won’t always make sense to us, just as a neighbor who won’t get out of bed wouldn’t have made sense. But God still wants us to keep asking. He wants us to keep knocking.

Because, notice. If the neighbor had not kept knocking, if he would have just given up after the first negative response, he never would have gotten what he wanted. Jesus says it is because of his boldness that he received.

Persistence in prayer will prevail with God where giving up won’t. God invites our argument. Even when He does not immediately grant our requests, that doesn’t mean He wants us to stop asking.

So how do we answer the question: Is there a right way to pray? There are lots of ways to pray, but here are four lessons from the master of prayer: put God at the center, confess your sins, trust that the Father knows what is best, and never give up. Keep on praying.