A good understanding of prayer can change your life – forever. I can remember my High School years here in Ontario, where the day would always begin with opening announcements and a recitation of The Lord’s Prayer, from Matthew chapter 6 in the Bible. I was perhaps midway through, in my 3rd year when for the first time I realized that the Lord’s Prayer wasn’t just a prayer, it was an outline for prayer. I thought you were just supposed to memorize the Lord’s Prayer and recite it whenever it was time to pray. And at that particular age and stage, the twenty-one seconds it took for me to say the Lord’s Prayer was just about how long I spent in prayer. Beyond that I probably didn’t know what to say. So, like most of my friends and many of the Christians I knew, I would simply recite the Lord’s Prayer, maybe give God a few requests, and call it a day.
Learning to consider the Lord’s Prayer as an outline, a model for prayer, remains one of the greatest discoveries you can make as you consider the teachings of Jesus. When his disciples asked Him to teach them to pray, Jesus used a technique that many rabbis used – teaching God’s truth by providing an outline drawn from the Scriptures. The disciples already knew how to pray based on their upbringing. They had learned traditional prayers that most Jewish boys would have memorized. But Jesus wasn’t praying as they had been taught, so they asked him to teach them to do it his way. So that’s exactly what Jesus did; he gave them the gift of an outline for how to talk to the Father.
Having a plan in place when you pray goes a long way toward deepening your relationship with God. A prayer plan facilitates staying focused and going deeper. The primary components of prayer planning are model prayers. These are not scripted prayers to be read verbatim but simply outlines that can help you include elements of prayer such as giving thanks, confession, and petition. Jesus himself gave us the best model prayer of all.
“Our Father in Heaven, Hallowed be Your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we have also forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.” – Jesus in Matthew 6:9-13
It’s important to realize that Jesus wasn’t teaching us words to memorize but rather how to connect with God. He had a relational goal in mind. It’s difficult to grasp how radical it was for his disciples to hear that they (and we) should connect with God relationally. And not just relationally, but we should begin by calling God our Father, which Jesus implies may be his favorite title. It’s similar to when we address our earthly fathers as Daddy or Papa. It’s warm and personal; familiar and comfortable. We can speak to God as his sons and daughters. God wants to enjoy a personal/family relationship with you. And nothing will determine your relationship with God more than your view of him. God loves for us to come to him as children who love him and want to spend time with him.
