A Word about Healthy Prayer

Today I want to share a word about healthy prayer as I comment on Matthew 6:7-13, which reads:

“And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this: Our Father in heaven hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” 

We're in the middle of a series on the characteristics of healthy churches as taught by the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. As our churches rebuild their ministries after the ravages of a year of dealing with COVID-19, they should consider how they can be rebuilt in a healthy manner. The IMB teaches that a key element of a healthy church is the practice of healthy prayer.

I will be the first to confess that I do not know enough about prayer. I do not know how prayer works and I also know that my prayer life could use improvement. That being said, this passage of scripture does teach us all that we need to know about prayer, which is logical considering this is our Lord's central teaching about how to pray. 

What does this passage, which we often call the Lord’s Prayer, teach us about healthy prayer?

First, Healthy Prayer is Relationship:

Dr. Ken Hemphill, in his study “The Prayer of Jesus” said that prayer is really about a relationship with our Father. Prayer should be an on-going, day-long conversation with Him. We see this in the preamble to the Lord’s Prayer, because in Verse 7, Jesus assumed that the disciples would pray regularly because He said, “when you pray . . .”

When I say I don't understand how prayer works, what I mean is that we know that God knows everything and that He is all loving and all caring for His people. So, therefore, if He knows everything and loves us why does He not just act without us praying?

In truth He often does act without us praying, but the issue is God wants a relationship with His children. Like a human parent who loves a child, Our Father loves us, and He wants to relate to us. He wants to talk with us, and like with Adam and Eve, He wants to walk with us in the garden in the cool of the day. 

Therefore, prayer is not transactional; we ask God for something, and He responds, like the way a college student may call home asking for money. No, prayer is relational; it is us spending time in fellowship with our God and our Father.

Next, Healthy Prayer is Recognition:

As Jesus moved on to teaching about how to pray, He began with a recognition of who God is. 

First and foremost, He asserted that God is Our Father. We know that human fathers are frail and limited but Our Father in heaven is not. He is the ultimate example of a father to us. As we pray, we need to be praying as if we are speaking with the best father ever, because He is!

Of course, God is more than Father He is also Lord. He is mighty and lifted-up and He is sovereign. And He deserves to be praised and honored!

So, this opening to prayer sets the stage for our relationship with God. Our relationship with God is both personal because he loves us, and also transcendent, because he is the God of the universe. This is an amazing, if pithy, expression of God's ability to balance all parts of our relationship with him. 

Humans struggle with having a balanced life, but God never does, and our prayer life must be founded on this balanced relationship with him.

We Also See That Healthy Prayer Is Resolution:

Because of whom Our Father is and because of our relationship to Him of love through our Lord Jesus Christ we can resolve to commit ourselves to Him. 

This portion of our prayer recognizes that God loves us and His will for us and for this world is perfect. It is an expression of our alignment with God's purposes, intention, and will. It is also an expression of our trust in our Lord because we commit ourselves to his timing also.

To say that we don't always understand what God is doing is an understatement. If we understood God, what kind of God would He be? What we need to know is that God has the best of intentions for us, and we need to align our hearts with His purpose.

It is easy for us to accept God's will when it is pleasant and easy. It is another thing entirely when God's will is a time of testing or trials for us to endure. Yet as we pray in accordance with Jesus’s model, we need to express our commitment and our resolution to bow our knee to Our Father and to trust Him with our entire being.

Finally, We See That Healthy Prayer Is Reconciliation:

Like any good father our God expects His children their petitions to Him. Good fathers love to help their children with their problems. I think where we go wrong in our prayer, however, is how we understand God’s priorities.

As we bring our needs to God we often focus on our temporal needs: our health, our wealth, our happiness, and our security. God is concerned about these things, and He is happy to help us with them. The thing that we forget, however, is that God has more serious issues that he wants us to deal with.

God does want us to be reconciled with our day-to-day circumstances, but the prayer that Jesus taught us reveals that God is more concerned about our reconciliation with Him and with our brothers and sisters in Christ, than He is with our everyday issues of life. 

As we see in the Ten Commandments, God is concerned about our relationship with Him and with the other people whom He created. I believe if we focused more on that issue rather than our own well-being, our prayer life would be much healthier.

This is also borne out by Verses 14 and 15, which instruct us, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

If we are to practice healthy prayer, reconciliation must become more important to us than it is for God to respond to our personal needs!

Conclusion:

While we call this prayer the Lord's Prayer, in truth it is better termed the Model Prayer or as some people call it, our Family Prayer. If we really wanted to see the Lord's prayer, we should consider the High Priestly Prayer found in John Chapter 17, but that is an aside.

The fact is healthy prayer does not have to be perfect prayer. Prayer is like anything else we do in life; it is an iterative thing. The more we pray the better we will be at it. In fact, I think a great model for us as we pray is Daniel, so I will close with his example. 

Even though King Darius had signed an immutable law which prohibited anyone from praying to another god except him, Daniel 6:10 tells us,

“When Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem. He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously.”

Persistence in prayer goes a long way toward making up for our deficiencies in prayer. As we develop healthy prayer in our churches and in our lives, let us follow the examples set for us by Daniel, and by our Lord Jesus!

Every blessing,

Dr. Otis Corbitt