E. M. Bounds wrote:
“Prayer should not be regarded as a duty which must be performed, but rather as a privilege to be enjoyed, a rare delight that is always revealing some new beauty.”
Simply put, prayer is having a conversation with God.
It’s been said that “To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.”
To have physical breath is to breathe.
To know God is to pray.
In some ways, prayer should be the easiest, most natural thing we do—as natural as breathing.
After all, part of what it means to be made in the image of God means He’s created us to have this ongoing prayer conversation with Him.
But it’s not always that simple in practice, is it?
For me, praying well has often been a struggle—both in the “how” and sometimes in the “want to.”
Which I suppose is why i love the way Luke 11 records the set up to Jesus teaching His disciples The Lord’s Prayer.
Luke 11:1-2a: 1 He was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John also taught his disciples.” 2 He said to them, “Whenever you pray, say…” (CSB)
After that Jesus went right into teaching them what we call The Lord’s Prayer. (Perhaps better thought of as The Disciple’s Prayer. Yes, it is FROM Jesus, but He gave it FOR His disciples to pray.)
The reference to “John” in Luke 11:1 refers to John the Baptist, the cousin of Jesus, the preacher-prophet who proclaimed Jesus’ time of arrival had come.
As John had taught his disciples to pray, so this unnamed disciple asked Jesus to do the same.
Note that this question is asked immediately after seeing Jesus pray.
Jesus’ disciples are like, “Lord, some of us learned about prayer from John the Baptist. But there’s something special, Jesus, about the way You pray. We thought we knew how to pray, but You make it clear there’s a lot more for us to learn. Lord, teach us to pray.”
I don’t know about you but this request to learn how to pray encourages me.
If we want to get better at prayer, it is something we can be taught.
It’s something we can learn!
Like any of the other spiritual disciplines, it’s something we can get better at over time.
Prayer warrior E. M. Bounds wrote: “The most important lesson we can learn is how to pray.”
