Lord, Teach Us to Pray
It's fascinating that when we look through the gospel accounts there is only one thing recorded that the disciples ask Jesus to teach them, "Lord, teach us to pray" (Luke 11:1). Not teach us to preach, or teach us to do miracles. But, teach us to pray. They asked this after seeing Jesus "praying in a certain place" by himself. This request wasn't asked because it was a strange occurrence they witnessed, but rather a pattern they had noticed in Jesus' life. Have you noticed it? Let's walk through just two chapters of the Gospel of Luke and take a look.
In Luke 4, Jesus spends forty days fasting and in solitude in the wilderness. In the second half of the chapter, we see him spend a day teaching in the synagogue, and at sunset he's healing all who came to him (v 40). Mark records for us what happens next after this extremely long day of ministry: "And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed." In the next chapter in Luke we read, "[A]nd great crowds gathered to hear him and to be healed of their infirmities. But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray." (Luke 5:15-16). This was his custom. When the demands seemed to be immense, scripture tells us how he withdrew to pray. Is this our custom and our pattern of dealing with the ever-present demands of life?
Our actions prove what we believe. If we struggle to pray, then it's because at our core we don't believe it's effective or really doing any good. If your missional community collects school supplies for children in need, you're doing something. If you serve on the connect team or in the nursery, you're doing something. These are good and necessary things! But the point is, it's much easier to do these things because we feel and believe we are actually doing something.
The early church believed their prayers did something. They believed that God heard them and that their prayers were effective and crucial to seeing the gospel transform everything around them. We are told in Acts 4:42 that the early church "devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer." Throughout the book of Acts we see multiple instances of the church coming together for corporate prayer (Acts 4:24; 12:5; 21:5) with one of them being an all-night prayer gathering where "many were gathered together praying" (Acts 12:12).
At New City, we often talk about our core identities of a family of missionary servants, disciples who make disciples. As a family who believes our heavenly Father cares for our needs, we should lift each other up in prayer, especially those in our missional communities. As missionaries under the leadership of Jesus, we should follow his strategy and command and "pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest." (Matt 9:38) As servants, we should cry out for justice, on behalf of our communities, our country and the world, knowing that "the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective" (James 5:16b) and the Spirit of God responds to our cries! As disciple makers, we teach others to pray as Jesus taught his disciples, by praying together.
One way we seek to flesh this out is by praying together before the service. As many as would like to participate are welcome to join us at the stage before the service begins and pray. Afterwards, go, empowered by the Spirit. As family, care for those whom the Lord brings to New City that morning.
Charles Spurgeon once took some people down to his Metropolitan Tabernacle basement to show them his “power plant.” There, on their knees, were about three hundred people praying for the service! The early church father John Chrysostom once said, “God can refuse nothing to a praying congregation!” Do we believe in the power of corporate prayer as they did?
The scriptures teach us something amazing about the activity of prayer in Exodus 17:8-13. Here we find the Israelites being attacked by the Amalekites. Whenever Moses' arms were stretched up towards God, holding his staff, the militarily untrained, recently-enslaved Israelites began to win the battle. When Moses let his arms down the Amalekites began to dominate again. What an old man does with his arms on top of the mountain shouldn’t have any effect on the battle in the valley below. But it does in the kingdom of God. And what you and I do sitting in our homes as families or missional communities, or in our sanctuary, while praying for a village in India or the needs of our community shouldn’t seem to have any effect logically, but it does in the kingdom of God.
Lord, teach us to pray.