New Testament Prayer for Everyone

Tom Wright

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780281069064
• eBook ISBN: 9780281069071
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

This helpful and collection of Tom Wright's insights into the meaning and practice of prayer, gives you all the accessible wisdom of the various New Testament prayers explored in his individual 'For Everyone' commentaries.

This convenient yet compact collection of explorations includes his own thoughtful translations and meditations on all the major prayers of the New Testament.

Reasons to add 'New Testament Prayers for Everyone' to your collection:

- Get Tom Wrights reliable, readable insights
- Benefit from his own translation from the original manuscripts
- Understand the key teachings of New Testament writers
- Find how the hopes and fears of the early Church compare to today's
- Make yourself an expert in the earliest written Christian prayers
- Find the through line from the apostles to your prayers today

Tom Wright on 'The Lord's Prayer':
"References to Jesus' own practice of private prayer are scattered throughout the Gospels and clearly reflect an awareness on the part of his first followers that this kind of private prayer - not simply formulaic petitions, but wrestling with God over real issues and questions - formed the undercurrent of his life and public work. The prayer that Jesus gave his followers embodies his own prayer life and his wider kingdom ministry in every clause."

There are many books about prayer, but this is the first by Tom Wright to cover all the key teachings and examples to be found in the New Testament.

PART 1

NEW TESTAMENT TEACHING ON PRAYER

1

THE TEACHING OF JESUS

PRAYER IN SECRET

Matthew 6.5 – 6

⁵‘When you pray, you mustn’t be like the play-actors. They love to pray standing in the synagogues and on street corners, so that people will notice them. I’m telling you the truth: they have received their reward in full. ⁶No: when you pray, go into your own room, shut the door, and pray to your father who is there in secret. And your father, who sees in secret, will repay you.’

Once, when living in the Middle East, I went out for a walk in the afternoon. On my way home, feeling slightly hungry, I bought a bar of chocolate at a wayside stall. I got back home, went to my room, made a cup of tea, unwrapped the chocolate and broke off a piece to eat it. Fortunately I glanced down at the chocolate before I put it in my mouth. When I did so I dropped it with a shout. It was alive. Inside what looked like a perfectly ordinary bar of chocolate were hundreds of tiny wriggling worms.

Jesus didn’t know about chocolate, but he did know about things that looked fine on the outside but were rotten on the inside. Here, at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, we find his shrewd comments on what it means to live a life that is, so to speak, solid chocolate all the way through.

Jesus doesn’t say that outward things don’t matter. Giving money to those in need, praying to God day by day, and fasting when it’s appropriate – he assumes that people will continue to do all of these. What matters is learning to do them simply to and for God himself. All the Sermon on the Mount, in fact, is centred on God himself, who easily gets squeezed out of religion if we’re not careful.

Jesus also assumes that there is benefit to be had from doing these things. Many people imagine that he is asking us to do everything with no thought of reward, and are then rather shocked when he repeats, three times, his belief that our heavenly father will repay us (Matthew 6 verses 4, 6, 18). Clearly, Jesus is not so bothered about the notion of disinterested behaviour, or ‘altruism’, as we sometimes are. In fact, what he says is far more realistic. If we struggle to clear our hearts of any desire to do something, so that we are acting from totally pure motives, we will always find a little corner of desire somewhere – even the desire to behave altruistically! Then, instead of looking away from ourselves and towards God, we find ourselves focusing back on ourselves again, wanting to please not God but our own ideal of lofty, disinterested action.

The same applies to prayer. What you are in private is what you really are. Go into your inner room and talk to your father. You don’t have to make a song and dance about it, and indeed the fewer people that know you’re doing it the better. Nor do you have to go on mouthing pious phrases. You may find there are forms of words which help, as a framework or a starting point; Jesus is about to give the disciples the framework he particularly recommends. But the point is to do business with God, one to one.

Jesus doesn’t say what kind of reward we should expect. That, too, is part of the point. Simply knowing God better is reward enough; but there may be other things as well. You never know till you try. What is clear is that he is inviting his followers to a life in which inside and outside match perfectly, because both are focused on the God who sees in secret.

THE LORD’S PRAYER

Matthew 6.7–15

⁷‘When you pray, don’t pile up a jumbled heap of words! That’s what the Gentiles do. They reckon that the more they say, the more likely they are to be heard. ⁸So don’t be like them. You see, your father knows what you need before you ask him.

⁹‘So this is how you should pray:

Our father in heaven,

may your name be honoured

¹⁰may your kingdom come

may your will be done

as in heaven, so on earth.

¹¹Give us today the bread we need now;

¹²and forgive us the things we owe,

as we too have forgiven what was owed to us.

¹³Don’t bring us into the great trial,

but rescue us from evil.

¹⁴‘Yes: if you forgive people the wrong they have done, your heavenly father will forgive you as well. ¹⁵But if you don’t forgive people, neither will your heavenly father forgive you what you have done wrong.’

I was talking to a friend who had the reputation of being one of the finest preachers in the area. How did he go about it, I asked. He had no particular technique, he said; he just puzzled over the biblical readings that were set for that day until a framework emerged. Once he’d got a framework it was just a matter of writing it out.

That, of course, was a deceptively simple answer, and we can only guess at the hours of struggle and prayer that were disguised by such a short, and humble, response. But it’s often the case, in many areas of life, that we blunder around until we find a framework around which we can build. And this is almost always true with prayer.

Jesus contrasts the sort of praying he has in mind with the sort that went on in much of the non-Jewish world. We know from many writings and inscriptions that many non-Jews did indeed use multiple formulae in their prayers: long, complicated magic words which they would repeat over and over in their anxiety to persuade some god or goddess to be favourable to them. Such prayers are often marked by a note of uncertainty. There were many divinities in the ancient pagan world, and nobody quite knew which one might need pacifying next, or with what formula.

This is hardly surprising. Prayer is one of life’s great mysteries. Most people pray at least sometimes; some people, in many very different religious traditions, pray a great deal. At its lowest, prayer is shouting into a void on the off-chance there may be someone out there listening. At its highest, prayer merges into love, as the presence of God becomes so real that we pass beyond words and into a sense of his reality, generosity, delight and grace. For most Christians, most of the time, it takes place somewhere in between those two extremes. To be frank, for many people it is not just a mystery but a puzzle. They know they ought to do it but they aren’t quite sure how.

What the Lord’s Prayer provides, here at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, is a framework. Jesus doesn’t say you should always use identical words, and actually when Luke gives his version of the prayer it is different in small but interesting ways (Luke 11.2– 4). It looks as though Jesus intended this sequence of thought to act more like the scaffolding than the whole building, though of course the prayer is used as it stands (usually in the longer version we find here in Matthew) by countless Christians every day. Already by Jesus’ day the Jewish patterns of prayer were well established, with short but powerful prayers to be said three times a day. Maybe Jesus intended this prayer to be used like that as well.

What then does the prayer tell us about our regular approach to God? First, and so obvious that we might miss it, the prayer is deeply meaningful. It isn’t a magic formula, an ‘abracadabra’, which plugs into some secret charm or spell. It is something we can mean with our minds (though it will stretch our thinking) as well as say with our lips. It implies strongly that we humans can and should use our ordinary language in talking to the creator of the universe, and that he wants and intends us to do so. It implies, in other words, that we share with the one true God a world of meaning which he wants us to explore.

Second, everything is set within our calling God ‘father’ (as Jesus does throughout this Sermon – in fact, we could suggest that a title for the whole Sermon might be, ‘What it means to call God “father”’). For Jews in Jesus’ day, this title for God went back to God’s action in the Exodus, rescuing Israel from Egypt and so demonstrating that ‘Israel is my son, my firstborn’ (Exodus 4.22).

Third, this God is not a man-made idol. He is the living God, who dwells in ‘heaven’, and longs to see his sovereign and saving rule come to birth on ‘earth’. This is, in fact, a prayer for the kingdom of God to become fully present: not for God’s people to be snatched away from earth to heaven, but for the glory and beauty of heaven to be turned into earthly reality as well. When that is done, God’s name – his character, his reputation, his very presence – will be held in high honour everywhere. The first half of the prayer is thus all about God. Prayer that doesn’t start there is always in danger of concentrating on ourselves, and very soon it stops being prayer altogether and collapses into the random thoughts, fears and longings of our own minds.

Fourth, though, because this God is the creator, who loves his world and his human creatures, we can ask him for everything we need in the safe knowledge that he is far more concerned about it all even than we are ourselves. Much of the rest of the chapter spells this out. But if we are truly praying this prayer to God’s honour, we can never simply pray for food for ourselves. We must pray for the needs of the whole world, where millions go hungry and many starve. And already we may sense, bubbling up out of the prayer, the realization that if we truly pray it we might also have to do something about it, to become part of God’s answer to our own praying.

Fifth, we pray for forgiveness. Unlike some religions, in which every single action carrys eternal and unbreakable consequences, at the heart of Judaism and Christianity lies the belief that, though human actions matter very deeply, forgiveness is possible and, through God’s love, can become actual. Jesus assumes that we will need to ask for forgiveness not on one or two rare occasions but very regularly. This is a sobering thought, but it is matched by the comforting news that forgiveness is freely available as often as we need it.

There is, however, a condition, which remarkably enough is brought right into the prayer itself: we ourselves must be forgiving people. Jesus takes an extra moment afterwards to explain why. The heart that will not open to forgive others will remain closed when God’s own forgiveness is offered.

The prayer ends with a sombre and realistic note. Jesus believed that the great time of testing was coming upon the world, and that he would have to walk alone into its darkness. His followers should pray to be spared it. Even now, in the light of Easter and with the guidance and power of the holy spirit, we still need to pray in this way. There will come yet more times of crisis, times when all seems dark for the world, the church, and in our own hearts and lives. If we follow a crucified Messiah, we shouldn’t expect to be spared the darkness ourselves. But we must, and may, pray to be kept from its worst ravages, and to be delivered from evil, both in the abstract and in its personified form, ‘the evil one’.

Here is the framework Jesus knew we would need. Here is your heavenly father waiting and longing for you to use it day by day as you grow in your knowledge, love and service of him. What is stopping you from making it your own?

ASK, SEARCH, KNOCK

Matthew 7.7–12

⁷‘Ask and it will be given to you! Search and you will find! Knock and the door will be opened for you! ⁸Everyone who asks receives; everyone who searches finds; everyone who knocks will have the door opened. ⁹Don’t you see? Supposing your son asks you for bread – which of you is going to give him a stone? ¹⁰Or if he asks for a fish – which of you is going to give him a serpent? ¹¹Well then: if you know how to give good gifts to your children, evil as you are, how much more will your father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

¹²‘So whatever you want people to do to you, do just that to them. Yes; this is what the law and the prophets are all about.’

I hate fundraising. Many people are good at it; many actually enjoy it; but I can’t stand it. I hate asking people for things anyway, and asking for money is the worst of all. As a result, I’m not very good at it. I understand that in some countries it’s expected that clergy, and people in similar jobs, should cheerfully ask people to give to good causes. In my world, it always seems difficult and embarrassing.

So when I read a passage like this I find it very hard to believe, and I have to remind myself of what it’s based on. Does Jesus really mean that God is going to answer every request we make? That he is like a father longing to give his children what they want and need? Can we truly take him up on such remarkably open-ended promises?

I think sometimes our failure to believe such promises, and to act on them, doesn’t come so much from a failure of faith in God but from a natural human reluctance, like my dislike of fundraising. Maybe I was taught when I was little not to go on asking for things all the time. It’s too long ago to remember. But I suspect many people have that instinctive reluctance to ask for things; if pressed, they might say it was selfish, or that God had better things to do with his time than to provide whatever we suddenly happen to want.

Well, that may or may not be true, but it would be a shame to tone down one of the most sparkling and generous sets of promises anywhere in the Bible. Maybe it isn’t ‘selfish’ to ask for things. Maybe it’s just the natural thing that children are supposed to do with parents. Maybe our refusal to do so actually makes God sad or puzzled: why aren’t his children telling him how it is for them, what they’d like him to do for them? Of course, generosity of spirit is easily abused, and we all know the caricatures of people asking God for wildly inappropriate things in orde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: New Testament teaching on prayer
• Part 2: Prayers of the New Testament
• Questions for discussion and reflection