A Transforming Vision

The Lord's Prayer as a Lens for Life

William Edgar

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781781914076

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Why Pray at All?

Prayer is an engine wieldable by every believer, mightier than all the embattled artillery of hell. Never out of season, nor to be deemed a drudgery, it is to be plied indefatigable, with a compass coextensive with the church universal.

(E. K. Simpson & F. F. Bruce)

Guilt

Prayer is not often thought of as carrying a major philosophy of life. Most people consider prayer to be connected with worship, and making requests to God. And so it is. Or, they consider prayer is what you do early in the morning, before meals and just before going to bed. And so it should be. Prayer in this sense is a habit, a good one. But few of us live the entire reality of prayer. Few of us are in such regular conversation with God. For many of us prayer is like the bread on each side of a sandwich. It is like getting dressed each day. Prayer is like punctuation. For the Lord Jesus and the heroes found in the Bible, as we shall see, prayer is far, far more.

To be honest, the first reaction many of us have to the subject of prayer is guilt. Robert Murray McCheyne once said, ‘You wish to humble a man? Ask him about his prayer life.’ Very few of us pray as we should, whether in quantity or in quality. Yes, we make new resolutions from time to time to pray more, especially after something has prompted us: a crisis, a feeling of emptiness, a good book or sermon on prayer, observing a praying person, either from the past or in our present experience. But then the good intentions fade away and we are back into the busyness of living. Guilt! We have heard that Martin Luther prayed a good deal first thing in the morning, but when a really busy day was ahead of him, he got up even earlier to pray even more. Guilt! We may have read biographies of George Whitefield, in which we learn how he read God’s Word on his knees and prayed over portions of it for hours on end. Guilt! Perhaps we are familiar with St. Teresa of Avila’s nine grades of prayer: vocal, meditation, affective, simple, etc. Guilt! Or we may have paused over some of the extensive prayers recorded in Scripture. Think of Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the temple requiring 50 verses in 1 Kings 8, which we suspect was just a brief summary. Or, those wide-ranging Psalms which qualify as prayers. And, even though he railed against the long prayers of the Pharisees, Jesus himself prayed extensively. ‘And rising very early in the morning, while it was yet dark, he departed and went to a desolate place, and there he prayed’ (Mark 1:35). Guilt!

Guilt is not particularly productive nor constructive. It may provide an initial prodding, but then we need to move on to something not only positive but lasting. How can we find such a way? The answer is really quite simple. Not easy, but simple. If our prayer life is less than it should be, then likely it has little to do with discipline or method. Those are helpful, but they are beside the main problem. What is the main problem? Simply, our view of God is less than it should be. The greater our God, the more significant will be our prayer life. Put differently, it’s all about our worldview, our vision. ‘Prayer presupposes faith,’ as the great French sociologist Jacques Ellul explains in his book on prayer. ‘To raise the problem of prayer, of the difficulty of praying, etc., is in reality to raise the problem of faith in the contemporary world… Prayer is a mirror in which we are called to contemplate our spiritual state.’ ³

Two trends, particularly in the West, militate against a productive prayer life. The first is secularization. That word is loaded, and here is not the place to explore the concept as it deserves. Simply put, secularization means the functional absence of God in our lives. One legacy of the Enlightenment, though not the only one, is to believe we only need our unaided reason to function in life. If there is a God, he is in the gaps. Secularization means to think and live as though he were not really a significant factor, either intellectually or in practice. ⁴

Before he became such a powerful voice into the twentieth century, Francis Schaeffer made a crucial discovery. He asked his wife, Edith, a haunting question: ‘What if we woke up one morning and found our Bibles changed? What if God himself had removed everything in it about the Holy Spirit and prayer? What real difference would it make in our lives?’ Precious little, they decided. The Schaeffers then resolved to live and act in the reality of God’s presence. Indeed, the concept of reality is found everywhere in the Schaeffers’ discourses and writings. Francis Schaeffer often referred to what he called the ‘two chairs.’ Christians can sit either in the ‘chair of unfaith’ or the ‘chair of faith.’ Being in the first chair does not mean you are an unbeliever, but that you do not operate in the light of the reality of the supernatural. In the chair of faith, you recognize the full reality of the supernatural world. You could be like the apostle Paul who had visited the ‘third heaven’ (2 Cor. 12:1–5). There he heard things that cannot be told (v. 4). Schaeffer asks us to imagine coming back down and seeing the world with new eyes. Living, then, in the chair of faith, prayer life will be greatly enhanced. ⁵

The second trend is simply busyness. Although we only have ourselves to blame, the world demands more and more of our time for things that are means, not ends. How many of us are bound to various electronic leashes? Ask yourself, what did you do with your time prior to emails and texting? As most people do, I own a mobile phone. I even have an iPad. These devices are of course marvelously useful. But whereas I might have read a book, or talked to a real person, I now tend to send messages. I communicate rather than commune. I text rather than talk. And I notice myself being less and less patient with ordinary tasks, such as driving to the market, waiting for a letter, even walking through a museum. As Blaise Pascal told his seventeenth century readers, ‘When all is equally agitated, nothing appears to be agitated, as in a ship. When all tend to debauchery, none appears to do so. He who stops draws attention to the excess of others, like a fixed point.’ ⁶

In such an atmosphere prayer is necessarily diminished. You simply cannot (and should not) text the Lord God. Prayer takes thought, and it takes time. Praying slowly and carefully can only be cultivated when we make time for doing it. Finding the time is more than a matter of getting up earlier, or making lists and carefully going through them. That may have to happen. But something more radical is needed. We will have to change our lifestyle so that such times for meditation are not just fit-in, but are natural. Consider the ten commandments as guides for the Christian life. None of these commandments, rightly understood, are push-button. They can be accomplished externally, but that is not the point. Not committing murder, adultery or theft is far more than refraining from pulling the trigger, going to bed with the wrong person or embezzling funds. No, these ‘rules’ are guidelines for an entire way of life. They speak to our hearts. We need to be retrained in order to develop love and respect for our friends to the point where we are doing far more than avoiding maligning, cheating or ripping them off. Instead, we are enjoined to cultivate such a deep respect, such esteem and reverence for our neighbors, that we could not imagine taking advantage of them. Well, the same can be said for prayer. We don’t just pray out of duty, resigning ourselves to God’s command to pray. Instead, we should cultivate a love for conversing with the living God, the Lord who is ready to hear, and we should long for those times when we can speak our deepest thoughts to him. We ought to relish time for prayer, publically and privately, and feel frustrated when they are not abundant. Prayer, like matters of moral comportment, is a lifestyle issue.

And it takes an entire life to learn them. Apparently, after an astonishing concert, a fawning fan approached the great pianist Ignacy Paderewski, and told him, ‘I would give my whole life to play the piano like you.’ To which he answered, ‘And that, dear friend, is exactly what it would take.’ Most of us could not approach Paderewski’s music after several lifetimes. But the point is, developing a habit, such as prayer, is a matter of a life commitment.

The first principle of prayer

Let us break down the components of prayer. First of all, it is we who pray. This may seem obvious. There is no coin to insert, no mouse to click, and no requisite spiritual posture to guarantee good praying. God does not pray in our stead. We pray. So, then what is prayer, considering the one who prays? Put one way, prayer is intercession. Human beings may intercede for one another. Lawyers intercede before the judge. Parents plead on behalf of their children. Similarly, praying to the Lord is to make intercession (1 Sam. 2:5; Isa. 59:16; Jer. 27:18). We even coin the term, ‘intercessory prayer.’ The word generally means to plead, or to liaise.

At the same time, prayer is not just any intercession. Prayer is the elevation of the soul to God. As Jean-Rodolphe Ostervald, pastor of the French church in Basel in the late seventeenth century, tells us about the nature of prayer in his marvelous book of daily devotions, ‘King David says it best in Psalm 25:1, “To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul”.’ Ostervald reckons we learn about three aspects of prayer from these simple words. (1) Prayer must originate in our soul or in the heart, not merely on our lips. (2) Prayer must be addressed to the Lord, the true God, the only one able to hear us. (3) David’s expression underscores the zeal, the ardor, the sincerity with which we must pray. ⁷

Everything hinges on our attitude in praying. In a word, we want to pray in faith. Behind a healthy faith stands a healthy view of the world. Here is where our counter-cultural apologetics comes into play. An amusing story in the Book of Acts (12:1–19) illustrates how prayer can become perfunctory or routine. The apostle Peter had been locked up in a tight security prison for having preached the gospel. The church was earnestly praying for him. The night before his trial an angel came to the prison, woke Peter up, and guided him to the exit, as his chains miraculously fell off. The liberated Peter went to Mary’s house and knocked on the door. There a prayer meeting was going on… for him! Rhoda, the house servant, went to answer, and recognized Peter’s voice. In her joy she went back inside and proclaimed to the gathered group that he was free. They didn’t believe her. ‘You are out of your mind,’ they told her. It can’t be true. He kept knocking. Finally they opened the door, and sure enough, it was Peter. What was happening here? They were saying, in effect, ‘you can’t be Peter, we’ve been praying for your release, but we know it is not likely to happen.’

The story is amusing but also convicting. How often do we pray for things, resigned that nothing much will happen? We assume nothing is going to change. Instead of believing in the living God for whom nothing is impossible, we have become functional fatalists. Perhaps, we believe, some force may govern events without much real care for our needs. The end of a war? Unrealistic. A hostile relative? He will never change. One of our French friends once told us that France would never respond to the gospel today. Astonished, we asked him how he knew that. His answer was, they have had their chance. When? At the Reformation. They started to respond but then turned their backs on the gospel, so God gave up on them. ⁸ Our friend had resigned himself to a world of no real change. He had forgotten that God does not rule as a grudging head of state, weary of his people. He does not give us just one chance, and then wash his hands. As long as the end of the world has not yet come, all people everywhere may still repent (Acts 17:30).

The same sentiment is behind the (musically beautiful) hymn, by James Lowell, ‘Once to Every Man and Nation.’ He wrote it in 1845, to protest America’s war with Mexico.

Once to every man and nation,

comes the moment to decide,

In the strife of truth with falsehood,

for the good or evil side;

Some great cause, some great decision,

offering each the bloom or blight,

And the choice goes by forever,

‘twixt that darkness and that light.

Not very good poetry, the hymn goes on to plead for us to pursue the truth, no matter how costly. In all, these words are quite man-centered. Why only once? Why does the power to offer bloom or blight reside in humanity? The hymn is close to fatalism: once we make the wrong choice, we’re locked-in.

In contrast, the biblical view informs us that we have a merciful God, always ready to hear us and shed his grace upon us.

The Lord is merciful and gracious,

Slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

He will not always chide,

Nor will he keep his anger forever.

He does not deal with us according to our sins,

Nor repay us according to our iniquities…

As a father shows compassion to his children,

So the Lord shows compassion on those who fear him

(Ps. 103:8–10, 13).

This Psalm is truly God-centered, though without minimizing human responsibility. Indeed, it is when we have a proper fear of God, and a confidence in his love, prayer begins to take on far more reality than any fatalism can explain. We need to make it clear that our prayers are effective not because of anything in the formulation, or even in the thoughts of our hearts, but because we have a merciful God, who gives us a first chance, a second chance, a third, fourth and on to the next time we cry out to him.

We might note with some interest how Paul appeals to us to pray in Ephesians 6. He uses the wonderful image of the soldier taking up the whole armor of God against rulers and spiritual forces, which has inspired many a preacher and many a story-teller: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of the gospel, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit are the indispensible protective covering for the believer doing battle with the enemies of the kingdom (Eph. 6:13–17). But it is significant, is it not, that prayer is not among the portions of the armor? One of the reasons is surely that prayer is so important, it is not on the list, but treated separately. More than these accoutrements, prayer is simply fundamental: ‘praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication for all the saints, and also for me…’ (Eph. 6:18).

Thus, prayer is intercession. It is we who pray, not God praying for us. Yet our earthly intercession only makes sense if the God to whom we pray is ready to listen, full of mercy and grace.

Three powerful intercessors

So, prayer is lifting up the soul. We pray. It is our intercession. Yet, according to the Christian worldview, we are not alone as intercessors. Indeed, what allows our prayers to be effective is not primarily our human agency, important though that may be. Rather it is the intercession of God, the Holy Trinity. Though one in essence, our God exists in three separate Persons. Their purpose, while united, is also expressed through each of the Persons in a particular way. God the Father cares about the needs of his people. God the Son opens up the way into his heavenly presence. And God the Holy Spirit applies all of the Lord’s grace to every area of our lives, particularly to efficacy in prayer.

(1) God the Father. Thus we can understand something of the relation of our human, earthly intercession, with God’s heavenly intercession. God the Father is the holy judge of the universe. But he is also infinitely gracious and merciful. What matters to us also matters to God. So we come confidently to him. We come as advocates, interceding on behalf of people or concerns. At the same time, our concerns become the Father’s concerns. To illustrate the need to intercede with perseverance in the face of a God who cares about us, Jesus told the story of the importunate widow (Luke 18:1–8). Though the judge in this story was hard-hearted, the woman kept coming to him, insisting that he hear her case. Finally he responded, weary of her pleas. God, Jesus taught, is far more responsive than a sedentary judge. He is a Father. He cares for his people. He will come just when it is right, without undue delay, because he hears their cry, day and night. If human magistrates need to be prodded to rescue widows, God is particularly sensitive to the plight of widows, orphans and aliens, as he tells us repeatedly in his Word. When our prayers are perfunctory, that would be for one of two reasons. Perhaps we have ceased caring for our cause. Or, worse, it could be because we have ceased believing God really wants to respond.

We often have a vision of God as a fitful tyrant. Certainly he is a judge and it is proper to fear him with reverence. But the Bible describes him as a Father, one who is generous with his children. The preacher and theologian Sinclair Ferguson likes to say God saves, not reluctantly, but relentlessly. Indeed, Jesus told his disciples that if even earthly fathers who are sinners know how to give good gifts to his children, how much more will the heavenly Father give us the very best. Luke records it this way: ‘If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him! (Luke 11:13). God rewards those who seek him (Heb. 11:6); he is just that kind of God. So God himself is our intercessor. But there is more to it than simply that.

(2) God the Son. Gloriously, God the Son has become our major access to God. The Son became a man, and opened the way for our entrance into God’s presence. The entire Old Testament tells of the way God came down to earth in order to bring his people into his presence. Various images help explain this journey. The people were to build a temple for the Lord to dwell in, a place where he could meet with them. Going up to Jerusalem on special occasions was a joyful parade, leading to Mount Zion and then to the temple. The people sang the Songs of Ascent (Psalms 120–134) as they marched. The problem when they arrived is that no one could enter the most holy place inside. The high priest could, but only once a year, having performed a blood sacrifice for himself and for the people. The final fulfillment of this picture is Jesus Christ, who entered Jerusalem in triumph, on a colt, with the crowds singing from Psalm 118. Then he was put to death, rising from the dead on the first Easter Sunday.

Now Jesus is our true high priest. As the Book of Hebrews argues forcefully, Jesus not only went into the holy of holies, but gave us access to the throne of grace (Heb. 4:14; 9:11–14). Because he suffered so, he understands us. He sympathizes. He makes propitiation for us (Heb. 2:17–18). Because of his once and for all death on Calvary’s cross, this propitiation applies in the present. He is our advocate with the Father and the propitiation for our sins (1 John 2:1–2). The Father always hears him, not only because he is his eternal Son, but because he perfectly obeyed him in his life and death on earth (Heb. 5:8–10). He did this all for us, his beloved people. In what we call the ‘High Priestly Prayer,’ recorded in John 17, Jesus prays to the Father and makes all of these connections. He asked for his people, reminding the Father that he perfectly accomplished all that was required of him. Now that he is about to depart the world, through death, he entrusts his people to the Father’s care. And the Father is delighted to answer him. Indeed, the whole purpose of the Son’s incarnation, of his death and resurrection, was to give us access to God’s grace (Rom. 5:2). And this open door makes the success of our prayers assured. And there is still more to it than even this wonderful truth.

(3) God the Holy Spirit. As if this provision were not enough, the third Person of the Trinity is also here to intercede for us. If the Father is the one who welcomes us, and if Christ is our heavenly advocate, we also have an earthly one, the Spirit of God. John extensively records the last teachings of Christ to his disciples in what we know as the Upper Room Discourse (John 13–17). Here Jesus promised the disciples that when he went away he and the Father would make their home with believers (John 14:23). He does that by the Holy Spirit whom he sends in his name. The Spirit is called our Helper (in the King James, the Comforter, see John 14:16, 26; 15:26; 16:7). The Greek word is paraclete which can mean helper or comforter, but also has a more juridical connotation. The Spirit is an advocate, a counselor, an intercessor. The Holy Spirit is the agent of God’s presence and strength in the life of the church. He seals us in Christ, so that our inheritance is sure (Eph. 1:13–14). He gives us new life, resurrection life, and sets us free to please God, which we cannot do by nature (Rom. 8:2, 9–11, 15).

And, most important for our purposes, he helps us to pray:

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groaning too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God (Rom. 8:26–27).

The context for this state...

Table of contents

• Testimonials
• Title
• Indicia
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Why Pray at All?
• 2. The Setting for the Lord’s Prayer
• 3. Prayer and the Coming Kingdom
• 4. Our Father Who Art in Heaven, Hallowed Be Thy Name
• 5. Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done, on Earth as It Is in Heaven
• 6. Give Us this Day Our Daily Bread
• 7. And Forgive Us Our Debts, as We Forgive Our Debtors
• 8. Lead Us not into Temptation, but Deliver Us from Evil
• 9. For Thine Is the Kingdom and the Power, and the Glory, Forever and Ever, Amen
• Christian Focus