Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” (Luke 11:1, ESV)

It’s been a while since I posted to this blog, but I’ve felt the call recently. It won’t be daily, but just now and then, as inspiration strikes.

My subject for today is prayer. It once seemed to me that there were more books written about “how to pray” than such a simple topic might call for. Over the past several years I have learned better. It should have been plain to me. If Jesus’s disciples needed to learn to pray, then so do we all!

The difficulty starts because we don’t rightly know what “praying” means. Most of us start off, at least, with the idea that praying is a matter of presenting God with a shopping list. If it expresses a complete dependence on God, that doesn’t entirely miss the point. “Becoming as little children” in prayer is a great start.

“Praying” as the disciple meant is more than presenting a shopping list.  Two Greek words are used in the New Testament to suggest “praying.” One is almost always used for “shopping list” petitions. The other – the one used in Luke 11:1 — shows something more. It seems to indicate the broad scope of the act of praying to God. And that is what Jesus teaches to His disciples. His “model” prayer covers worship, submission, petition and confession (at least). At its heart is the essential clause, “Thy will be done.”

There’s a second issue that comes to mind though about why we seem to have such difficulty with prayer, and why there are so many books. It’s about how we learn to pray. Jesus didn’t say to his disciples, “well, there’s a lot of good examples in scripture – look at Moses and Joshua, David and Daniel, Amos and Joel, Nehemiah and Ezra….”. He said, “Do it like this.” I can’t remember anybody ever doing that for me. I wasn’t raised in a Christian home, and in the places where prayer happened when I was young, and when I got saved, it seemed to be assumed that everybody knew how to pray. Well, they don’t. They need someone to say to them, “Do it like this.” It’s not just about telling someone what prayer is. It’s about telling them how prayer is done.

I could write a book about this … but the bottom line is that I think teaching a disciple to pray is a vital part of discipling