The Lord’s Prayer Revisited
Passage: Matthew 6:6-13
Prayer is a strange task. On the one hand, it should be so easy. It requires no special equipment, you don’t have to be in any special place at any special time. You don’t have to do it at a specified time of day. You don’t have to have another person to do it with, you don’t have to get in any special position, you don’t have to talk out loud. You don’t have to go to school or receive any special training. It is not something only certain specially trained people can do.
So why is prayer so challenging, so difficult? Why do all of us struggle with our prayer life? Why does it seem like God is so hard to talk too? And why are we especially self-conscious when we pray with others?
Prayer is hard work, sometimes the hardest work, we do.
It is a battle fought on three fronts, the world, the flesh, the devil.
First, it is spiritual warfare, it is engaging in a great cosmic battle and Satan resists all prayer all the time. It really is against principalities and powers in the heavenly places.
Second, it is battle with the world, our world all around us creating so many distractions, so many interruptions. The busyness of our schedules pushes prayer to the far corners of our life.
Third, it is a battle with our own flesh, with our own laziness, sloth, lack of self-discipline and self-control. It is a battle with our doubts and lack of faith, a battle against our lukewarmness, our faintheartedness, our unworthiness. Our own souls are empty, cold, spiritually dry ground.
Prayer is the greatest and most important work we ever do, and it ought to be the first work we do every day. Jesus teaches us and calls us to daily offer up to God praise, adoration, confession, repentance, and thanksgiving and then supplications and intercession, all in reliance on the Holy Spirit.
And as we have been learning, Jesus is the model teacher giving us the model prayer. One excellent place to start is to take each petition of the Lord’s Prayer and add to it, expand on it, dilate it, praying the petitions for yourself and for others and for your church.
I am going to do that this evening. I am going to expand each petition using just Scripture, just praying the Word of God back to God. Every word of this prayer is taken from 220 OT or NT verses. This is sort of a doubly inspired prayer, a prayer based on the Lord’s Prayer using only God’s Words. I invite you to pray with me. You can do this either with your eyes open or closed, whatever way enables you to follow along and stay focused.
This prayer is the master prayer from the Master Prayer. Let us not neglect so great a gift.