Teach Us To Pray
“Now it came to pass, as He was praying in a certain place, when He ceased, that one of His disciples said to Him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.”
Luke 11:1 NKJV
Prayer is really coming into the presence of God to submit to His will. The object of all prayer is that God be glorified.
"Whatever you ask in My name," Jesus said, "that will I do that the Father may be glorified." John 14:13.
And that tells us the purpose of prayer.
Jesus said in His highly priestly prayer in John 17, "I have glorified You on earth. Now restore Me to the glory I had with You before the world began."
Prayer is first and foremost a recognition of God's majestic glory and it is an act of submission to that glory. All petitions, all supplications, all passions, all requests, all needs are subject to God's glory.
"Hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done," it's about Your name, Your will, Your kingdom, and then and only then is it, "Give us our daily bread, forgive us our trespasses, lead us not into temptation."
Prayer is true pure worship. It begins and ends and middles with worship. It starts with forgetting self. The first thing you do when you come to God in prayer, acknowledging Him as Father who cares about you and who has all the resources you need, is to confess that the priority is not you but Him, because the first thing you say is, “Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be Your name.”
Jesus said, "If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself." It starts that way and it keeps going that way and it never changes. When you come to Christ it is the end of you for good. And from then on your prayers are, "Father, hallowed be Your name, Your kingdom come, Your will be done." That is to say your agenda is all that matters to me. And however it is that my daily bread can come and my forgiveness can come and my protection can come, consistent with Your will, that is my prayer. Prayer is to lift up the soul to honor and glorify God, not to bend God to my agenda. The whole prayer centers on God, "Our Father" indicates God is source. "Hallowed be Thy name," God is sacred. "Thy kingdom come," God is sovereign. "Thy will be done," God is superior. "Give us each day our daily bread," God is supporter. "Forgive us our sins," God is Savior. "Lead us not into temptation," God is our shelter. "For Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever, amen." God is supreme. It is about God.
And what is remarkable about this text is that the disciples of Jesus didn't know how to pray. And they were not unlike many people today, if not most who claim to be Jesus' disciples. There was one of them on behalf of the rest who said to the Lord, "Lord, teach us to pray." John the Baptist had to teach his disciples to pray. Now we need to know how to pray. How is it these Jewish people with the Old Testament didn't know how to pray? Because true religion, the true faith of the Old Testament had been supplanted by an apostate form of Judaism led by religious hypocrites and prayer had been reduced to formulas, rituals, ceremonies and vain repetition. And that's all they knew, were the recited, heartless, almost mindless prayers. When they heard Jesus pray, they heard something completely different than that.
And on this occasion they, no doubt, had been eavesdropping while He was praying in a certain place, or they wouldn't have known when He finished in order to approach Him with their concern. They knew that what kind of prayer they had experienced, what had been passed down to them in the traditions of their apostate form of Judaism wasn't anything like the way Jesus prayed. And so they said, "Teach us to pray the way You pray, the way John taught his disciples to pray,” the way really the Old Testament also taught true believers to pray.
And so Jesus gives them a model prayer.
It's not just a prayer to be prayed. You can do that. It's a framework on which to base all your prayers. It's a skeleton on which to hang the flesh of all your intercession.