Prayer 101

I'm currently reading N. T. Wright's little book, The Lord and His Prayer, as a resource for a youth Bible study. It's an excellent book and I recommend it to anyone. Wright elaborates on how Jesus' original hearers would have understood the words of His prayer...that in its original context, the Lord's Prayer is actually a "risky, crazy prayer of submission and commission." In reading it, I've become very convicted by how different my own prayer is when put next to the model provided by Our Lord. Actually, it is not surprising at all that in our individualistic, materialistic culture, Christian prayer tends all too often to focus on one clause in Jesus' prayer: "Give us this day our daily bread." Of course, there is nothing wrong with submitting our requests to God, with laying before Him our specific needs and those of our loved ones. What is wrong is that often, we fail to do this in the larger context of expressing adoration for Our Father, expressing our conviction that His Name should be hallowed, expressing our commitment to seeing His Kingdom come to earth, and expressing our honest confession of sin and temptation. As Wright comments, "We come to prayer, aware of urgent needs, or at least wants. It's tempting to race through the Lord's Prayer, as far as 'on earth as it is in heaven,' so that we can take a deep breath and then say, 'Now look here: when it comes to daily bread, there are some things I simply must have.' And then off we go into a shopping list. To do this, of course, is to let greed get in the way of grace....We owe it to ourselves, not to mention to God, to pray the prayer in a more integrated manner." I suggest that churches often misapply the Lord's Prayer in their worship, their Sunday School classes, and in personal devotions. What if, instead of merely teaching our congregants to memorize Matthew 6:9-13, we actually did something more "risky" and "crazy"? What if we model and teach our congregations to express God's attributes in prayer? What if we preached that hallowing God's Name means so much more than merely refraining from curse words, but actively living holy lives as representatives of His Name? What if we challenged them to not merely see "heaven" as a distant, otherworldly reality, but as the standard by which we should live out our physical, economic, social, and political lives here on earth...and then to pray for God's strength to make the necessary changes in our lives? What if we reminded our congregants that they are sinners who need constant grace, and that they must pray not just for forgiveness for themselves, but also for the strength to forgive others? And then, after all this is understood and prayed for, submit our requests to God. We might actually see that some of our requests need to be reformulated that light. If I understand Matthew 6:9 correctly, the Lord's Prayer is not necessarily what we should pray, but rather, how we should pray. May God give all of us the grace and understanding to take Jesus' practical guidelines and apply them, that we might grow in our relationship with Him and assist others in doing so as well.