Episode Transcript
PRAYER OF CONSECRATION
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
Abba, I belong to you.
I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.
Abba, we belong to you.
Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
Luke 11:1 (NIV)
One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples."
CONSIDER THIS
I’ve been seriously trying to learn to pray going on forty years now. Several years ago, I had a major epiphany. You know what an epiphany is—it’s when you finally see what you’ve been looking at for so long. Here it is: Jesus’s life is our school of prayer. God comes to earth in the form of a first-century Jewish peasant. He lives out before our very eyes a revolutionary life behind which is an extravagant life of prayer. A good number of those prayers are written down and have survived to the present day.
If I want to learn to pray, doesn’t it make perfect sense that I will make those prayers—uttered by God, written down on scrolls and now reproduced in books (a.k.a. the Bible) of which I personally own no less than twenty-five—my curriculum? At the time, that had never occurred to me before. Has it to you? So how many prayers of Jesus would you say we have written down (without counting any twice)? Scholars will surely debate this, but I’m going with nine. I count nine.
For the next several weeks, we will work our way through these nine prayers and see what we can learn and how we can grow. Rather than keeping you guessing, here are the nine prayers as I count them:
Matthew 6:9–13: Our Father . . .
Matthew 11:25–26: Blessed are you Abba, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Abba, for this was your good pleasure.
John 11:41–43: “Abba, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me. . . . Lazarus, come out!”
John 12:27–28: “Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Abba, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Abba, glorify your name!”
Mark 14:36: “Abba, nothing is impossible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”
Luke 23:34: “Abba, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
Mark 15:34: “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Luke 23:46: “Abba, into your hands I commit my spirit.”
John 17:1–26: “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Abba, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me . . .”
These nine prayers hold an eternity of divine wisdom. Together, we will, at minimum, plumb their shallows over the next couple of weeks. As we come into this school of prayer, we will be well served to reorient ourselves with the Teacher. And, just so you know that I know, I am not the teacher. They will make for a timely refresher course as we head into the forty days of Lent this year—a season set apart for drawing near to the Lord through prayer and fasting.
One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples."
THE PRAYER FOR PRAYER
Our Father, thank you for sending your Son, Jesus, to us. Thank you for that day when one of those disciples asked him, "Lord, teach us to pray." And thank you for teaching them and us with your life. Today, I am that disciple asking you, Lord Jesus, "Teach me to pray." Come, Holy Spirit, and bring me back to a beginner's mind and the humility of a child that I might learn not by information but by revelation—and not that I would become known as a person of prayer but that I might know and be known deeply by you. Praying in Jesus's name, amen.
