The Lord's Prayer

The Lord's Prayer

Prayer is perplexing. Prayer is both natural and unnatural, easy and difficult. Prayer is natural and easy as we were created to know, worship, and be in a relationship with God. As a result of our sin and the fall, prayer is now unnatural and difficult.

First, sin has broken our fellowship with God. As Isaiah 59:2 says, "Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear."

Second, born in our sin, we are self-reliant. We want to do what we want and we want to live how we want. In his book A Praying Life, Paul E. Miller gives some helpful insight. “If we think we can do life on our own, we will not take prayer seriously. Our failure to pray will always feel like something else—a lack of discipline or too many obligations. But when something is important to us, we make room for it. Prayer is simply not important to many Christians because Jesus is already an add-on."

In Luke 11:38-42, the disciples asked Jesus, "Teach us to pray." Don't miss the wisdom of their request. They did not ask "how to pray" but "teach us to pray." They were not asking for theory, they were asking how they could know and pray to God, the Heavenly Father as Jesus knew and talked with Him.