Prayer: Forty Days Of PracticeSample

TEACH ME TO PRAY

There are a few things I’ve come to appreciate about the moment when the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. First of all, they would have been adult men. These aren’t 13- or 14-year-old kids who are hearing about religious matters for the first time. These men would have been raised in a religious setting and expected to have familiarity with religious practices and language.

Secondly, they’d been around Jesus for a long time at this point. I think I’d be tempted to pretend I was more “with it,” or had my religious life together if I were them. In fact, we see this in other moments when the disciples ask Jesus if they will sit at his right and left side in the coming Kingdom, as if they’d earned such a place by their stellar performance and unwavering faith. But in this moment, instead of pretending they know what they’re doing in order to seem impressive, they ask for help.

I think it would have taken some humility for the disciples to say, “We think we’ve got something to learn here. Can you teach us?” I further think that kind of humility is a key to long-term spiritual growth.

Because the older we get and the more we’ve been at it, the harder it can be to say, “I think I need help here.” The temptation is to believe that when you get to an arrival point, you’ve learned what you need to learn and get to graduate “Jesus school.” But we don’t. That’s not what we are invited to. Jesus didn’t invite his disciples to achieve spiritual enlightenment. He invited them to follow him. That’s a life-long invitation. It lasts through your teen years, though your twenties and thirties and into your forties and fifties, and on and on for the duration of your life on earth. And the reality is that life changes dramatically over those many years. You don’t pray in your thirties the way you did in your twenties. You won’t pray in your forties the way you did in your thirties. You won’t pray during seasons of drought the way you do in seasons of fruitfulness. When life changes and circumstances shift, you’ll need to learn to pray differently. Will you have the humility to once again ask, “Teach me to pray”?