If you think you really know The Lord’s Prayer, think again!
If you think you really know The Lord’s Prayer, think again!
I was getting closer to it when God opened my eyes to it being Hebrew poetry, a royal psalm. But God has opened my eyes even more through a dry, technical book by a German academic, Joachim Jeremias, who really puts it in context.
- It is radical, urgent and immediate.
- A prayer for revival and for the end times.
- A prayer for the hallowing of God’s name where it is defiled.
- A prayer not to fall from belief in the great apostasy that will precede Jesus’ return.
- A prayer linked to communion, to Jesus our spiritual food.
- A prayer for the New Covenant.
- A prayer recognising God’s kingdom is here, now, and seeking its complete fulfilment and consummation on earth.
- It is both a prayer to be spoken and used at regular times of the day, and before communion, and a prayer outline.
If you think you know The Lord’s Prayer, think again!!!
Prayer After the Fall – Genesis 3:9-13.
But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.” (Genesis 3:9-13 NRSV)
This is man’s first conversation with God after The Fall.
God initiates the conversation and gives both the man and woman chance to repent. Instead they evade God’s questions.
You could say this is one of the best examples in scripture of how not to pray. The other best example that comes to mind is Pharisee who thanked God he was not like others though God saw his heart and was not fooled (see Luke 18:9-14). Prayer is not about sidestepping your responsibilities and putting the blame on others, whether they are blameworthy or not. In this case, all parties, except God, were at fault but neither Adam not Eve would admit it.
There is one point which should bring hope to us all. God initiated the conversation after seeking them out. God wants the conversation restored with each of us, so he seeks us and gives us chances to repent. Chances Adam and Eve did not take up. Yet what we gain through Jesus incarnation, life, death, resurrection and ascension gives us so much more than Adam or Eve ever lost.
Prayer Before the Fall – Genesis 3:8.
They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. (Genesis 3:8 NRSV)
In this first post I shall be looking at what prayer was like before The Fall. This actually says a massive amount about what prayer is, and how a life a prayer is in fact just a life ‘walking’ with God. I shall be looking at the effects of The Fall in the next post.
God was accustomed to meet with Adam and Eve ‘at the time of the evening breeze’, which is the beginning of the Hebrew day. Christians in the West in particular seem to think that they have to spend time with God first thing in the morning. The times I prefer are either last thing at night or while my son is at school, if it is at night then I see it as for the next day. What time of day does God come to meet you? You need to learn his rhythm for your life as Adam and Eve had, then you will start to know him coming to meet you as you become more aware of his presence in your life.
God initiated the times when he would walk and talk with the people he had created. God’s ‘presence’ would come to the garden, and Adam and Eve would come to meet with him. It was not the other way around. In prayer it is never, ‘Thank you God for coming to join us’, but it is always, ‘Thank you God for waiting for us to join you’ as he is always there waiting for us.
Prayer is about ‘the presence of the LORD God’. If God is not present then we cannot converse with him, which in its simplest form is all prayer is. This is why being among believers praying is such a great witness to non-believers, there is a real sense of the presence of God in prayer, or at least there should be. This is what God intended from the beginning.
Prayer is being naked before God but not ashamed. God made us and he sees us as we are. Before The Fall Adam and Eve were happy for God to see them as they had been made, they had nothing to hide.
A life of prayer is a life ‘walking’ with God. It is not about one off occurrences, but about continual practices. It is about sharing the whole of our life with God, about exercising our authority while being under his authority, just as Adam and Eve did in the garden. It is about being mindful of him in all we do, and spending time specifically in his presence, not one or the other, but both at the same time.
I hope this has made you think how prayer is the simplest, most natural thing in the world for human being to do. It is, but The Fall changed all that as we shall see in the next post.
Defining Prayer.
How am I going to define prayer for the purpose of this study.
This is the beginning of the definition given in Easton’s Bible Dictionary,
‘Prayer, is converse with God; the intercourse of the soul with God, not in contemplation or meditation, but in direct address to him. Prayer may be oral or mental, occasional or constant, ejaculatory or formal.’
This is a very good description of prayer, but not quite the one I shall use. For the purpose of this study I shall define prayer as follows.
‘Prayer is our part in any conversation with God that does not wholly consist of an act praise or worship. It acknowledges that God is the greater partner in the relationship and we are the lesser partner.’
This is a very broad definition of prayer which is intentional. I know from my own personal experience that I do not just pray when I use formal words historically associated with prayer. Prayer can be your questions, your tears, your thanksgiving, your thoughts and your feelings, or anything else that involves you in a conversation with God.
There are things that are distinctive about the prayer of true believers to the Living God, these will be made apparent as we look at the Word. The only distinctive I presuppose is that prayer is conversational and therefore a direct personal form of communication, although this in itself will cause some Christians to completely change how they look at prayer.
All Prayer in the Bible 