* In the parable of the widow who pestered an unjust judge, seeking redress for injustices (Luke 18:1-8), our Lord taught us that efficacious prayer must be tenacious prayer. The main lesson for us is that “men ought always to pray and faint not” (v.1.); that our life should be one great connected prayer. For if an unjust judge will yield to the tenacity of a mere widow, how much more will the Judge of all the earth respond to the tenacity of His elect who, in prayer, cry to Him day and night? And if, from our point of view, He seems to delay in answering (which from a divine point of view He doesn’t), paradoxically it is to strengthen our faith. The cause is love; love for the elect to try and strengthen their faith, and for His enemies to give them time for repentance. And when the time for divine intervention comes, the Lord will intervene. There will be no tarrying or delay. Till then we persevere tenaciously in prayer.
* Humility, not pride in our own attainment, is the right disposition in prayer. Our Lord Jesus taught this in his parable of the “Publican and the Pharisee.” (Luke 18:10-14). Both men prayed in the Temple. Only one received a response. The high and lofty One who in-habiteth eternity will look to that man who is humble and of a contrite heart who trembles at His word, and whose prayer arises from an acute sense of penitence and unworthiness. But the man whose prayer is the expression of a proud self-satisfied heart, that forgets that “a Syrian ready to perish was my father, and went down into Egypt . . .”, who labours under the fatal delusion that by our own merit we can win acceptance; he prays to himself, not to God, shaking his own hand in self-congratulation. Devoid of a sense of sin, he needs no Physician and grants acquittal upon himself . . . In his heart he says, “There is no God.”
* In the midst of pressures, at the busiest moments, our Lord turned aside for long seasons of prayer. Modern versions of Luke 5:15 show that, for Jesus, there were not one, but many, withdrawals, wildernesses and prayers. The harder his days, the longer his prayers; the busier the occasion, the greater insistence that there is no substitute for the bent knee in prayerful communion with the Father. Emotions in us that may disturb our prayer experience were turned in him to prayer; for he “offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears” (Heb. 5:7) and was “heard for his godly fear.”
* “Wait on the Lord” is an Old Testament phrase which, in its Hebrew originals, has eight different words which correspond fairly closely to the eight key words by which we might summarise the Lord’s teaching on the nature of prayer — humility, intensity, importunity, simplicity, unity, tenacity, charity and expectancy.
For example, did you know that there is a sense of “waiting” which means to wage war? Curiously, it is this root (tsabha), the common word in the Old Testament for war, with its strong military associations, that is used of the priestly “waiting” before God. A title of Deity (tsebaoth: hosts) derives from this word that is used of the spiritual warfare waged by the Levitical priests on behalf of their brethren.
Numbers 8:24 reads in A.V.: “They shall go in to wait upon the service in the work of the tent of meeting.”
Literally it is, “They shall go in to war the warfare of the tent of meeting.”
It is not for nothing, then, that Paul, in Ephesians 6, regards prayer as one of the most important weapons of the Christian in the search for God.
Again, in Genesis 8:10, Noah, after receiving the dove into the ark on the first occasion, “stayed (yachal) yet another seven days.” Similarly on the second return of the dove (v. 12). His was not a waiting of blank despair but of unshakeable hope. He knew God would deliver him, so he waited expectantly.
“Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him” (Matt. 6:8). We do not pray therefore to inform God of our wants and needs, but to enter into communion with Him He knows our needs, frame, hearts and burdens, and “He gives the very best to those who leave the choice to Him.” Should we then ask? Yes, for the Lord has so ordered things that, in principle, He gives to those that ask.
For what should we ask? We are promised that “all things whatsoever ye ask and pray for, believe that ye receive them and ye shall have them” (Mark 11:24). Similarly, in John 15:7, “Ask whatsoever ye will, and it shall be done unto you.” But there is limitation. Jesus said, “If ye abide in me . . . ye shall ask . . and it shall be done . . .”
It is a tragedy that some of our requests, if granted, would not glorify the Father; and the reason that we ask what we do is that we do not abide deeply enough in the Son. Like James and John (Matt. 20:21), we have lapses of sinful spirit and ask for selfish things. For the true centre of prayer is neither our needs nor our wills, but God’s will; and the aim of prayer is not to make God change His will, but to enable us to change our will and disposition — so that He can do for, and through us, what He cannot do unless we submit our wills to Him.
Like the prophet, Jeremiah (Lam. 3:25), we should seek, not things, but God.
We must remember that “name” in Scripture means not only “Who” but “What He is.” Thus in Is. 57:15 the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity has a name, and that name is “Holy”. God’s’ name is Father, for He is that to those who will draw nigh in the Spirit of adoption (Rom. 8) and cry “Abba, Father”; His name is also Hallowed (i.e. Holy) for in this name He gathers into a single word all those separate qualities in which He is other than man, and says, “I am Holy”.
“Holy be Thy Name”, we pray.
Prayer is costly. Jeremiah 29:13, “And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart”.
We must take care that the adding of the words “In Jesus’ Name” at the end of a prayer is not for us simply a ritual utterance. For to pray through, or in the Name of, Christ is no mere devotional formula, but in the teaching of the Master it means that the prayer must be in unison with the mind of the one in whose name it is presented. It cannot be a tacking on of a formula, like putting Christ’s signature to a blank cheque that we have filled in and now expect the Father to honour. The cheque must be written in full by Christ, for to pray in Christ’s name is to pray as our Lord Jesus himself would pray. So we plead in Jesus’ name, which is in complete submission to the Father’s will, and say “Thy will be done: perfect us in all Thy will.”
Thus “The Lord’s Prayer” is a prayer in Jesus’ name. It does not require the formula, for the very fact that we are able to address God as “Father” tacitly implies the mediatorial work of Christ, and makes it a prayer in Jesus’ name.
The common designation of the prayer recorded in Matthew 6:9-13 is “the Lord’s Prayer.” This title, of course, is not in the New Testament. It is the Lord’s Prayer in the sense that it came from the heart and mind of the Lord. But it would not have been used by the Lord himself. He taught his disciples to say “Our Father”, but the pronoun “My” was used with reference to himself. (cf. John 20: 17). He would not have prayed for forgiveness of trespass.
“The Lord’s Prayer” was a pattern that he offered us as a model prayer, the prototype of all faithful prayer, and he commanded:
“After this manner pray ye . . .” thus implying that the Father’s children are all praying children. There are no dumb members in God’s family on earth.
“I have manifested Thy name unto the men whom Thou gayest me out of the world”. (John 17:6). What name of God did Jesus manifest to the disciples? Undoubtedly the name “Father”. For in the Son, God had revealed Himself as Father and had called upon the disciples to address Him in prayer as “Father”.
Reflections on the Potter and the Clay