Recently, I was really struggling with a situation. I was going round and around in my mind on what to do about it. I had no answer. I had nothing. In the middle of the mind congestion, I came across this tweet. When you don’t know what to do – Pray.
You would think that that would be a given in my life, but at the moment, it wasn’t. And even though it is so elementary and obvious, it really impacted me. Instead of relying on logic or common sense, stop and pray. Corrie Ten Boom, a Dutch Holocaust survivor, wrote, “ The wonderful thing about prayer is that you leave a world of not being able to do something and enter God’s Realm where everything is possible.”
In Luke 11, Jesus teaches the disciples to pray. Consider the first verse. “Once Jesus was in a certain place praying. As He finished, one of His disciples came to Him and said, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.’” Luke 11:1 NLT
Notice that it was a disciple who initiated this conversation about prayer. He saw Jesus praying. And so he asks Jesus to teach them to pray. This is the only time that the disciples ask for a tutorial. They never said – Lord teach us how to make wine, how to walk on water, how to multiply bread. They never asked Jesus how to lead people, how to preach, or how to heal. The only time the disciples said, “Lord teach us” was when asked about prayer.
Honestly, I don’t see anywhere in the gospels where the disciples were described as men of prayer. Two disciples were described as sons of thunder. A nickname Jesus gave to James and John probably because they had bold and aggressive personalities. None of the disciples were described as men of prayer. Even in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed alone.
So, the desire of this one disciple to ask Jesus to teach them to pray is probably an open admission that prayer was a deficiency in his life and in the lives of the others. He asked Jesus to teach them to pray because he knew that this was an area of ignorance and inexperience. So if you feel like you are not that good at prayer, you are not alone.
More coming on prayer….