Luke 11

The Lord's Prayer

• Jesus is praying
• The Lord's Prayer is roughly the same in St Matthew and St Luke's gospels, but it's framed differently
• Teach us to pray
  • Prayer in those days was not as casual as it is for us... for us we can go pray and just say extemporaneous prayers and just shut our door and speak to God
  • In the pagan societies, prayer usually meant reciting incantations and doing magic and calling on these demon gods to try and get what you want. If someone wanted a good yield in his crops, he would find the "god of crops" and offer sacrifices and prayers to it hoping that his crops give a good yield
  • In the Jewish societies, they had some set prayers and set sacrifices outlined in the law... but many times we see in the Old Testament that the Lord rejects them because they are coming and saying these prayers, thinking they are justified - despite being completely wicked
  • In the first century, leaders of Jews would tell them when to pray and what to say and when to say what - St John the Forerunner did this (Luke 11:1) and there are other indications of teachers who did this... usually it would be certain psalms and certain times in the day
  • This carried into Christianity as we see in our Agpeyas
  • The disciples are asking for the structure - if prayer isn't about magically getting God to do what you want, then what is it and how do we do it?
• Prayer isn't about changing God, it's about changing us
  • Draw close to God in prayer and the prayers change us
  • Prayers of repentance are for us to change, not for God to be happy instead of sad. We seek healing & cleansing
  • Prayers of thanksgiving are for us to give us a grateful heart and fight our tendency to greed, selfishness and pride
  • Sometimes we pray for someone sick to get better and he doesn't get better so we say "Prayer doesn't work" - but that is because we are assuming the purpose of prayer is to get God to heal this person... magic!
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