Once Jesus was praying in a particular place. When he had finished, one of his disciples approached. “Teach us to pray, Master,” he said, “just like John taught his disciples.” [Luke 11:1 (NTE)]
I used to look forward to our occasional stops in the bank where a tray of homemade cookies always was laid out for their customers. I admit to having no will-power when it came to their white chocolate chip/macadamia nut cookies. With a hint of lemon, they were so delicious that I searched the internet to find the recipe so I could skip the bank visit. Several recipes came close but none were quite right so, using those as a guide, I developed a recipe that met the taste test!
When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, He recited what we call “The Lord’s Prayer.” It’s important to remember that the disciples asked how to pray but not what exact words to use. Being a good teacher, instead of a lecture on praying, Jesus gave them a model prayer, but certainly not the only prayer to be said.
My recipe search told me the basic ingredients I needed for the cookies: flour, baking powder, brown and granulated sugars, butter, eggs, and lemon extract. Jesus’ model prayer included basics like praise, an acknowledgement of God’s holiness, acceptance of His will, confession, forgiveness, and petitions for daily provision and protection from evil. I found other recipes that included ingredients like cornstarch, lemon zest, nuts, and vanilla extract. If we look at other prayers said by Jesus, we find things like thanksgiving, a desire to bring God glory, and pleas for others and for the church.
When Jesus showed the disciples how to pray, He gave them an outline (or a basic recipe) rather than a comprehensive list of components. Like a recipe, it’s up to us to put them all together. Some days, I give God an extra cupful of thanks and praise because, unlike salt, we can never overdo those ingredients. It’s often easy to skip the confession and forgiving but, like forgetting the baking powder in cookies, prayers don’t seem to come out right without them. While it’s possible to add too much flour to a cookie recipe, our prayers seem to improve the more we pray for the needs of others. God, however, probably won’t find our prayers very appetizing if we spend more time mixing in petitions for ourselves than for others! Unlike a cookie recipe, there is no set amount of time for baking the perfect prayer; that’s a judgment call. As for me, I often find it necessary to bake my prayers a long time before acceptance of God’s plan forms in my heart.
When we grow bored with the food we’ve been preparing, we create new recipes or tweak the old ones by adding something extra like dried cherries or cinnamon chips to oatmeal cookies. The same goes for our prayers. If prayer seems boring, we need to change it up by gathering the ingredients and presenting them to God in a different way. Just as there are countless ingredients with which to bake delicious cookies, there are countless components that can go into our prayers. Regardless of the recipe, my grands are pleased whenever I bake; I think God feels the same way about our prayers!
Believers do not pray, with the view of informing God about things unknown to him, or of exciting him to do his duty, or of urging him as though he were reluctant. On the contrary, they pray, in order that they may arouse themselves to seek him, that they may exercise their faith in meditating on his promises, that they may relieve themselves from their anxieties by pouring them into his bosom; in a word, that they may declare that from him alone they hope and expect, both for themselves and for others, all good things. [John Calvin]
Several years ago, our mountain church hosted a concert sponsored by the small Jewish congregation in town. I vividly remember the end of the program as Jews and Gentiles sang Hava Nagila, joined hands, and danced the hora around our large sanctuary. Impressed by the performer’s energy, passion, and love of God, I purchased one of his recordings. Yesterday, after sorting through some old books and CDs, I listened to it for the first time in over 10 years. The music was composed and performed by a man who still performs today but the Hebrew words he sang were those of the Hallel and over 2,000 years old.
Although ancient Israel did have lions, they rarely wandered the streets and today’s verse about the sluggard who uses preposterous excuses to avoid work reminded me of more than 45 years ago when I regularly hosted a support group for nursing mothers. Among the chairs in our family room was a large La-Z-Boy rocking recliner. On meeting nights, that chair should have been occupied by the mom with infant twins or the woman within days of giving birth but the women who usually made a bee-line for the comfy rocker were the ones I came to think of as “the excusers.” Although they arrived with a litany of new mother complaints and said they wanted advice, they always had a reason why every suggestion wouldn’t work. While not quite as far-fetched as claiming a stray lion was in the road, some of their excuses came close. Perhaps, operating under the mistaken belief that motherhood was undemanding and trouble-free or that their lives weren’t going to change substantially with a baby’s arrival, these young mothers found it easier to wallow in their misery in a La-Z-Boy than to make an effort to solve their problems and find a way to make their new normal work. Apparently, they weren’t familiar with Proverbs 19:20: “Get all the advice and instruction you can, so you will be wise the rest of your life.”
Last summer, we moved permanently to our home in Florida. Knowing we’d no longer be spending any time in the cold winters of the Midwest, I packed up our winter attire for the charity resale shop. Along with the many coats, scarves, hats, and boots, I had a pile of winter mittens and gloves. Along with our super warm double ragg mittens, my husband and I had an assortment of wool, fleece, and leather gloves. He had a pair of heavy duty insulated Carhartts and I had some polyester/spandex gloves I often wore while walking. While packing up the rest of the house, I came across work gloves in the furnace room, rubber gloves by the wash tub, gardening gloves in the garage, silicone heat resistant gloves by the grill, fingerless gloves in the gym bag, vinyl gloves in the first aid kit, a pair of oven mitts, and even some chemically treated silver polishing gloves! Each pair had a specific use but, without a hand inside any of them, they were nothing but empty shells.
When I wrote about my friend Pat yesterday, I didn’t want to imply that the only thing non-believers miss is eternal life. The saddest part of being a non-believer (or waiting until the eleventh hour to believe), is foregoing the abundance of life promised by Jesus while we live on this side of the grass.
When Pat died, it was difficult to find words of comfort for her grieving husband. A non-believer, he has no faith in Jesus, no understanding of the soul, no hope of eternity, and no anticipation of Christ’s return. Distance and timing kept me from attending Pat’s Celebration of Life and, because we rarely saw one another, I’m not sure I felt her absence until today when I received a letter from her husband. With the letter was a bookmark made for her Celebration of Life. It had her picture and some sweet words about memories filling our hearts, time healing our souls, and the peace of knowing there’s one more angel in heaven. To a non-believer, those words may be comforting but, to me, they were empty (along with being theologically incorrect). I’ve never understood how non-believers find it so easy to believe in heaven and angels but so hard to believe in judgment, hell, God, or Jesus.
Devotions of the Heart 