Praying

Not to be repetitive, I have shared this before, I struggle with prayer.  I can study the Bible for hours.  But like the 12, when asked to invest some extended time in prayer, I am likely to fall asleep.  

I have tried a number of different approaches.  I have a notebook divided into a daily section and then days of the week in which I put prayer letters and lists of people for whom I want to pray.  I also have a deck of index cards with prayer requests on them.  All help for a while.  But, I find that I am continually struggling with consistency.

I read this the other day, “And when, to our distress (and this comes to us all), we find ourselves so muddle-headed, dead-hearted, and tongue-tied in prayer that “we do not know how to pray as we ought,” then our very desire to pray as we should and our grief that we are not doing so shows that the Spirit is himself making effective intercession for us in our hearts (Romans 8:26ff.); which is as reassuring as it is mysterious, and as thrilling as it is amazing.” (J. I. Packer, Growing in Christ (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), 165.)  While that is encouraging, it still is the case that I don’t feel like I am doing well in this discipline.

In the past months I have been praying the Lord’s prayer for people.  That has been an interesting and good exercise.  It dawned on me that in Matthew 6:9, when Christ says, “Pray, then, in this way…” “pray” is imperative, it is a command.  So, it dawned on me, that I probably ought to do that.

After praying through the prayer for people for some days, I began to think through what each phrase was asking.  I came up with five categories:

Praise
9  Our Father who is in heaven,
    Hallowed be Your name.

Rule
10 Your kingdom come.
     Your will be done,
     On earth as it is in heaven.

Dependence
11 Give us this day 1our daily bread.

Relational Health
12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

Protection
13 And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

The last phrase is not in the earliest and best manuscripts.  

As I have prayed through this several times it has occurred to me that much, if not all of the exhortations we read in the New Testament fall under one of these categories.  What do you think?

In the past weeks I have been reading some authors on this prayer.  They have come up with different but similar outlines.  They have also said that this is the way that we should be praying.  

I will share some of that tomorrow.