The model prayer

by J. D. Jones

(1) It is a model as to manner. I will note here only three characteristics of the prayer. First, will you notice its brevity! The prayer that teaches to pray contains only six short petitions. The measure of a prayer is not its length, but its sincerity and earnestness. One good friend reminded a minister who was accustomed to take full time in his preaching, that there was all the difference in the world between the length of a sermon and the strength of a sermon. So there is all the difference between the length of a prayer and the strength of a prayer. We are not heard for our much speaking. The priests of Baal cut themselves with knives and cried from morn until the dusk of evening, “Baal, hear us.” The mob at Ephesus shouted out for the space of two hours, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” But the command is laid upon us, “Be not ye like unto them.” We are to avoid all vain repetitions. If prayers were valued according to their length, then there would be no prayers to compete with the prayers of the Pharisee. But the publican, who could only stammer out that one heart-broken petition, “God be merciful to me a sinner,” went to his home justified rather than the Pharisee, in spite of his long prayers. We have not yet got rid of the notion that there is some kind of merit in “long prayers.” We need to learn the truth Augustine wishes to enforce when he says that much speaking is one thing and much praying quite another. There can be much prayer in very little speech. In fact, the shortest prayers are always the most eloquent. Need abbreviates prayer. Want will make prayer direct and pointed. Two of the most moving prayers I know of in the whole range of Bible literature are, the prayer of the poor Canaanitish woman who had a sick daughter, and whose prayer consisted of three simple words, “Lord, help me”; and the prayer of that dying thief on the cross, who, in the agony of mortal pain, cried, “Lord remember me when Thou comest in Thy kingdom.” Brethren, it does not require many words to pray. No one need restrain himself from prayer because, like Moses, he is slow of tongue. You can compress a great prayer into the compass of a brief sentence. As Thomas Binney used to say, “A little prayer may bring a large answer, and bring it soon, if sincerity and faith give it wings. A short word may be made long enough to span the distance between earth and heaven if it be struck off from the living heart.”

Secondly, notice the directness of the prayer. How pointed the petitions are! There are no waste words! Here are a number of distinct and definite requests, each of which is stated clearly and plainly in a few simple words. There is no need for a cloud of words in prayer; there is no need of elaborate and highflown language; there is no need to beat about the bush. Let us be direct in our prayers! I am afraid we have got into the habit of using a kind of conventional language in prayer, as if God did not understand our common talk! The ideal prayer, however, is that which makes our request known to God with the same frankness and directness with which a child makes known his wants to his parents. Look at these petitions! Each of them is a prayer for a distinct and definite object. We want the same directness in our prayers to-day. As Matthew Henry quaintly puts it, “We should always strike at the white.”

Then notice the simplicity of the prayer. It is a prayer so simple that a little child can understand it! This is not a prayer reserved for the use of the learned, the cultured, the highly educated. This is a prayer everybody can understand. Wayfaring men, though fools, need not err therein. But its simplicity is not shallowness. People are apt to make mistakes. They think that profound which is simply turbid and muddy. They think, on the other hand, that which is pellucid and clear must of necessity be shallow. But the turbid pool is often very shallow, while those waters of crystal clearness contain depths no plummet can fathom. It is so with this prayer. It is simple, exquisitely simple, so simple that even a child can grasp its meaning. But what depths these simple sentences hide! Have we not been learning Sabbath by Sabbath something of the grandeur and sweep of the prayer? We have been trying during these past Sabbaths to explore the length and breadth, the height and depth of this prayer, but have you not felt, as the preacher has felt, that after all our exploring, there are yet undiscovered regions in this prayer?

There’s a deep below the deep, and a height beyond the height,

And our hearing is not hearing, and our seeing is not sight.

Profundity is always a matter of idea, not of language. A man is not profound because he revels in polysyllables. The profoundest thought can be clothed in the simplest language. Shall I tell you the profoundest truth ever uttered by mortal man? Here it is, “God is love.” Yet the words are the simplest that language could afford. It is so exactly with this prayer. Beneath these simple sentences there are depths we have never fathomed. That is why this prayer will never be among the childish things which we can put away. Added years will only increase our sense of its sweep and depth and beauty.

(2) Now let me pass on to say that this prayer is a model as to Order. I need not dwell long upon this, for I have already drawn attention to it in the course of my exposition. But let me repeat again that this Model Prayer teaches us that in all true prayer God’s glory will occupy the first place. Before ever a word is said about personal needs our Lord teaches His disciples to pray that God’s name may be hallowed, that His kingdom may come, and that His will may be done on earth as it is done in heaven. It is “after this manner” we are to pray always. That is the order we must observe in all prayers, “First things first.” First God’s glory, then our personal wants. This is the hardest lesson of all to learn. The great feat of life is accomplished when we have learned to prefer God’s will to our own, and when we honestly seek first His kingdom and His righteousness. And yet this hard lesson we must all learn if we are to find strength and comfort in prayer. People talk about “unanswered prayers!” There ought to be no unanswered prayers. I make bold to say that to the man who has learned the true secret of prayer there are no unanswered prayers. It is the man who has forgotten the true order who complains of unanswered prayers. It is the man who has thought more of his own personal desires than of the glory of God who complains that Heaven is deaf to his cry. The man who has learned to seek first the kingdom of God, who sincerely desires that God’s will may be done, that man never talks about unanswered prayers. All his prayers are richly and graciously answered. He asks and receives, he seeks and finds, he knocks and the door is always opened. If you put the emphasis in the wrong place by laying stress on your own desires, you will be troubled by “unanswered prayers”; but if you put God first, if you desire His will may be done, what-e’er betide, you will never miss the blessings, but you will find in your own experience the old promise still true, “If we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us.”

(3) Let me ask you to notice that this prayer is a model as to Spirit. After all, the power of a prayer depends not upon the words we use, but upon the spirit in which we offer it. “According to your faith it shall be unto you.” Our prayers may be beautiful in their language, correct in their theology, brief, simple, direct; and yet they may rise no higher than the ceiling of the room in which they are uttered. Yes! even this Pearl of Prayers, as uttered by some of us, may be nothing but a barren form. Before prayer becomes living, throbbing, vital, before it can take to itself wings, before it can reach the ear of God, we must pray in the spirit. And the spirit which alone gives prayer its efficacy and power, is the spirit of childlike confidence and trust. This Model Prayer is full of that spirit. Notice how it begins, “Our Father” That implies that we come to God as His children, believing He is readier to give good things to us than we are to give good things to our children. It is “after that manner”—in childlike faith in God’s love—that we are always to pray. The measure of our trust in God will be the measure of our power in prayer. “According to our faith it shall be unto us.” Christ’s prayers were prevailing prayers, because He had a perfect faith. He called God “Father,” and He honoured God’s Fatherhood by placing an absolute and utter trust in Him. We want the Christ spirit to make our prayers effectual. It is not the words that are wrong, it is not the order that is amiss, it is the faith that is lacking. If only Christ’s spirit of loving confidence in God were breathed into our prayers, how irresistible they would be. Dr. Stanford, in his little volume on the Lord’s Prayer, quotes those exquisite lines, in which George Macdonald applies the legend of how the boy Jesus once made some clay birds fly to the prayers men offer—

My prayer-bird was cold—would not away,

Although I set it on the edge of the nest,