"As he was praying, they ask him, Teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples" (Luke 11:1). It looks as if at times his disciples caught him at prayer or even overheard him, and felt that here was prayer that took them out beyond all they had ever known of prayer. There were men whom John had taught to pray; was it they who asked Jesus to teach them over again? There may have been some of them who had learnt the Pharisee's way in prayer, and some who stuck to the simpler way they had been taught in childhood. In each case the old ways were outgrown.
We can put together what he taught them. In the first place, the thing must be real and individual—the first requirement always with Jesus. The public prayer of ostentation is out of the reckoning; it is nothing. Jesus chooses the quiet and solitary place for his intercourse with his Father. The real prayer is to the Father in secret—His affair. And it will be earnest beyond what most of us think. We are so familiar with Gospel and parable that we do not take in the strenuousness of Jesus' way in prayer. The importunate widow (Luke 18:2) and the friend at midnight (Luke 11:5) are his types of insistent and incessant earnestness. Do you, he asks, pray with anything like their determination to be heard? The knock at the door and the pleading voice continue till the request is granted—in each case by a reluctant giver. But God is not reluctant, Jesus says, though God, too, will choose his own time to answer (Luke 18:7). It does not mean the mechanical reiteration of the heathen (Matt. 6:7)—not at all, that is not the business of praying; but the steady earnest concentration on the purpose, with the deeper and deeper clarification of the thought as we press home into God's presence till we get there. It was so that he prayed, we may be sure. It is not idly that prayer has been called "the greatest task of the Christian man"; it will not be an easy thing, but a strenuous.
One part of the difficulty of prayer is recognized by Jesus over and over again. Men do not really quite believe that they will be answered—they are "of little faith." But he tells them with emphasis, in one form of words and another, driving it home into them, that "all things are possible with God" (Mark 10:27)—"have faith in God" (Mark 11:22). One can imagine how he fixes them with the familiar steady gaze, pauses, and then with the full weight of his personality in his words, and meaning them to give to his words the full value he intends, says: "Have faith in God." To see him and to hear him must have given that faith of itself. If the friend in the house to your knowledge has the loaves, you will knock till you get them; and has not God the gifts for you that you need? Is he short of the power to help, or is it the will to help that is wanting in God?
Once more the vital thing is Jesus' conception of God. Here, as elsewhere, we sacrifice far more than we dream by our lazy way of using his words without making the effort to give them his connotation. To turn again to passages already quoted, will a father give his son a serpent instead of the fish for which he asks, a stone for bread? It is unthinkable; God—will God do less? It all goes back again to the relation of father and child, to the love of God; only into the thought, Jesus puts a significance which we have not character or love enough to grasp. "Your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things," he says about the matters that weigh heaviest with us (Luke 12:30). Even if we suppose Luke's reference to the Father giving the Holy Spirit to those who ask (Luke 11:13), to owe something to the editor's hand—it was an editor with some Christian experience—it is clear that Jesus steadily implies that the heavenly Father has better things than food and clothing for his children. How much of a human father is available for his children? Then will not the heavenly Father, Jesus suggests, give on a larger scale, and give Himself; in short, be available for the least significant of His own children in all His fullness and all His Fatherhood? And even if they do not ask, because they do not know their need, will he not answer the prayers that others, who do know, make for them? Jesus at all events made a practice of intercession—"I prayed for thee," he said to Peter (Luke 22:32)—and the writers of the New Testament feel that it is only natural for Jesus, Risen, Ascended, and Glorified, to make intercession for us still (Rom. 8:34; Heb. 7:25).
We have again to think out what God's Fatherhood implies and carries with it for Jesus.
"The recurrence of the sweet and deep name, Father, unveils the secret of his being. His heart is at rest in God."[23] Rest in God is the very note of all his being, of all his teaching—the keynote of all prayer in his thought. "Our Father, who art in heaven," our prayers are to begin—and perhaps they are not to go on till we realize what we are saying in that great form of speech. It is certain that as these words grow for us into the full stature of their meaning for Jesus, we shall understand in a more intimate way what the whole Gospel is in reality.
The writer to the Hebrews has here an interesting suggestion for us. Using the symbolism of the Hebrew religion and its tabernacle, he compares Jesus to the High Priest, but Jesus, he says, does not enter into the holiest alone. "Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us … let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith" (Heb. 10:19). In the previous chapter he discards the symbol and "speaks things"—"Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us" (Heb. 9:24). There he touches what has been the faith of the Church throughout—that in Christ we reach the presence of God. Without saying so much in so many words, Jesus implies this in all his attitude to prayer. God is there, and God loves you, and loves to have you speak with him. No one has ever believed this very much outside the radius of Christ's person and influence. It is, when we give the words full weight, an essentially Christian faith, and it depends on our relation to Jesus Christ.
Jesus was quite explicit with his friends in telling them they did not know what to ask, but he showed them himself what they should ask. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness" (Matt. 6:33), he says, and tells us to pray for the forgiveness of our sins and for deliverance from evil. Pray, too, "Thy kingdom come." "Pray ye the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest" (Matt. 9:38). This is perhaps the only place where he asked his disciples to pray for his great work. Identification with God's purposes—identification with the individual needs of those we love and those we ought to love—identification with the world's sin and misery—these seem to be his canons of prayer for us, as for himself. For both in what he teaches others and in what he does himself, he makes it a definite prerequisite of all prayer that we say: "Thy will be done." Prayer is essentially dedication, deeper and fuller as we use it more and come more into the presence of God. Obedience goes with it; "we must cease to pray or cease to disobey," one or the other. If we are half-surrendered, we are not very bright about our prayers, because we do not quite believe that God will really look after the things about which we are anxious. We must indeed go back to what Jesus said about God; we had better even leave off praying for a moment till we see what he says, and then begin again with a clearer mind.
"Ask, and ye shall receive," he says; and if we have no obedience, or love, or faith, or any of the great things that make prayer possible, he suggests that we can ask for them and have them. The Gospel gives us an illustration in the man who prayed: "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief" (Mark 9:24). But it is plain we have to understand that we are asking for great things, and it is to them rather than to the obvious little things that Jesus directs our thoughts. Not away from the little things, for if God is a real Father he will wish to have his children talk them over with him—"little things please little minds," yes, and great minds when the little minds are dear to them—but not little things all the time. There is a variant to the saying about seeking first the Kingdom of Heaven, which Clement of Alexandria preserves. Perhaps it is a mere slip, but God, it has been said, can use misquotations; and Clement's quotation, or misquotation, certainly represents the thought of Jesus, and it may give us a hint for our own practice: "Ask," saith he, "the great things, and the little things will be added unto you" (Strom. i. 158).
The object of Jesus was to induce men to base all life on God. Short-range thinking, like the rich fool's, may lead to our forgetting God; but Jesus incessantly lays the emphasis on the thought-out life; and that, in the long run, means a new reckoning with God. That is what Jesus urges—that we should think life out, that we should come face to face with God and see him for what he is, and accept him. He means us to live a life utterly and absolutely based on God—life on God's lines of peacemaking and ministry, the "denial of self," a complete forgetfulness of self in surrender to God, obedience to God, faith in God, and the acceptance of the sunshine of God's Fatherhood. He means us to go about things in God's way—forgiving our enemies, cherishing kind thoughts about those who hate us or despise us or use us badly (Matt. 5:44), praying for them. This takes us right back into the common world, where we have to live in any case; and it is there that he means us to live with God—not in trance, but at work, in the family, in business, shop, and street, doing all the little things and all the great things that God wants us to do, and glad to do them just because we are his children and he is our Father. Above all, he would have us "think like God" (Mark 8:33); and to reach this habit of "thinking like God," we have to live in the atmosphere of Jesus, "with him" (Mark 3:14). All this new life he made possible for us by being what he was—once again a challenge to re-explore Jesus. "The way to faith in God and to love for man," said Dr. Cairns at Mohonk, "is, as of old, to come nearer to the living Jesus."