The Westminster Shorter Catechism defines prayer as “an offering up of our desires unto God, for things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of his mercies.”
I don’t know about you, but sometimes my prayers can become same-old, same-old. I’ve tried for years to figure out how to revitalize my prayer life, but it’s not always easy. Recently I’ve been looking at ways to lean on what’s probably the most famous prayer in history: the Lord’s Prayer. It’s a model of prayer that Jesus gave his followers. Here’s how Jesus taught His followers to pray:
Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Matthew 6:9-13 (ESV)
Note: some manuscripts add, “For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever. Amen.”
“The “doxology” ending to the prayer—'For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’—was not present in the earliest manuscripts,” explains the Lexham Bible Dictionary. “It was likely a later addition.”
However, most people also pray those phrases when they recite the Lord’s Prayer, so I’ll include them in this discussion as well.
It’s one thing to recite the Lord’s Prayer. It’s a great way for a group to pray together and be on the same page, but Jesus meant for it to be a guide for our prayers, and not our prayers themselves. How can you bring the spirit of the Lord’s Prayer into your own prayers?
I recently heard an acronym on a podcast that can help make praying the Lord’s Prayer easier. I don’t know if he coined this acronym, but Greg Stier of Dare2Share explained it on Alisa Childers’ podcast.
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The acronym is PRAY: Praise, Request, Admit, Yield. What’s cool about this acronym is that it’s not only easy to remember, but it also ties directly to the Lord’s Prayer.
Praise
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come…”
Our prayers should always start with acknowledging God’s greatness and sovereignty. Praise and gratitude should be our default in both good and bad times. If you start your prayers with praise and thanksgiving, you’ll make sure that your mind and heart are calibrated toward Him.
“We declare his greatness to his face while on our knees, and in this act God bridges the distance between us and reveals himself to us,” J. I. Packer once wrote. “As we declare him to be very far above us, so we find him to be very close to us. He receives our praise; we receive his love.”
Request
“…your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread…”
The bulk of our prayers are requests to God. There’s nothing wrong with that per se; it’s human nature. But what we need to make sure we’re praying for is in accordance with God’s will.
“As you get to know God better, you will trust him more,” Stan Jantz and Bruce Bickel write in “Ten Essentials for New Christians.” “At some point you will trust that God knows what is best. Even though you may want something else, you will trust God’s love and decision more than you trust your own instincts. Bottom line: You will want what he wants for you, even though it might not be your choice.”
The Apostle John wrote in his first epistle, “And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him” (1 John 5:14-15, ESV).
Of course, we know that, as my pastor Kurt Petersheim puts it, “Sometimes the hardest prayer to pray is ‘Your will be done.’”
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Admit
“…and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
The Apostle John wrote, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness,” (1 John 1:9, ESV).
GotQuestions explains it this way:
The price paid by Christ on the cross has satisfied God’s wrath against sin, and no further sacrifice or payment is necessary. When Jesus said, “It is finished,” He meant it. Our positional forgiveness was obtained then and there.
Confession of sin will help to keep us from the discipline of the Lord. If we fail to confess sin, the discipline of the Lord is sure to come until we do confess it. As stated previously, our sins are forgiven at salvation (positional forgiveness), but our daily fellowship with God needs to stay in good standing (relational forgiveness). Proper fellowship with God cannot happen with unconfessed sin in our lives. Therefore, we need to confess our sins to God as soon as we are aware that we have sinned, in order to maintain close fellowship with God.
My friend Hunter Smith came up with a compelling metaphor to describe what confession does.
“Why do you brush your teeth every day? To prevent the build-up of harmful things that will ruin your teeth,” he said. “You can’t hide or hold on to your sins or they will build up and ruin your relationship with God.”
Yield
“For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever. Amen.”
Yielding to God is acknowledging that we’re powerless without Him. By yielding to Him, we're relinquishing the control that we think we have and turning our circumstances over to Him.
In 2 Chronicles 20, King Jehoshaphat prayed to God to deliver Judah from an overwhelming enemy. After trusting that God would “hear and save,” he prayed in verse 12, “We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”
“God’s purpose is that we might depend upon Him entirely. That’s why the story is one of the supremacy of the enemy and of the inadequacy of the people. And it’s because of this perspective that God brings things into our lives…” Alistair Begg preached.
Of course, yielding to God isn’t just for the times when we have nowhere else to turn; it also applies when everything is going right in our lives.
“It’s only when we’re confronted by the facts of our own personal inadequacy that we will then be enabled to call upon God for all the adequacy that He provides,” Begg preached.
I’m going to try to use the PRAY acronym and the model that Jesus gave us in the Lord’s Prayer to revitalize my prayer life. I'll let you know if it works!
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