School of Prayer Day Four

[In which we follow the Andrew Murray classic With Christ in the School of Prayer]

 

This then, is how you should pray: (Mt 6:9)

Because of the new fashion in which He wants His disciples to pray, the Lord offers a model for our emulation. Jesus offers the prayer as a framework through which our own hearts are to poured and our priorities aligned. It was not meant to be simply copied, though that was not prohibited. It is our model, used to teach us how our own prayers are to be formed and it contains ideas new to the first disciples that were stunning in how they change our approach to the throne.

“Our Father in heaven,”…We may take this entreaty for granted having learned this from an early age but, to fully grasp the depth of this adoration we must be mindful that the disciples had never before considered God as their Father. This revelation links us inextricably with the Lord in the household of God—he is our father and the Father of the Son. All that follows in prayer, our trust for provision, our pleas for protection, our expression of confidence, everything is now in the context of the personal. God is not an abstract concept that sits distant from us and deigns to address our words. He is our loving and merciful Father in whom we seek to live our life.

Murray closes with this,

Children of God! It is thus Jesus would have us pray to the Father in heaven. O let His Name, and Kingdom, and Will, have the first place in our love; His providing, and pardoning, and keeping love will be our sure portion. So the prayer will lead us up to the true child-life: the Father all to the child, the Father all for the child. We shall understand how Father and child, the Thine and the Our, are all one, and how the heart that begins its prayer with the God-devoted Thine, will have the power in faith to speak out the Our too. Such prayer will, indeed, be the fellowship and interchange of love, always bring us back in trust and worship to Him who is not only the Beginning but the End.