Teaching Prayer With Your Own Gone Quiet

There are twelve of them and they come on a Tuesday morning, and it is the best thing in her week, and that is the whole trouble.

She runs it in the small hall with the mismatched chairs and the urn on the trolley. Six weeks. She wrote the material herself over one winter and it is good material, plain and unsentimental, the kind that gives people something to actually do rather than something to feel guilty about. Week one is what prayer is not. Week three is on praying when you do not want to. Week five is the one about praying for people who are difficult, and it makes somebody cry every single time she runs it.

A woman in her seventies came up after week four in the spring and said she had been a Christian for fifty one years and had never once been taught this, and had gone home and prayed out loud in her own kitchen for the first time in her life.

And here is what nobody in that hall knows.

Her own praying, as a practice, as a thing that happens in a life, has not existed since about November.

There is something. She is not going to overstate this. There are sentences in the car. There is the thing she says when the phone rings with a number she recognizes and knows is bad news. There is a great deal of what you would honestly have to call thinking in God's direction while doing something else.

But the actual thing, the sitting down, the address, the waiting, the two way part of it, is not happening and has not happened in a long time, and she cannot tell you why, and she has stopped trying to work it out because working it out was itself becoming a substitute for it.

So she stands in that hall on a Tuesday with a handout about listening prayer and hears her own voice saying things she is not doing.

She would not call herself a hypocrite. She has thought hard about that word and she does not think it is the right one, and she is right, and we will come back to that. But she does have a low steady sense of being a person who has become better at describing a country than at living in it, and it has been getting louder since the spring.

They asked after three years

There is one verse in Luke that ought to be printed on the front of every course on prayer that has ever been written, and it is not a verse about technique.

And it came to pass, that, as he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.Luke 11:1

Now think about who is asking.

These are men who have been with Him for years. They have watched Him go up a mountain to pray and stay there all night. They have woken up and found Him gone and known exactly where He was. They have seen what comes out of those mornings: the authority, the healings, the way He speaks to storms.

And they say, teach us to pray. Not remind us. Not correct us. Teach us, as though they were starting.

Being taught to pray is not the beginner's condition. It is the disciple's condition, permanently, and the men closest to Jesus on earth said so out loud after three years of watching Him do it.

So hear this, standing in a hall with a handout in your hand: you are not a fraud, and the word you refused to use about yourself was refused correctly. That is not my kindness; it is what His word records about the people who knew Him best, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes a verse like that arrive as relief in a woman on a Tuesday.

Now let me get at the low steady sense, because that is what needs lifting.

The thought underneath it is that a teacher must be further along than the room. That is what makes the hall feel wrong. And it sounds humble, and it is actually an idea about qualification that Scripture nowhere holds. The material you wrote is true. You did not make it up out of your November. You built it out of years and out of the Bible, and the woman in her seventies praying out loud in her kitchen is not the product of your current condition; she is the product of true things said plainly by somebody who had done the work.

And look at what He handed them when they asked.

He did not give them a discipline. He gave them a short prayer that a child could learn in an afternoon. Our Father. Give us this day. Forgive us. Lead us. Five or six lines, most of them about needing things.

That is the answer to teach us to pray, from the mouth of the One who prayed all night on mountains. Which tells you what He thinks the floor is, and the floor is a great deal lower than the place you have decided you have fallen below.

You are not outside your own six weeks. His word puts the request teach us to pray in the mouths of the people standing closest to Christ, and the Holy Spirit is not measuring a woman's standing by whether her sitting down happened this month.

And I want to say one plain thing about the sentences in the car, because you have been discounting them, and you should stop.

You said there is a great deal of thinking in God's direction while doing something else. Read that sentence again as though somebody else wrote it. That is not the absence of prayer. That is a woman who has been talking to God all year in the only register she has had available, and God has been receiving every word of it, and He does not grade it against the version you used to do at a table.