“He was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John also taught his disciples. ” Luke 11:1
One of the things I love to do is to hear how other people pray. Listening to the prayers of others always give insight to a person’s relationship with God. Some people pray and it seems as if God is sitting right next to them. However others pray, and you may wonder if God ever listens to their prayer.
Another reason I love to listen to how other people pray is they teach me how to pray. I will never forget Esther Brown. She was an elderly lady in a previous church I pastored. She has paralyzed and spent her days in her bed overlooking a window where she watched as people went by day after day. She was not a wealthy woman and her family did not have a great reputation. In fact their last name was usually preceded by a colorful descriptor when people would mention them.
Every so often, I would go and visit her and I would sit as she talked about her week and she would fill me in on the comings and goings of the week. And ever once in a while she would forget a name and reach over for a notebook and look up the date in which we had chronicled that days activity. (She had stacks and stacks of these notebooks.)
One day I happen to peek into that sacred ledger and what I saw surprised me. Beside each person or description she scribed, she also wrote a prayer for them. It wasn’t usually a long prayer, but a prayer nevertheless. Whether she knew them or not, she prayed for them.
One Sunday, her son brought her to Sunday School as he did most Sundays, and I sat in her Sunday School class. Before the teacher started the class, she asked Esther to pray. What she pray floored me! I never forgot her words.
“Lord, we are in this class this morning and we are getting ready to read Your word. We sure would be thankful if you could let us know what it means. There are some things You say that are just really difficult for us to understand but you wrote them down so you must want us to know it. So I guess we are going to need Your help to do that. Amen”
You see, it wasn’t the most eloquent, stylized or fanciest of prayer filled with theological doctrine or supernatural insight. No, it was more valuable than that. It was real.
Lord, teach me to pray like that!
Following Him,
Jeff