Recently I encountered messages on this topic, Lord, teach us to pray, from two different sources and from two different generations.  First, I was reading a volume by Andrew Murray.  Andrew was a powerful preacher and missions minded pastor of the late nineteenth century.  Then, just this week I read an excellent blog from a current young minister at the International House of Prayer.  I knew that the Lord was bringing something to me that He wanted me to get. This, I believe, is a now word for God’s church, a focus born of what His Spirit is doing again in us.  Will you consider this important Scripture with me?

Luke 11:1 One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.”

The bottom line is that I believe we as the Church must be asking again, “Lord, teach us to pray.”

What I think the Lord is saying to us is this, we need to learn again how to be deeply true and intimate in our prayer lives.  It is interesting to me that out of all the things Jesus taught His men and all the things that He could have taught His men, this is the only thing we see them asking for.  What this speaks to me is that in spite of seeing miracles, seeing healings, seeing demons flee with shrieks, the only thing that they were really amazed at on the depth and personal level was Jesus’ intimate powerful times of prayer with the Father.

While it was not difficult to copy Jesus’ healing style, “be healed,” or extremely hard to learn to say “come out” to a demon, it was the intimate relationship with the Father that Jesus had in prayer that made all these ministries actually work!  We need to start afresh and ask the Father every day for the next few years, “Father, teach me to pray.”

Will you join me in becoming a very deliberate student of God’s school of prayer?

Oh My Dear Father, would you teach your Church afresh how to pray?