Patterns for Prayer
“After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed by Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” Matthew 6:9-10
There are no “rules” for praying. In Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), He gave a pattern for prayer to help His followers in communicating with His Father. Someone, unknown to me, also came up with a pattern for prayer using the title of one of the books that Luke, the physician in the New Testament, wrote, called ACTS. Using this word, we have A for adoration, C for confession, T for thanksgiving, and S for supplication. So, how do these two patterns compare?
Both of them stress the need to recognize God for who He is, how His name is to be “hallowed”, that is, to be regarded as holy and sacred. Sadly, God’s name is not hallowed among most of the earth’s inhabitants, but rather used as a curse word. To adore God is to have reverence for Him, which implies the desire that His kingdom on earth grow and flourish as it does in heaven. In other words, it is the desire for earth to resemble heaven. Unfortunately, most of earth resembles anything but heaven as earth stands now.
While the ACTS pattern of prayer leaves the petitions that folks desire to ask of God until the last thing, in Jesus’ pattern of prayer, it is right after the praise and adoration of the LORD: “Give us this day our daily bread”. Notice, Jesus doesn’t ask His Father for anything except a need. Does this mean that we are not to ask for anything except those things that we need, like food, clothing, and shelter? I don’t think so. I know that God doesn’t desire for us to ask for selfish things in our prayers, but what is important to us is important to God as long as those desires are within the will of God. We don’t always know what His will is for us thus we are not sure for what we are to pray sometimes. When Jesus was in the garden of Gethsemane, He asked to be relieved of the burden of the cross but knowing that it was the only way whereby men and women could be reconciled to the LORD, Jesus said, “Not My will but Thine be done”. That is another good pattern for us to follow when we pray and then trust that God will work out our situation in the way that He deems is best for us. The good thing is that the Holy Spirit takes our feeble prayers and turns them into meaningful words or, as Paul put it in Romans 8:26, “groanings which cannot be uttered”. Sometimes our prayers make us feel like groaning because we just don’t know what to pray.
The next portion of Jesus’ prayer is to ask forgiveness and to keep us from temptation. The ACTS pattern would have us to confess our sins right after praising the LORD. This pattern would support Paul’s admonition to confess our sins before taking the Lord’s Supper (I Corinthians 11:27-32). He emphasized the seriousness of participating in communion with a guilty heart. I don’t know, but it seems to me that God would appreciate it if we asked forgiveness before we ask for anything else.
Thanksgiving is not specifically mentioned in Jesus’ pattern, but it is implied because of the fact that God is able to keep us from temptation and deliver us from evil, and that is certainly something for which to be thankful. The consensus is that the order in which one prays is not nearly as important as taking time to talk with the Father, expressing our praises, gratitude, thoughts, desires, and worries to Him. I think that beginning with recognizing God’s holiness, power, sovereignty, and righteousness is important because it shows one’s reverence, respect, and honor for Him, and it also shows one’s dependence upon Him. After that, we should pray about whatever comes to our minds and hearts. We don’t need lofty words, thees, and thous, nor to speak in the vernacular of the King James Bible, but rather just talk with God, carry on a conversation like one would with a trusted friend. And do it often because He really wants to hear from us!