Day 51: Jesus Put the Personal in Prayer

“Therefore, you should pray like this:

Our Father in heaven,your name be honored as holy.Your kingdom come.Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts,as we also have forgiven our debtors.And do not bring us into temptation,but deliver us from the evil one.” MATTHEW 6:9–15, EMPHASIS MINE

I’M SURE IT COMES as no surprise that I love how my daughter, Missy, prays since I’ve made it clear that I’m pathologically biased when it comes to her! But if you’ll indulge my swollen mama-heart once more, the reason I love eavesdropping on her conversations with God isn’t because of how she “performs,” it’s her refreshingly genuine posture.

Missy prays without pretense. If she’s telling Him how my lack of patience has bruised her heart, she doesn’t camouflage her feelings with fancy words, but instead shares the unvarnished truth about how she needs His comfort and would like for Him to please help me with my shortcomings. Likewise, if she’s confessing one of her own mistakes—such as when she recently spent most of math class doodling her current crush’s name on her hand in black marker instead of completing her worksheet—she’s forthright about her offense and doesn’t feign innocence with poetic sentimentality. And ever since she began learning English after I brought her home from Haiti, she’s been concluding her prayers with, “In Jesus’s names.” I won’t correct her either because, quite frankly, I think it’s good theology—He does have a lot of names! The bottom line is my sweet sixth-grader communicates with Jesus in the natural language of someone who’s in a real relationship with Him.

When Jesus taught the disciples how to pray, He eschewed rigid, distant formality for a much more natural approach as well. As a matter of fact, before we even get to the words our Savior spoke, it’s hugely significant to note that the language He addressed Father God in was Aramaic—the language He’d grown up speaking in Nazareth. Other rabbis from ancient times right up until that point would verbalize petitions and praise to Yahweh solely in Hebrew. The implication is that there’s one single, sacrosanct language through which we can communicate with God. By crossing that traditional line in the sand of semantics, Jesus swung wide the door for the New Testament to be written in Greek (instead of Hebrew) and ultimately be translated into thousands of other languages, dialects, and cultures so that millions and millions of people outside of Israel could hear and understand the message of God’s unconditional love for mankind!49

And the Lord’s Prayer just keeps getting better because the very first word Jesus prays is Abba, the term a first-century Aramaic-speaking person would’ve called their earthly father, which in modern English would be “Dad” or “Papa.” Most of the long-established synagogue renditions of the Tefillah (the Hebrew word for prayer) begin with: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob.” A few others address the Creator of the Universe as “Holy One,” “Mighty One,” “Builder of Jerusalem,” and “Redeemer of Israel.” But get this: scholars find no evidence in pre-Christian Palestinian Judaism that God was ever addressed as Abba by an individual Jew in prayer prior to Jesus.50 And the three additional times abba appears in the context of prayer in the New Testament (Mark 14:36, Rom. 8:15, and Gal. 4:6), the Greek expression ho patēr—which also means “Father”—is added so that in the original texts it reads: Abba, ho patēr. In effect: Dad, Father. This reiteration was surely necessary in a culture where regular folks could only access God through a priest in a highly structured religious system so the concept of addressing Him with an informal, affectionate, familial term of endearment like “Dad” would’ve been mind-blowing . . . if not heart-changing.

Kenneth Bailey shares a story in his book, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, about how the divine paternity revealed in Jesus’s model prayer miraculously changed the heart of a young Latvian woman. Dr. Bailey met her at a Christian conference soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. Because he knew she’d been indoctrinated in atheism, he was curious about how she’d come to know Jesus. He inquired whether she had a family member who was a Christian or if she’d gone to an underground church or secret Bible study. All of which she responded no to. Then she told him this story:

At funerals we were allowed to recite the Lord’s Prayer. As a young child I heard those strange words and had no idea who we were talking to, what the words meant, where they came from or why we were reciting them. When freedom came at last, I had the opportunity to search for their meaning. When you are in total darkness, the tiniest point of light is very bright. For me the Lord’s Prayer was that point of light. By the time I found its meaning, I was a Christian.51

The moment we put our trust and hope in Jesus Christ as our Savior, God’s Spirit abides within us and around us. But since we can’t see Him, sometimes we aren’t conscious of His presence. Prayer is like pouring Miracle-Gro on our God-consciousness. Prayer—petitioning and praising God—helps us become more aware of His accessibility. And Jesus’s model prayer assures us that we get to access our Creator-Redeemer in the natural context of relationship. Now that you think about it, fancy diction and decorum would seem just plain silly if they followed a “Dear Dad” salutation, wouldn’t they?

• HOW DO YOU typically address God at the beginning of a prayer?
• DO YOU USE the same type of language when you’re praying that you do in regular conversation? How about when you’re praying in front of other people?
• READ PSALM 116:2. How could the imagery of God leaning down to listen to you affect the tone of your prayers?