O Lord, what a privilege it is that we can come to you in prayer, and we trust that we do not do so thoughtlessly, heartlessly, but genuinely. So we come before You now and ask that You would be so gracious as to speak to us. Give us ears to hear. If we walk away from this message, having learned nothing, it will not be the fault of Your Word, but it will be ours. So we pray that You would work around and through and above and beyond all of our distractions and how easily we are prone to wander, and You would teach us to pray. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Is there any activity more essential to the Christian life, and yet more discouraging in the Christian’s life, than prayer? We know we should pray. We want to pray, or at least we want to want to pray. We admire those who do pray. We think of the prayer warriors in our lives and some of you are those people. We look up to you.

And yet when it comes to actually praying, if we’re honest, most of us feel like failures. If someone asked you right now, “How’s your prayer life?” very few of us would be happy for the question or confident in our answer. We’d say, “Let’s talk about something easier, like politics” or “Let’s talk about the weather, that massive blizzard we had this week.”

We wish we prayed more. We wish we prayed longer. We wish we prayed better. I bet none of us anticipate getting to the end of our lives and looking back and saying, “You know what I regret? I just spent too much time in prayer.”

We are much more apt to resonate with the question I read from a pastor several years ago in a book as he reflected on his own life in prayer, he asked, “How can something I’m so bad at be God’s will for my life?”

I’ve read a lot of books on prayer over the years. Maybe you have, too. The best ones make me feel grateful and hopeful. I close the book and I think, “I can pray.” Too many of the books, however, make even the most earnest Christian feel like a failure for doing anything else besides praying.

I remember early in my ministry reading a classic book on prayer, I won’t mention it, some of you have probably read it, maybe you were helped by it. I’m very willing to admit that the problem may not be with the book, it may be with my hardness of heart. But I remember reading the book and finding it inspirational at first, these great exhortations to prayer, but by the end it was deflating. I felt like, well, I don’t know if I can ever do this. It felt like a relentless, pounding upon the will. Pray more, pray more.

In my experience, nonstop focus on the “ought” of prayer can stir us up at first, but then it quickly wears off and it leaves in its wake more guilt than prayer. While there may be a short season and you say, “Yes, I’m going to do this, yes,” then over the long haul you just feel this low to medium grade guilt.

But the Lord’s Prayer is different. It’s different, and I hope that this sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer is different. Not mainly because I think it’s a bad idea to just relentlessly focus on the will, and we need a little of that, but more importantly because the Lord’s Prayer doesn’t do that, at least not explicitly. That’s not how it talks about prayer.

We start this morning a series on the Lord’s Prayer. We’ll actually get to the first petition tonight and we’ll be covering it morning and evening for the rest of the month.

You probably are aware of the significant place that the Lord’s Prayer has played in all of Church history. Throughout Church history, when it came to discipling children and discipling new converts, the Church instructed people in three basic elements: The Apostles’ Creed,