God Will Hear Us, The First Time

I heard a saying, some time ago, and it goes like this. “When we speak to God, it is called prayer. When God speaks to us, it is called psychosis.”

At the start of chapter eleven in the book of Luke, the apostles get curious and ask Jesus to teach them the proper way to pray to God. They also mention that one of the reasons they ask this is because they are aware that those who followed John the Baptist at that time may have had a little more structure in their ministry and that this structure may be helpful to them in their spiritual life.

I am always intrigued by the example of how the apostles are a representative of the church through history, all of the way to the present. From the freestyle prayer days one thousand years before Jesus, exhibited in Psalm 139 where the psalmist states “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts. Point out anything that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life” to the Lord’s Prayer that I learned as a child, outlined in the beginning of chapter eleven.

As I was raised a Catholic, I was very surprised to hear the ending of, ...for thine is the power and the glory... We were always told that was the Protestant ending, not the Catholic ending to the Lord’s Prayer. I think it is funny how we parse a common religious belief and even in the use of a common prayer, we can’t wait to exclude our fellow believer.

The Lord’s Prayer has so much importance because the source of the prayer is Jesus Christ Himself and according to St. Augustine, “whatever else we say when we pray, if we pray as we should, we are only saying what is already contained in the Lord's Prayer.” Because of it’s original sourcing and it’s simple completeness of thought, it is considered the most complete Christian prayer. In the words of the Catholic Saint Cyprian, "The same Lord who made us, also taught us how to pray, so that our petitions will be more easily heard, when we speak to the Father in the words offered to us by his Son.”

As we always seem to want to do, we can’t wait to institute some religious law to keep us in the proper lane of the faith highway. Starting with the Council of Toledo, the Lord’s Prayer was prescribed to all of the faithful as something to be done repetitiously and repetitively in order to be a good Christian and to please God.

God is not hard of hearing. Say it once with feeling and I am sure He will here us.