No act is more basic to the Christian life, to Christian worship, to piety, and to growth than prayer and yet also so uniquely and strangely difficult. Experience and reading tells us that the struggle to pray is common to believers. You don’t often hear or read people say, “I just could not bring myself to eat for weeks at a time.” Yet, you hear and read Christians say such things about prayer. Nevertheless, prayer is as basic to the Christian life as eating is to the body.
Just as we need to be taught what food is good for us (and what is not), so too we need to learn what prayer is and is not. Prayer is an essential element of our sanctification (the Spirit’s gradual, gracious work of conforming believers to the image of Christ). Just as we are learning daily what it means to die to sin and to live to Christ, so too we daily learn how imperfect and inconsistent our prayers are and what it means to pray as our Lord taught—in the Spirit, to the Father.
One thing worth of note is that – it is believers who have received God’s free grace in Christ. It is believers who have been saved. It is believers who have been justified. It is believers who are being gradually, graciously conformed to Christ (sanctification). It is believers who are thankful. Therefore, it is believers who pray.
Almost as soon as the story of sin and redemption begins, we find a record of prayer. Genesis 4 begins and ends with worship. Abel brought an acceptable offering, and Cain did not. The latter’s jealousy led him to murder — the first worship wars. At the end of the chapter (v. 26), with the announcement of the birth of Seth, Scripture reports: “At that time people began to call upon the name of Yahweh.” This seems like a reference to public worship, but it is interesting that worship is characterized by the act of calling upon the name of the God of the covenant, Yahweh. Prayer begins with calling upon the name of God. The Lord’s Prayer begins by invoking the name of the Father.
Our Lord Jesus instructed his disciples (and us) frequently on the importance and nature of prayer. Believers are not to pray as the (Pharisaic) hypocrites did (Matt. 6:5–7) by calling attention to ourselves, in order that our piety might be recognized by others; nor do we pray like pagans who seek to impress the gods with verbal diarrhea.
Those prayers are not the prayers of the grateful redeemed. Those are the prayers of the ones who are still seeking to impress. The believer knows that he no longer has to impress others or God, that Jesus Christ, God the Son, is our high priest, mediator, and substitute. The believer knows that he stands before God solely on the basis of Christ’s righteousness imputed, by grace alone, and that Christ and all His benefits are received through faith alone.