In trying to answer the question, "What is prayer?" we have, in part,
answered this question also, but it is so important that it must have a
section to itself.
In the first place, we should pray in order to make acknowledgment of
the glory and the power of God. It is because of what God is Himself
that we have need to fall down before Him in adoration and praise. We
are inclined to think too much of our own needs in relation to prayer.
Indeed when we mention the word prayer, we begin at once to think of
our needs, of what we want, and of what other people want. These are
important, but these are not first; and until we understand that they
take the second place in prayer, and do not constitute its chief
argument, we cannot realize the real reason for Christian Prayer. The
real, the first reason for prayer from the Christian point of view is
to glorify God,--to praise Him for what He is, and to fall down before
the greatness of His power. We have a model prayer which teaches us
about this. Among many other things it teaches us the chief reasons
for prayer. It comes to us full of answers to our question, Why should
we pray? "When ye pray, say, Our Father, Which art in Heaven, Hallowed
be Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, in earth as it is in
heaven." This surely means that God must be first in our prayers.[2]
We are half way through the Lord's Prayer, we are more than half way
through, before we begin to talk about our needs. Our Lord Jesus
Christ has taught us that in prayer we are to think first of such
things as the Father, Heaven, His Name, His Kingdom and His Will,
before we say anything of the bread and our other needs. Yes, surely
the great reason for praying is to honour God, to unite ourselves with
His great purposes in heaven and earth.
Again, I would ask you to think of this from another point of view.
One of the great objects of life is to know God. To know God! This
sometimes seems a very mystical, far away subject, does it not? It
belongs, surely, to those who have been specially endowed, or to those
who have the mystical temperament! I do not think this is true. I
think we grow to know God as we grow to know our friends. And how do
we grow to know our friends? We speak to them, we take them into our
confidence, we tell them of the things that make up our lives, and by
so doing we grow into friendship. If we neglect this for long our
friendship begins to wane. Now I think it is very much the same with
our relations to our great Friend. We grow in our knowledge of Him and
His ways, and in our understanding of His mind, just in proportion as
it is our habit to go into His Presence and to take Him into our
confidence about our lives. And this is what prayer is. By prayer we
grow to know God. The highest prayer is "Thy Will be done", and we can
only come to those heights of prayer by praying,--for it is by talking
to God, looking at Him, taking Him into our confidence that we come to
understand some of His ways and purposes, enter into the secret places
of His dwelling, and thus learn to say, "Thy will be done!" Only they
who have learnt in the School of Prayer to say, "Father ... Hallowed be
Thy name" can go on to truly say, "Thy will be done". The object of
prayer is not to bend His Will to ours but to so learn of him, and to
so enter into His Friendship day by day that we can say, "Thy will be
done".
But, of course, in prayer we are meant to ask for things for ourselves
and for others. What has been said above by no means indicates the
complete reason for praying. No, the Christian prays for things for
himself and others. It cannot be too strongly stated "that prayer gets
things done". "Ye have not," says St. James, "because ye ask not". It
is the Will of the Father to give us things in response to prayer. Our
Lord in the model prayer taught us to pray definitely for certain
things in human life. His Father, so He teaches us, is interested in
the whole of human life, all its needs, its cares, its joys, its
perplexities, its strain,--all these can be made the subject of
intercourse between the Father and the child. The Father cares about
them so much that they must find their place in our prayers. Indeed,
they are so important that they must have _their own place_. And their
own place is second. So in all our praying let us remember it is God
first, ourselves second. But we go further than that. It would seem
as if we were not in a position to know our real needs sufficiently
well to pray about them with intelligence, unless first of all we have
allowed the light that comes from thinking about God, adoring His Name,
and falling down before the majesty of His purpose and His will, to
shine upon our life's needs. Yes, we are indeed to pray for our varied
needs and those of others, but we cannot know our real needs unless God
is first in our prayer, and we have prayed, "Our Father, Hallowed be
Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done".[3]