There’s nothing like a lesson from God.
We can deduce all we want from prophets or messengers but when Jesus takes the time to teach something, it’s a good plan to pay attention.
Welcome to Jesus’s lesson on how to pray.(1)
It’ll take more than a while to dissect the components of the Lord’s prayer so let’s stick with one line in the interim.
Give us this day our daily bread.(2)
This day has a few implications.
We’re to ask for one day. The day in which we exist.
The obvious implication being we’re to come to God in prayer every single day.
Everyday? Really?
That sounds like a lot.
Depends on how you look at it.
Some things we do on a daily basis without second thought.
We brush our teeth, change our clothes and eat – in most cases more than once a day.
We do these things to keep ourselves healthy, safe and functional.
Prayer on the other hand is easily ignored because it often doesn’t make our necessary ‘to-do’ list.
You know when it’s easiest to stop praying?
When things are good.
Prayer has so often been associated with a need for help that it rarely enters our minds to pray when we sit in a position where we don’t think we need help.
Victory and pride are doorways to that position.
It happened to Joshua.
As leader of Israel he had had successes and at least one failure.
Luckily the root of that failure was removed ensuring Ai’s defeat. (3)
After that comprehensive victory, Israel from every angle looked to be on a roll; a fact that had surrounding nations scrambling to save their skin and one nation strategically got the upper hand using a tool that Israel did not see coming…guile.(4)
Gibeon disguised it’s men in tattered clothing and in an Oscar-worthy performance, used moldy bread as proof that they were from a far off land interested in peace with Israel
Joshua, who so far had not put a foot wrong fell prey to Gibeon’s guile.(4)
He became complacent. Fresh off successive victories, he did not inquire of the Lord.
He did enquired of his leaders and ended up believing a false narrative.
In less than a week, the deception came to light and there was nothing Israel could do about the peace brokered with a nation they were supposed to destroy.
As humans our natural tendency is to trust our senses. We trust what we see, smell, hear, taste and touch.
Like the Gibeonites, our enemy knows and works hard at exploiting those tendencies.
God also knows what the enemy knows and offers us protection through daily prayer.
There is so much we don’t know. God on the other hand knows it all, which makes it unwise to think we can go our own way and make anything other than a mess.
In His mercy, God hasn’t left us on this planet without help. He has left us with His all- knowing all-powerful self, so we do more than survive.
Joshua’s story tells how the best of intentions can often lead us into a ditch. If he had turned to God when he was unsure, he could have saved himself and his country a fair amount of regret.
We get to learn from that.
God would have us seek him daily; When things go bad; When things go great; When we’re on a low; When we’re on a high.
By the way, daily prayer doesn’t have to be complicated. Most of us speak daily to those we love without considering it a chore.
God wants to be part of our daily lives.
Not necessarily because we want something from him but because He ultimately knows the way we take, and it’s just good sense to follow His leading.
The divine arsenal has a preemptive strike.
It’s called prayer.
We should use it more.
1 Matthew 6v9-15
2 Matthew 6 v 11
3 Joshua 7 v 25- 8 v1
4 Joshua 9 v 16