Entrusted with the Gospel

They say environment shapes you, so when possible, choose your environment carefully. If you can get in, Harvard sounds amazing, but if a disproportionate percentage of professors there are atheists, why not just pick another school?

But it’s not just environment that shapes us – prayer shapes us too. Now that’s not the primary thing prayer does – most importantly, it connects us with God who hears and answers. 

But praying also molds us.

I’ve been praying the Lord’s Prayer for decades now, and I wonder what my life would be like had I not been praying all along the way that Jesus taught – I hesitate to ponder it. 

Here’s what I mean: the most natural impulse of my heart is to 

• Glorify myself, 
• Organize life to my own advantage, and 
• Do whatever I want. 

But here I am, every day praying against that natural impulse, and instead, praying that 

• God’s name would be honored, 
• His Kingdom would be advanced, and 
• His will would be done. 

Asking for these things day after day, year after year changes you. Not to mention that God answers your prayer.

Or consider the tendency to get angry or frustrated with others in the course of everyday life; here, the daily prayer that God would forgive me…“as I forgive others”…also recalibrates our grudge-holding hearts.

And I might forget that I live in a world with a spiritual enemy out to destroy, but daily I remember that he prowls like a roaring lion…and I’m on the lookout more than I would be otherwise.

I have been formed by this prayer, just as Jesus intended me to be. 

I don’t know what your plan is to pray every day, and I would not say that one must pray this prayer that Jesus gave His disciples. But I would say that if you don’t have a plan for daily prayer, the Lord Jesus provides us with a wonderful model, and there’s undoubtedly far more here than meets the eye. 

Consider the wisdom of beginning to pray it every day.