Would you rather get everything you ask for in prayer or get to know God better than you do now?

Your current prayer life reveals your true priority.

Most of you know that I love to read. And I’ve got a pretty good library in my home office.

Still, I’m always on the lookout for more great books, so here’s your chance to make some recommendations. What are your favorite books on the subject of prayer?

I’ll start with two of mine:

Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship With God by Dallas Willard

Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer by C.S. Lewis

“When you pray, say:

“‘Father,

hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread.

Forgive us our sins,

for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.

And lead us not into temptation.’”

This version of the Lord’s Prayer comes from Luke 11. If Jesus wanted us to pray his exact words from the previous version in Matthew 6, why does he misquote himself here? There are parts missing, and some of the phrases are just different. Doesn’t Jesus know the Lord’s Prayer?

Or maybe it’s not about the specific words.

There are three things — three big themes — in both of them. I think they’re what we’re supposed to concentrate on.

First, declare God’s greatness (“hallowed be your name”).

Second, surrender your will (“your kingdom come”).

Third, acknowledge your dependence (“give us”, “forgive us”, “lead us”).

Too often we want to sing just the first and last stanzas of that song. “God, you’re great and powerful. Now, here’s all the stuff I need.”

But I think the crux of the matter is found in that second stanza — the one about surrendering our will.

That second verse — where you surrender your will and ask for God’s kingdom and agenda to come before your own — that’s where God really shapes you. That’s where real intimacy with your heavenly Father begins.

“This, then, is how you should pray:

“‘Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come,

your will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts,

as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from the evil one.’”

First, the first two lessons in the Daniel series are available for you to hear now. I really had a great time with that series and am looking forward to starting a full year’s worth of teaching on the life of Jesus. This is going to be the culmination of all my studies and research. It’s already stretching me, and I’m just outlining what the next year is going to look like.

Also, you should be able to sign up soon to get all the teachings I’ve done in .mp3 format. It’ll be a subscription service that will automatically update every month. That should be up and running in the next few days! Thank you, Jeremy (our fantastic web designer)!

For those of you who are new to the blog, I should give you a little background about the teachings you’re listening to. I started teaching a Wednesday night Bible study at the North Atlanta Church of Christ two years ago. We started with about 12 or 15 folks and have grown to more than 100 now. Most weeks there are people sitting on the floor and standing along the back wall. It’s been an amazing couple of years!

My favorite part is that there are elders and their wives who attend and sit right next to college students and people who are right out of the recovery ministry. There are folks from four or five different churches — some have been Christians longer than I have been alive — some still aren’t sure where they stand. But we come and pray together every week for God to change us as we look at these great stories contained in the Bible.

I started this as an experiment. I had been talking with some folks about writing a Study Bible called The 52 Most Important Stories in the Bible. It would be commentary, character study and daily devotional all in one. I thought it was a great idea!

And then the publisher asked me for a list of those 52 stories.

My first attempt went like this: Creation, Fall, Cain & Abel, Tower of Babel, Noah, Call of Abram, Ishmael, Sacrifice of Isaac, etc. The problem with that approach is that I’ve just listed eight stories, and I’m not even halfway through the first of 66 books in the Bible! I actually got to the end of the Old Testament and had 48 stories.

So, I decided to teach through every story in the Bible. I figured it would take me a couple of years, and when I was done I’d know which ones were most important. Makes sense, right?

Well, two years later and we’re just finishing up the Old Testament.

I’ve learned a ton. The class is something I look forward to every week, and — as I said earlier — I’m really looking forward to learning about Jesus in the coming year. But it’s time for the book project to actually start being put together now. Hopefully, the advance against royalties will be large enough for me to bring in some folks to help with research and some of the writing. But there’s still the matter of which stories make the cut.

So, I’m opening it up to you. You helped me so much with my previous two books, I need your assistance once again.

Which stories are, in your opinion, the “absolutely must have, cannot do without, if you miss this story you’ll miss something essential to the big picture” stories in the Bible?

Remember, I can only include 52 of them!

Thomas Aquinas set out five ways or “proofs” of God’s existence.

IN WAY ONE, Aquinas offered the evidence of change in the world. He wrote, “Now anything in process of change is being changed by something else.” Using Aristotle’s idea of an Unmoved Mover, Aquinas reasoned, “If the hand does not move the stick, the stick will not move anything else. Hence one is bound to arrive at some first cause or change not itself being changed by anything, and this is what everybody understands by ‘God’.”

IN WAY TWO, Aquinas focused on cause and effect in the world. “Now if you eliminate a cause you also eliminate its effects, so that you cannot have a last cause, nor an intermediate one, unless you have a first.” Aquinas did not believe in an infinite chain of causes and effects reaching back into eternity. “One is therefore forced to suppose some first cause, to which everyone gives the name ‘God’.”

IN WAY THREE, he takes up the idea of being and non-being in the world. The fact is that things exist, but they don’t really need to exist. On top of that, there was a time when they did not exist, and there will be a time when they no longer exist. “Now everything cannot be like this, for a thing that need not be, once was not, and if everything need not be, once upon a time there was nothing….” Aquinas asserted that if nothing in the world needed to exist, there must have been a time when nothing existed. Logic told him that nothing can come from nothing. “One is forced therefore to suppose something which must be, and owes this to no other thing than itself; indeed it itself is the cause that other things must be.” In this, Aquinas actually sounds a lot like Anselm. Both believed that objects in the world have contingent existance (they can exist, but they don’t have to exist), but only God has necessary existence (God must exist to be God). If God did not exist then nothing could exist, because creation is dependent upon God’s necessary existence to exist at all.

IN WAY FOUR, Aquinas concentrated on degrees of goodness and perfection in the world. “For example, things are hotter and hotter the nearer they approach what is hottest. Something therefore is the truest and best and most noble of things, and hence the most fully in being; for Aristotle says that the truest things are the things most fully in being.” Aquinas went on to write, “There is something therefore which causes in all other things their being, their goodness and whatever other perfections they have. And this we call ‘God’.”

IN WAY FIVE, Aquinas pointed to goals and order in nature. “For their behavior hardly ever varies, and will practically always turn out well; which shows that they truly tend to a goal, and do not merely hit it by accident. Nothing that lacks awareness tends to a goal, except under the direction of someone with awareness and understanding; the arrow, for example, requires an archer. Everything in nature, therefore, is directed to its goal by someone with understanding, and this we call ‘God’.”

There you have the five ways or “proofs” of God’s existence offered up by perhaps the most brilliant mind of medieval theology and philosphy. His ideas have been debated and criticized, but they’re still around. Like most people with an “NT” temperament (I’m an INTJ for those of you interested in such things) I find that Thomistic Spirituality really resonates with me.

Now, let me ask you a question: Do you think any of these Five Ways might be helpful if you were talking to someone who didn’t believe in God or wasn’t sure? Which one(s) and why?

Anne Lamott has said that there are basically only two prayers that most people pray:

“Help me! Help me! Help me!”

“Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”

Most of our prayers can be summarized with those two two-word phrases. But when Jesus takes time to teach us how to pray, he says we ought to start with two other words: “Our Father”.

Think through the implications of just those two words.

“Our” — I’m not an only child. God is not merely my Father; he’s our Father.

“Father” — I’m not an orphan. God’s not just way out there beyond the azure blue concealed from human sight. He’s right here. He’s invited me into an intimate relationship with him. He’s not content to remain at a distance. He’s a loving Father.

Our Father.

So much depth contained in those two words. Here’s a challenge for you: This weekend, pray these two words. Pray them over and over — not in a “vain repetition” sort of way. Concentrate on them. Meditate on them. Focus more on who God is than on what he can do or has done. See what happens when you pray two words at a time: Our Father.

What if God doesn’t want to do something?

What if God wants to say something?

Would you be able hear him?

How?

Jesus’ followers knew how to pray. They were Jewish, and Jewish boys learned early on how to pray. They prayed at meals and at the synagogue, at the Temple, on the Sabbath. They prayed every morning when they got up and every evening when they went to bed.

And then they met Jesus, and they said, “He knows something about praying that we don’t know.”

So, they asked him, “Jesus, would you teach us to pray?”

And Jesus does not say what many of us would say, “You don’t need to learn how to pray. It’s just talking to God. Just talk to him. There’s no right way or wrong way.”

Jesus actually says, “Okay, when you pray, do it like this.”

If someone asked you to teach them how to pray, what would you start with?

Jesus starts with…location.

“But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen” (Matthew 6:6a).

But, Jesus, can’t we pray anywhere? Location doesn’t really matter, does it?

It’s no use trying to tell Jesus that location doesn’t matter. He’s smarter than you; he knows something about prayer that you don’t know. And he says location matters. Pray in your room with the door closed. That’s the first lesson.

Thomas Aquinas began by asking three questions:

1. Is it self-evident that there is a God?

2. Can it be made evident?

3. Is there a God?

Aquinas himself was convinced that the existence of God was not self-evident. You can’t describe God the way you describe a tree or a mountain. You can’t see, hear, smell, taste or touch God. He was also convinced, though, that the natural features of the world provide a great deal of evidence for God’s existence.

In order to prove God’s existence, Aquinas began with what people saw and experienced every day. Unlike Anselm, he did not believe that understanding the term “God” is enough to show that God exists. He rejected Anselm’s a priori Platonic proof, which begins in the mind, and concentrated on five a posteriori Aristotelian proofs, which begin with the real world.

Aquinas figured:

The awareness that God exists is not implanted in us by nature in any clear or specific way. Admittedly, man is aware of what by nature he desires, and he desires by nature a happiness which is to be found only in God. But this is not, simply speaking, awareness that there is a God, any more than to be aware of someone approaching is to be aware of Peter, even should it be Peter approaching. Many, in fact, belive the ultimate good which will make us happy to be riches, or pleasure, or some such thing.

In other words, God is not obvious.

So, Aquinas rejected Anselm’s Platonism and thought it was impossible to climb from “truth” to “Truth” and call that Ultimate Truth “God”.

There are some today who argue with the very existence of truth (never mind “Truth” or “Ultimate Truth”). Perhaps, if Aquinas lived today, the question he would wrestle with would be: If we can define neither truth, Truth nor Ultimate Truth, can the term “God” have any meaning at all?

In other words, in a world where truth has not merely gone out of fashion but is considered non-existent, how can one become convinced of the existence of God? And what kind of God would that be?