LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2013, Page 354

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354

THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS
Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to
hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying,
“This man receives sinners and eats with them.” So he told
them this parable: “What man of you, having a hundred sheep,
if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the
open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it?
And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing.
And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his
neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found
my sheep that was lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy
in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine
righteous persons who need no repentance.” (Luke 15:1–7)

we also pray, “Yet not my will, but Thy will be done” (Mark
14:36).78

A final question
The preceding discussion helps us answer—so far as possible—the question of “how” the unchanging God responds to our prayers. But why does God
desire communication with us? Why is He interested in hearing and receiving
our prayers in the first place? God knows even before we pray what we (and
others) need and why we (and they) need it. And God Himself needs nothing from us (see Psalm 50:12–15; Acts 17:25). He certainly does not “need”
our prayers and worship, either for the “information” they provide or for the
“affirmation” they offer. Why is God so interested in hearing our prayers?
In raising this question, we are broaching the question of the mystery of
the Gospel itself, the inexplicable nature of God’s love and the mystery of His
desire for intimacy with those whom he created and redeemed. Peter Brunner
writes:
Before [the] fall, the foremost creature actually said with
every breath: “Yes, Father.” He did not utter this yes of his
love as a choice between yes and no, but in unquestioning,
unbroken, spontaneous self-evidence, which knows of no
choice and which is nevertheless—yes, by that very fact—
the manifestation of the true, pristine freedom of man. Here
already we are facing the miracle, which can be nothing but
an offense to any outsider but comprises for the believer the
blissful fullness of God’s love, namely, that man’s loving
turning to God in prayer, praise and adoration is both in one:
gift of love from above and personal mental act of a creaturely
“I.”79
When our prayer, “Thy kingdom come,” is finally and fully answered, we
will again speak our “Yes” “to God in “unquestioning, unbroken, spontaneous” praise and thanksgiving: “‘For at that time I will change the speech of the
peoples to a pure speech, that all of them may call upon the name of the LORD
and serve him with one accord’” (Zeph. 3:9).

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should
be called children of God; and so we are. (1 John 3:1)
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation,
or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger,
or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed
all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through
him who loved us. (Rom. 8:35–37)
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the
moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man
that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care
for him? (Ps. 8:3–4)
Ultimately, therefore, our response to the gift and command of prayer (like
our response to all of God’s good and perfect gifts and commands) must be,
with St. Paul, one of sheer doxology:
O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable
his ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who
has been his counselor?” “Or who has given a gift to him that
he might be repaid?” For from him and through him and
to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen. (Rom.
11:33–36)

Even in our fallenness, however, God continues actively to seek us out—
as He sought out Adam and Eve and Cain after the Fall (Gen. 3–4)—toward
the goal of delighting in our presence, fellowship, and praise.
The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will
save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you
by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing. (Zeph.
3:17)
78

Ibid., 273.

79

Peter Brunner, Worship in the Name of Jesus (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1968), 37.

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Chapter Three: How Do Christians Pray?

The Spirit’s teaching is not by way of merely subjective feelings. We pray
as taught by the Holy Spirit in the sacred Scriptures that show us Christ who
makes the Father known. Our High Priest, Jesus, teaches us in His words and
by His example.

Jesus teaches us to pray
How do Christians pray? The answer depends on who is teaching us to
pray. As noted above, genuinely Christian prayer can only flow from faith
in Jesus Christ and the Triune God He reveals. Old Testament believers prayed
in the Christ who was to come, revealed beforehand in the Torah, Prophets,
and Psalms (Luke 24:44)—the very Psalms which tell of Christ (cf. Ps. 2:7; 110;
Matt. 22:44, par.; Acts 2:34), taught Israel to pray, and still teach us today. The
Incarnation of the Word means the only way to learn Christian prayer is from
Christ, promised and revealed.
Jesus, God’s Son in human flesh, not only reveals divinity in His person,
He also shows us perfect humanity. God’s Son, eternally one with the Father
(John 10:30), is man and therein models a life of prayer not in some “otherworldly manner,” but in authentic humanity. The eternal Word made flesh sets
aside time for prayer (Luke 5:16), pleads with His Father in human weakness
(Luke 22:42), and commends himself in death to the Father (Luke 23:46).

Learning prayer from Christ means, as Luther points out, that the “how”
of Christian prayer goes in two directions: “our Lord Christ himself has taught
us both the way and the words” of prayer.82 The way or manner of Christian
prayer flows from faith itself. We pray because God has made Himself known
to us and worked faith in us. The words and content of Christian prayer flow
from the fact that the one in whom we believe leads us to learn words by first
repeating His words, as in the Lord’s Prayer and psalms. Dietrich Bonhoeffer
emphasizes this connection:
In response to the request of the disciples, Jesus gave them
the Lord’s Prayer. Every prayer is contained in it. Whatever
is included in the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer is prayed
aright; whatever is not included is no prayer. All the prayers
of Holy Scripture are summarized in the Lord’s Prayer, and
they are contained in its immeasurable breadth. They are not
made superfluous by the Lord’s Prayer but constitute the
inexhaustible richness of the Lord’s Prayer as the Lord’s Prayer
is their summation. Luther says of the Psalter: “It penetrates
the Lord’s Prayer and the Lord’s Prayer penetrates it, so that
it is possible to understand one on the basis of the other and
to bring them into joyful harmony.” Thus the Lord’s Prayer
becomes the touchstone for whether we pray in the name of
Jesus Christ or our own name. It makes good sense, then, that
the Psalter is often bound together in a single volume with
the New Testament. It is the prayer of the Christian church. It
belongs to the Lord’s Prayer.83

St. Augustine reminds us of the importance of the Incarnation for Christian prayer:
No greater gift could God have given to men than in making
His Word, by which He created all things, their Head, and
joining them to Him as His members: that the Son of God
might become also the Son of man, one God with the Father,
one Man with men; so that when we speak to God in prayer
for mercy, we do not separate the Son from Him; and when the
Body of the Son prays, it separates not its Head from itself: and
it is one Saviour of His Body, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of
God, who both prays for us, and prays in us, and is prayed to
by us. He prays for us, as our Priest; He prays in us, as our Head; He
is prayed to by us, as our God.80
So Christians pray to the Father through the Son—and we pray by (or
in) the Holy Spirit.81 Faith comes by the Holy Spirit’s work. The Spirit’s gift
of faith is focused on Christ. In Christ we know the Father and are invited to
pray to Him as His adopted children. So it is that by the Spirit we are enabled
to “cry, ‘Abba, Father’” (Rom. 8:15; cp. Gal. 4:6).

It is by means of the words that God Himself has spoken to us, therefore,
that we Christians learn to speak back to him in prayer.
The child learns to speak because his father speaks to Him.
He learns the speech of his father. So we learn to speak to God
because God has spoken to us and speaks to us. By means of
the speech of the Father in heaven his children learn to speak
with him. Repeating God’s own words after him, we begin to
pray to him. We ought to speak to God and he wants to hear
us, not in the false and confused speech of our heart, but in the

80
St. Augustine, “Psalm LXXXVI,” §1, in Expositions on the Book of Psalms in A Select Library of
the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaef, [NPNF], vol. 8 (Grand
Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1956), 409–410; emphasis added.
81
“Wherever the Holy Spirit makes his entry into human life, there we find the origin of
Christian prayer, since it is the Spirit who moves us to pray and who instructs us in the life of
prayer. . . . It is the Holy Spirit who unites us with the living Christ and thereby enables us to
enter into a living communion with him. It is the Spirit who prays for us and with us (Rom.
8:15, 16). He teaches us how to pray, for we do not know how to pray as we ought (Rom. 8:26).”
Donald G. Bloesch, The Struggle of Prayer (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 37.

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2013 Convention Workbook

82

LC, 3, KW, 441.

83

Bonhoeffer, Psalms, 15–16.

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