Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.— Corrie Ten Boom
Prayer often brings a flood of contemplations, even among those with experience in this spiritual discipline. Does prayer truly work? Are the testimonies of answered prayers just coincidences? Why do those who do not believe in God often seem to have more than those who pray fervently? Why is the blame placed on us when our prayers seem unanswered? Why must we pray repeatedly? Didn’t God hear us the first time? These and many other questions can make prayer seem confusing or even discouraging at times.
Books and teachings on prayer abound, but rather than bringing clarity, they sometimes add to the confusion. Yet, when we turn to the dialogue between Jesus and His disciples in Luke’s account, we find a profound simplicity. The disciples had seen Jesus pray, both privately and publicly, and witnessed the tangible results of His prayers. Yet their question was not about the power or miracles that came from prayer—it was about learning how to pray.
It appears that John the Baptist had taught his disciples a specific prayer that identified them as his followers, and Jesus’s disciples wanted something similar. However, Jesus’s response did not give them a ritualistic or Rabbinic prayer to establish an exclusive identity. Instead, He revealed the true essence of prayer as communion with God. The prayer He taught was rooted in relationship and fellowship—God as Father, His holiness, His kingdom, His will, forgiveness, and provision. It wasn’t just about physical needs like bread but about aligning oneself with God’s purposes.
Jesus often used tangible examples, like food, to teach spiritual truths because they are relatable. Unfortunately, this has sometimes led to the misconception that prayer is primarily about asking for material things. When these tangible proofs of prayer seem absent, confusion and doubt can arise. Many of our prayers focus on what we want and the evidence of answered prayer in physical terms. Yet, Jesus’s teaching emphasized friendship and relationship. The example of a friend knocking on another’s door at an inconvenient hour highlights the power of relational trust. Similarly, the analogy of children asking their father for food emphasizes the father-child relationship over the act of receiving.
To ask, “Teach us how to pray,”
is to ask, “Teach us to commune with and relate to God.”
The ultimate culmination of Jesus’s teaching here is the asking for the Holy Spirit, showing that prayer is fundamentally about deeper fellowship with the Father.
This does not mean that our physical needs are irrelevant in prayer. On the contrary, our existence is first bodily, and our physical conditions influence our ability to focus on spiritual matters. Neglecting physical needs in pursuit of spirituality is an extreme Jesus does not endorse. We need food, shelter, stability, protection, and other essentials to function and prioritize our relationship with God. For most people, burdens like debt, unemployment, or hunger can make it nearly impossible to concentrate on divine communion.
What Jesus teaches is not to ignore these needs but to seek them through our relationship with God rather than apart from Him. When we align our prayers with a desire for fellowship, our needs are met as a byproduct of that relationship.