Luke 11:13 If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!"

1. Our biggest fear with prayer is that God will say ____________.

2. In teaching us to pray, Jesus gives us:

    a. A ____________.

    b. A ____________.

3. Because we are in Christ, God will always answer our prayers for our ____________ and never to ____________ us.


Scripture Readings
Genesis 18:17-33
Colossians 2:6-15
Luke 11:1-13

Take It With You!

As we learn how to live as disciples of Jesus Christ, here helpful tools will be offered to aid in your study.

"Lord, teach us to pray!" So spoke the disciples to Jesus. In making this request, they confessed that they were not able to pray on their own, that they had to learn to pray. The phrase "learning to pray" sounds strange to us. If the heart does not overflow and begin to pray by itself, we say, it will never "learn" to pray. But it is a dangerous error, surely very widespread among Christians, to think that the heart can pray by itself. For then we confuse wishes, hopes, sighs, laments, rejoicings - all of which the heart can do by itself - with prayer. And we confuse earth and heaven, man and God. Prayer does not mean simply to pour out one's heart. It means rather to find the way to God and speak with him, whether the heart is full or empty. No man can do that by himself. For that he needs Jesus Christ.

The disciples want to pray, but they do not know how to do it. That can be very painful, to want to speak with God and not to be able to, to have to be speechless before God, to discover that every call to him dies within itself, that heart and mouth speak an absurd language that God does not want to hear. In this need we seek out men who are able to help us, who know something about prayer. If one among us who is able to pray would only take the other along in his prayer, if we could pray along with him, then we could be helped! Certainly experienced Christians can help us in this way a great deal. BUT they can do it only through him who must himself help them, and to whom they direct us if they are true teachers of prayer, namely through Jesus Christ. If he takes us along with him in his prayer, if we are privileged to pray along with him, if he lets us accompany him on his way to God and teaches us to pray, then we are free from the agony of prayerlessness. But that is precisely what Jesus Christ wants to do. He wants to pray with us and to have us pray with him, so that we may be confident and glad that God hears us.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible