Among our hopes in starting this series on the Lord's Prayer is to let Christ "re-teach" us how to pray, and so, correct us in our wrong practices and attitudes, a reality that has slowly crept into the Church’s practice of prayer. A good way to do that is to go back to the teachings of fellow faithful Christians, particularly, the Reformers of the 16th century and the Puritans of the 17th century. Their wealth of literature on the subject of prayer will be most helpful for us today. Martin Lloyd-Jones, speaking on the subject of innovations in the realm of religious worship in his time said, “The 19th century's and its pragmatic mentality and outlook is responsible for most of our troubles and problems today. To me, this is a devastating century. The sooner we forget the nineteenth century and go back to the 18th, and even further to the 17th and 16th, the better.” This just goes to show that church history can teach us on the area of revival, and I believe in many other practices in the Christian community that have been introduced have brought the problems we have now today. For this reason it is good to look at the teachings of the Reformers back to the earlier centuries. One of the things that I have observed in the churches of that period and even up until today, especially those that are branded as “traditional churches”, is that it was customary for the leaders of those churches to teach on three great subjects: The Apostle’s Creed, The Ten Commandments and The Lord’s Prayer. I guess that when their people asked the question, “How do we pray?”, the simple answer of the leaders would be to study their catechisms and teachings on the Lord’s Prayer and apply them. Today, we might be able to memorize and recite Lord’s Prayer, but not so many people truly know what it means. This is truly a great loss for the church. But the opposite is true to the Church centuries before us; earlier Christians expounded on the Lord’s prayer and among other factors, and their teachings produced a great body of praying Christians that turned the world around. I believe we owe it to ourselves to hear from the past for our spiritual edification. No individual Christian or group has a monopoly of truth. We need the godly voices of the past generations to instruct us. This is the reason why I would like to share to you some of the insights of some reformers as we go along. This is not to say that we should slavishly take their teachings and treat them as though they were inspired like the Scriptures themselves. No. We maintain the position of Sola Scriptura and we should always be Berean Christians to find out if what these Reformers and Puritans and what I will say is Biblical or not. We study them because we recognize the fact that God uses people for our instruction. The purpose for our study is not only to learn the Lord’s Prayer from the Reformers of the 16th and 17th centuries whose teachings have greatly influenced their generations. But we also would like to use this study to check our own prayer lives. Remember that great lesson from history: “All institutions have a tendency to produce its opposite.” To apply that to prayer: “All prayer can degenerate into outward forms losing the spirit underlying it. Just like what Paul wrote the Corinthians, “Keep on examining yourselves to see if you are in the faith”. So should we keep on examining ourselves to see if we are praying correctly. This attitude of examining ourselves always, is clear in the teaching on the Lord’s prayer as we go into it. The whole context of the Lord’s prayer shows us the need to examine our prayer lives always.
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