How's your prayer life? Some people would answer, "What prayer life? I don't have a prayer life. I'm much too busy!" Yes, we do all lead busy lives, but is that a plausible excuse?

Everyone makes time for what they value most in life!

As Christians what do we value most? If what we value most is a relationship with God, our Father in heaven, then we will set aside regular time during each day to pray to Him.

Others might say, "But I don't even know how to pray!" And that's a fair question. Prayer is not always easy. I wonder what you’re our own experience of prayer is? I often feel inadequate about my prayer. Yet I feel a longing to go further, to connect with God more deeply.
- A quick show of hands. Who’s with me in that feeling? Who else sometimes feels inadequate in their prayer and yearns to go a bit deeper???
- And who feels entirely satisfied with their prayer as it is and doesn't’t see any need for anything more???
We’re not the first ones to want to grow in our prayer life and not know how to proceed. Prayer is something we seem to feel perpetually inadequate about. So the disciples, probably speaking for most of us, come to Jesus and say, "Lord, teach us to pray." And Jesus responds with a model of how to pray.

Now no religion ever ranked prayer higher in the scales of priority than the Jews did. Prayer was very formalised – set prayers were recited 3 times a day, morning, midday and again in the evening. There were many who loved these prayers and would repeat them with much reverence, adoration and love: but inevitably there would be many who just gabbled their way repetitively through them without thought to what they were saying or to whom they were saying it.

And we are ill qualified to criticise, as I am sure there are many occasions when we do precisely the same with the prayer which we know today as the Lord’s Prayer. The disciples observed Jesus at prayer and asked Him to teach them how to pray. They desired a deeper more intimate relationship with God, like Jesus had, and clearly Jesus wanted them to have it too, as he does us today.

Prayer is a learned discipline which begins with acknowledging God's goodness and aligning ourselves with God's purposes.

If you find prayer difficult, like those first disciples, or maybe your prayer life at present seems dull, boring, meaningless and dry, then a good place to start is by regularly saying the Lord’s Prayer.

If we look at this pattern we will see that when we pray God is firstly given his supreme place - Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come - we acknowledge God for who he is and for the claim which he rightly has over our lives. Then we can bring before God our Present needs -for bread and the essentials that we need to sustain us daily in our lives, - we bring all our past wrong doings, and ask for his forgiveness, and pray for His help and guidance in our future. We also join our concern and commitment for people and the world with His. In the Lord’s Prayer Jesus teaches us to bring the whole of our lives to the whole of God, and to bring the whole of God to the whole of our lives. As this pray becomes part of our daily routine so we can begin to include other prayers. There are many to be found in the psalms and scattered throughout the scriptures, and there are many other books available with collections of really well composed prayers.

Now the objection that is often raised to the use of set prayers is that they can become just routine things that we say without thinking, and that is undoubtedly true. They can. But that’s not the whole story. You see, if you were to ask Andrea Bocelli or Dame Kiri Te Kawana whether singing scales can become just routine things they do without thinking, they would certainly tell you " Yes," But singing scales was where they started to learn and now as two of the best opera singers in the world they know that they still have to sing scales to stay at their peak.
Praying set prayers is a bit like singing scales. Even when they’re not really expressing the fullness of your prayer, the exercise shapes and moulds you and establishes within you a rhythm of prayer which leads to praying things that are more specific and heartfelt.
If you want to learn to sing you start with scales. If you want to learn to pray, then regularly praying the Lord’s Prayer and other set prayers can awakens in us all kinds of holy desires in which our deepest yearnings will start to find expression in spontaneous prayer.

Like the first followers, we too can to ask for help with learning and exploring prayer–and many people who are serious about it do ask for help.

Earlier in the year, during Lent, the Team here in Leek held a Retreat in Life, which provided an opportunity for people to explore and develop their prayer life supported by others.

The value and importance which Christians in our town place on prayer was reflected by the number of people here at St Edward’s and St John’s and the wider team who attended the course.

Conscious of the business of people’s lives the course was planned to fit into our daily life patterns. Jesus has already given us a model of prayer – what to say and how to say it – the course provided opportunities to consider to different styles of prayer in which this pattern could be used to develop our own individual prayer life.

You see, your particular set of strengths and weaknesses are unique to you .We have all sorts of idiosyncrasies that make up the unique human being that we are. And so the ways we relate, the ways that we express ourselves to God, or anyone else for that matter, will be unique to us. So we explored different methods of prayer, such as praying with the bible, and imaginative Meditations on various passages of scripture.

Sticking with it, not giving up or letting go, is something that Jesus encouraged his followers to do when they asked him about prayer. It’s a very good question: How do you pray? In a way it’s something we need to learn all our lives. We never really arrive at a place where there isn’t something more to learn about prayer. As we change, and grow, and mature in our faith so we need different ways to express ourselves in prayer to our loving creator.

If we desire to make real advances in the depth and intimacy of our relationship with God, then we need to persevere and learn how to pray. Prayer, real prayer, is something that enables us to journey deeper into, and experience a more intimate communion with God. Jesus prayed directly to His heavenly Father. He prayed anywhere—whether outdoors on a hill, or in a boat. Anywhere. He prayed often. Sometimes He prayed all night or rose up early in the morning to pray. We too can find time in the business of lives to pray; in the bathroom, walking the dog, washing the dishes and commuting to work, or hanging out the washing. Prayer is hard work, but our communication with God is as essential to our spiritual well-being as breathing is to our physical life.

The other way Jesus taught, as he so often did, was to tell short stories or parables: in our passage this morning we hear about the friend at midnight; the searching person; and the good parent. All of these stories encourage us not to give up but to persevere in prayer.

They also encourage us that the reason not to give up, but persevere is because God is good and prayer, in one sense, is about learning just how good God is. He always wants the best for us and for the world, and prayer is about discovering what that might be. Often it is about us learning that what we at first thought was best for us or the right way for things to work out, is not necessarily His.

God is good and will neither ignore you nor give you what’s bad for you. But just as you know that if you give children exactly what they want, when they want it you just end up with spoilt children, so too God will not spoil you. We are told to "search and we will find" because it is not always going to be handed to us on a plate. As in many other areas of life we will sometimes benefit more from the actual searching than we will from the eventual finding.

The value of persistent prayer is not that God will hear us, but that we will finally hear God. The more we pray the more our wills, our thoughts and desires fall into step with Gods.

Jesus teaches us that God is our Father and so we can be sure that he wants us to ask for his help and will answer in ways that reflect his love for us.

Jesus says if human parents can be relied upon to help their children, how much more will our heavenly Father help us? We can take this comparison further: if human parents would be devastated to know their children were in need but did not turn to them for help, how much more pain does it cause our perfect heavenly Father when we do not talk to him? Let’s remember the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer "Our Father", and let God’s perfect parenthood encourage and inspire us to persevere in drawing close to him in prayer.