Man of Prayer

Prayer is one of the greatest gifts God has given his people. Prayer is the gift of talking to the Creator of the universe and the Redeemer of the soul. It is an awesome privilege and a humbling responsibility. Prayer is at the same time a gift and a command. God calls us to pray because he knows that it is food for our souls. We are prayerless to our own spiritual poverty. Every follower of Jesus should be a person of prayer.

Jesus was a person of prayer, a man of prayer. He was the greatest person of prayer in all of human history. His disciples knew it and sought his help in their own prayer struggles. They could plainly see that prayer was a source of his amazing power. We find the prayer life of Jesus on display in the four Gospels. They all show him to be a man of prayer, but it is Luke that makes it a point of emphasis more than the others. Over and over, we find Jesus praying in every kind of situation. The aroma of prayer was always on him. He had a prayer instinct. He gravitated automatically to connect with the Father as he navigated through the many challenges of his life. In what follows, we want to get a bit of a glimpse into the praying heart of Jesus through the lens of Luke.

In Luke, we first see Jesus praying at his baptism (3:21-22). He began his public ministry by traveling south from Nazareth to the Judean wilderness, where John the Baptist was baptizing in the Jordan River. John was preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. But Jesus had no sins from which he needed to repent. It was in that moment of intense spiritual energy around the ministry of John that Jesus entered the journey that would lead him to the cross. He walked through a portal into a different world, a world of intense spiritual conflict and confrontation. In that holy and heated environment of spiritual warfare, he prayed. In that instant of transcendent time, the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove; and the voice of the Father echoed from heaven saying, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” In that transitional time, Jesus’ inherent intuition was prayer.

We next find Jesus praying in Luke early in his public ministry when great crowds were streaming to him for healing (5:12-16). Jesus had healed a man of the isolating and debilitating disease of leprosy. In that tinderbox of troubles that was first-century Galilee, the word about him spread like a raging wildfire. People were coming to him from every quarter to hear him and to be healed of their maladies. They urgently pressed in on him, seeking the touch of the healer’s hand. In the context of that perfect storm of stress, Jesus would withdraw to secluded and solitary places to pray. It was a time to be alone with the Father and to re-energize his soul and spirit to re-launch for further ministry.

In that same general timeframe, Luke tells us that on one occasion, Jesus journeyed up into the mountains where he prayed all night long (6:12-16). Maybe it was a favorite place he often prayed, or maybe it was higher up upon the mountain to get closer to the Father. Asking, seeking, and knocking, Jesus cried out to the Father hour after hour the entire night. The intense spiritual warfare of praying all night while knowing what was coming in the morning and its critical nature must have been exhausting. Jesus may have prayed all night at other times, but on this instance, when daybreak arrived, he called his disciples together and chose twelve from them whom he named apostles. In this pivotal moment in salvation history, Jesus seeks the Father’s face all night long. He prayed until the light broke through with clarity.

On another occasion, Jesus is praying alone with his disciples (9:18-20). This is probably right after feeding the five thousand; it follows that story in the text. The atmosphere of the story of feeding the five thousand is one of crowds of people and the busyness of teaching and healing. Jesus is ministering to various kinds of needs. People wanted to get at Jesus. They needed Jesus, but in this story, the atmosphere is one of being alone with his disciples and engaging in prayer. In this context, Jesus poses a question to them. He said to them, “Who do the crowds say that I am?” The disciples had helped Jesus with the feeding of the five thousand, and they had earlier returned from the mission of going two by two throughout the cities and villages of Galilee, preaching and healing. They were in a position to have some sense of what the crowds were thinking about Jesus. And they had several answers to give him, but that was not the concern of Jesus. His concern was deeper; it resided in their hearts. He immediately said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”  This was the real question he was interested in and was surely part of his prayer. Peter answered that question saying, “The Christ of God.” In Matthew 16:16, Peter said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” This is a pivotal moment in Jesus’ ministry set in the context of prayer. But Jesus was a man of prayer; he always prayed in pivotal moments. Or maybe it was that Jesus was always praying, so that pivotal moments were always happening.

About eight days later, Jesus took Peter, James, and John with him up on a mountain to pray (9:28-29). As he was praying, his face and his clothes began to shine with a dazzling white glow. Jesus’ glory hidden by his humanity was revealed. At that moment, two men appeared with him in glory. The three disciples had fallen into a deep sleep while Jesus was praying, but awoke when this happened. Whether the disciples instinctively knew the two men to be Moses and Elijah, or they knew by hearing Jesus talking to them, we do not know, but Jesus was speaking to Moses and Elijah about his departure, which he was about to fulfill in Jerusalem. Then the Father spoke to the disciples from a cloud, “This is my Son, my Chosen One; listen to him!” In the context of intimate communion with the Father, Jesus’ glory was revealed, and a heavenly conversation about his mission ensued. The plan of God moved forward when Jesus prayed.

The last week of Jesus’ life is often called Holy Week. He went to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover, and was arrested by the religious leaders and crucified by the Romans. In the latter part of the week, Jesus celebrated the Passover meal with his disciples. In that holy place, tension hung in the air like smoke as Jesus revealed what would soon happen. The disciples were confused and anxious, not fully able to grasp all Jesus was saying. Then Jesus made known to Simon Peter the serious and volatile nature of the spiritual conflict that was raging in the room and in his heart. Jesus said to him, “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demand to have you, that he might sift you as wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail” (22:31-32). Simon recoiled at every word Jesus spoke with fear and disbelief. He claimed that he was willing to follow Jesus to prison and even death. The events of that night and the next morning would prove him wrong. Peter denied his Lord. The grief and pain in Peter’s heart were bitter. How could he recover from such a failure? The only way for the future that would become reality for Peter was that Jesus prayed for him. The prayers of Jesus changed the course of Peter’s life. Whose life is waiting on your prayers?

The final prayers of Jesus we see in Luke are prayers from his cross. In Luke 23:34, we hear Jesus praying as he gasped for breath, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Here we find Jesus praying for those who persecuted him to death on a cross. Nailed to a tree they had designed for him, Jesus forgave them for hating him and killing him. The basis of Jesus’ prayer for forgiveness was that they did not know what they were doing. But in one sense, they knew precisely what they were doing. They planned it down to every grizzly detail. They drank deeply of that insidious sin of envy. It fermented inside them and led them to the murder of the only truly good and innocent man who ever lived. Yet, Jesus knew all this and still prayed for their forgiveness. No one ever practiced grace more than this man.

Then, at the end of his suffering, Jesus prays one last time. Luke 23:46 records Jesus praying from his bloody cross. “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” Having finished the work of the redemption of mankind, Jesus now turns his attention to the Father. He had come into the world to do the Father’s plan, and he did it in every detail. In this final prayer, Jesus thrusts himself into the hands of his heavenly Father. He had humbled himself to the will of his Father throughout his life on earth. Now he returns to heaven, mission accomplished.

The key element of Jesus’ life through all the various experiences and challenges he faced to fulfill the plan of salvation was prayer. Jesus truly lived his life by prayer. It was the air he breathed. And as a man of profound prayer power, he serves as the example for his followers of what a praying life looks like. Led by the Spirit, followers of Jesus desire to be like him in every way, and prayer is one of the main ways we long to follow Jesus. As we take stock of our own prayer lives in light of Jesus’ prayer life, we all can find many ways we fall short. This is not an occasion for crippling shame, but a call to a serious and humble commitment to follow our Lord in a deeper level of prayer engagement. The apostle Paul acknowledged the need and the power source of Christ-like prayer in Romans 8:26-27, “Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”