God Hears the Heart

On the Lord’s Prayer

Dear brothers, the teachings of the Gospel are nothing other than divine instruction — foundations for hope to be built on, props to hold faith up, food to cheer the heart, a rudder to steer our course by, a guard for obtaining salvation. They teach the willing minds of believers here on earth, and they lead them to the kingdoms of heaven. God willed that many things should be said and heard through the prophets, his servants. But how much greater are the things the Son speaks! The Word of God, who was in the prophets, now bears witness with his own voice. He no longer tells someone to prepare the way for his coming; he comes himself, and opens the way, and shows it to us. We had been wandering in the darkness of death, blind and with no thought for what lay ahead. Now the light of grace has lit us up, so that we may keep to the way of life with the Lord as our ruler and guide.

Along with the rest of his saving warnings and his divine commands, by which he advises his people for their salvation, he also gave a pattern for praying. He himself advised us and taught us what we ought to pray for. The one who made us live also taught us to pray, with the same kindness by which he has stooped to give and grant us everything else — so that when we speak to the Father in the prayer and the petition the Son has taught us, we might be heard more readily. He had already foretold that the hour was coming when “the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth,” and in this way he carried out what he had promised earlier. We who through his making us holy have received the Spirit and truth may, by his teaching, worship truly and spiritually as well. For what prayer can be more spiritual than the one given to us by Christ, the same Christ by whom the Holy Spirit was given to us? What way of praying to the Father can be more truthful than the one delivered to us out of the mouth of the Son, who is the Truth? So to pray in any other way than he taught is not merely ignorance; it is sin. He settled the matter himself when he said, “You reject the commandments of God so that you may keep your own traditions.” [d]

So then, dear brothers, let us pray as God our Teacher has taught us. It is a loving and friendly prayer to plead with God in his own words, to let the prayer of Christ come up to his ears. When we make our prayer, let the Father recognize the words of his Son. Let the one who lives inside our heart live in our voice as well. And since we have him as an Advocate with the Father for our sins, then when we petition as sinners on account of our sins, let us put forward the words of our Advocate. For he says that “whatever we ask of the Father in his name, he will give us.” How much more effectively, then, do we get what we ask in Christ’s name, if we ask for it in Christ’s own prayer! [f]

But when we pray, let our speech and our petition be under discipline, keeping quietness and modesty. Let us bear in mind that we are standing in God’s sight. We have to please the divine eyes both by the way we hold our bodies and by the pitch of our voice. It is the mark of a shameless man to be loud with his shouting; it suits a modest man to pray with restrained petitions. Besides, in his teaching the Lord has told us to pray in secret — in hidden, out-of-the-way places, in our own bedrooms. This best suits faith, because it teaches us that God is present everywhere, that he hears and sees everything, and that in the fullness of his majesty he reaches even into hidden and secret places. As it is written: “I am a God who is near, and not a God far off. If a man hides himself in secret places, will I not see him? Do I not fill heaven and earth?” And again: “The eyes of the Lord are in every place, watching the evil and the good.” And when we come together with the brothers in one place and celebrate the divine sacrifices with God’s priest, we ought to remember modesty and discipline. We are not to fling our prayers about at random with unrestrained voices, or throw at God with noisy wordiness a petition that ought to be commended to him by modesty. God listens to the heart, not to the voice. He does not have to be reminded by shouting, since he sees what people are thinking. The Lord proves it to us when he says, “Why do you think evil in your hearts?” And in another place: “And all the churches will know that I am the one who searches hearts and inmost thoughts.” [g]

Hannah, in the first book of Samuel, held to this and kept it; she was a figure of the church. She prayed to God not with a loud petition but silently and modestly, deep inside her own heart. Her prayer was hidden, but her faith was plain. She spoke not with her voice but with her heart, because she knew that this is how God hears. And she got what she was asking for, because she asked it believing. Divine Scripture says as much: “She spoke in her heart, and her lips moved, and her voice was not heard; and God heard her.” We read in the Psalms as well: “Speak in your hearts, and on your beds, and be pierced through.” The Holy Spirit suggests these same things through Jeremiah and teaches us, saying, “But God ought to be worshiped by you in the heart.” [i]

And dear brothers, whoever prays should not be ignorant of the way the tax collector prayed alongside the Pharisee in the temple. He did not raise his eyes boldly to heaven or lift his hands in pride. He beat his breast, testified to the sins shut up inside him, and begged for the help of the divine mercy. The Pharisee was pleased with himself; but this man, praying like that, was the one who deserved to be made holy. He put the hope of salvation not in confidence in his own innocence — for there is no one who is innocent — but confessed that he was a sinner and prayed humbly, and the one who pardons the humble heard the man who asked. The Lord records these things in his Gospel: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed to himself like this: God, I thank you that I am not like other men — unjust, robbers, adulterers — or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of everything I own. But the tax collector stood far off and would not so much as lift his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast and said: God, be merciful to me, a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house counted righteous rather than the Pharisee; for everyone who lifts himself up will be brought low, and whoever makes himself low will be lifted up.” [k]

Dear brothers, now that we have learned these things from the sacred reading and have gathered how we ought to come to prayer, let us learn from the Lord’s teaching as well what we should pray. “Pray like this,” he says: [l]

Before anything else, the Teacher of peace and the Master of unity did not want prayer to be made singly and individually, as though whoever prays should pray for himself alone. We do not say “My Father in heaven,” or “Give me this day my daily bread.” No one asks that only his own debt be forgiven him. No one requests for himself alone that he not be led into temptation, or that he be delivered from evil. Our prayer is public and shared; and when we pray, we do not pray for one person but for the whole people, because we, the whole people, are one. The God of peace and Teacher of harmony, who taught unity, willed that one should pray this way for all, just as he himself carried us all in one. The three young men kept this law of prayer when they were shut up in the fiery furnace. They spoke together in prayer and were of one heart in the agreement of the Spirit. The faith of sacred Scripture assures us of it, and in telling us how men like that prayed it gives us an example we ought to follow in our own prayers, so that we may become what they were. “Then these three,” it says, “as though out of one mouth sang a hymn and blessed the Lord.” They spoke as though out of one mouth — and Christ had not yet taught them how to pray. That is why their words carried and had their effect as they prayed: a peaceful, sincere, spiritual prayer deserved well of the Lord. We find that the apostles prayed the same way with the disciples after the Lord’s ascension. “They all,” Scripture says, “kept on with one accord in prayer, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.” They kept on with one accord in prayer. By the urgency of their praying and by their agreement they declared that God, “who makes men live of one mind in a house,” admits into the divine and eternal home only those whose prayer is united. [m]

But what deep mysteries the Lord’s Prayer holds! How many of them, and how great — gathered up briefly in the words, yet spiritually rich in power! There is absolutely nothing passed over, nothing left out of these prayers and petitions of ours; they are a summary of the whole heavenly teaching. “Pray in this way,” he says: “Our Father in heaven.” The new man, born again and restored to his God by his grace, says “Father” in the first place because he has now begun to be a son. “He came to his own,” it says, “and his own did not receive him. But to as many as received him, he gave the power to become sons of God, to those who believe in his name.” So the man who has believed in his name and has become God’s son ought to begin from this point: to give thanks, and to declare himself God’s son, by saying that God is his Father in heaven. He ought also to bear witness, among the very first words of his new birth, that he has renounced an earthly father of flesh and has begun both to know and to have as his father only the one who is in heaven. As it is written: “Those who say to their father and their mother, I have not known you, and who have not acknowledged their own children — these have kept your commandments and have guarded your covenant.” The Lord in his Gospel has also told us to call no one on earth our father, because there is one Father for us, the one in heaven. And to the disciple who mentioned his dead father he replied, “Let the dead bury their dead” — for the disciple had said his father was dead, while the Father of believers is alive. [n]

And dear brothers, we ought not only to notice and understand that we are to call him Father who is in heaven. We add something to it and say our Father — that is, the Father of those who believe, of those who have been made holy by him, restored by the birth that spiritual grace gives, and have begun to be sons of God. This word also rebukes and condemns the Jews. They not only despised Christ in unbelief, though he had been announced to them by the prophets and sent to them first, but they also cruelly put him to death. They cannot now call God their Father, since the Lord shames them and refutes them: “You are born of your father the devil, and the cravings of your father you want to carry out. He was a murderer from the beginning, and he did not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.” And through the prophet Isaiah God cries out in anger: “I have fathered children and brought them up, but they have despised me. The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master’s manger; but Israel has not known me, and my people has not understood me. Ah, sinful nation, a people loaded down with sins, a wicked seed, corrupt children! You have abandoned the Lord; you have provoked the Holy One of Israel to anger.” Rejecting them, we Christians say Our Father when we pray, because he has begun to be ours and has stopped being the Father of the Jews, who abandoned him. A sinful people cannot be a son; the name of sons belongs to those who are granted forgiveness of sins, and to them immortality is promised anew, in the words of our Lord himself: “Everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin. And the slave does not stay in the house forever, but the son stays forever.” [o]

But how great the Lord’s generosity is! How great his stooping down, and how full his goodness toward us, that he has wanted us to pray in God’s sight in such a way that we call God Father and call ourselves sons of God, as Christ is the Son of God! Not one of us would have dared risk that name in prayer if he had not himself allowed us to pray this way. So then, dear brothers, we ought to remember and to know that when we call God Father we ought to act as God’s children — so that in the same measure in which we find pleasure in thinking of God as a Father, he too may be able to find pleasure in us. Let us live as temples of God, so that it is plain God lives in us. Let our doings not fall away from the Spirit. We have begun to be heavenly and spiritual, so let us think and do nothing but what is spiritual and heavenly. The Lord God himself has said, “Those who honor me I will honor, and whoever despises me will be despised.” And the blessed apostle has laid it down in his letter: “You are not your own, for you were bought with a great price. Glorify and carry God in your body.” [p]

After this we say, “May your name be held holy.” Not that we are wishing for God that he may be made holy by our prayers; we are begging him that his name may be made holy in us. And by whom is God made holy, since he is the one who makes holy? Well — because he says, “Be holy, just as I am holy,” we ask and beg that we who were made holy in baptism may go on being what we have begun to be. And we pray for this daily. We need to be made holy daily, so that we who fall away daily may wash our sins out by being made holy again and again. The apostle declares what this holiness is that God’s stooping down confers on us, when he says: “Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who make themselves soft, nor men who lie with men, nor thieves, nor swindlers, nor drunkards, nor slanderers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such indeed were you; but you were washed, but you were counted righteous, but you were made holy in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” He says we are made holy in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. We pray that this holiness may stay with us. And because our Lord and Judge warns the man he had healed and brought back to life to sin no more, or something worse will happen to him, we make this request in our constant prayers. We ask it day and night, that the holiness and the life we received from God’s grace may be kept safe by his protection. [q]

Next in the prayer comes: May your kingdom come. We ask that the kingdom of God may be set out for us, just as we ask that his name may be made holy in us. For when does God not reign? When does anything begin with him that both always has been and never stops being? What we pray for is that our kingdom, promised to us by God, may come — the kingdom bought by the blood and the suffering of Christ. We are his subjects in the world first; afterward we will reign along with Christ when he reigns, as he himself promises: “Come, you blessed of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world.” And yet, dearest brothers, Christ himself may be the kingdom of God — the one we long day by day to have come, whose arrival we crave to see shown to us quickly. Since he is himself the Resurrection, since we rise again in him, the kingdom of God may likewise be understood to be him, since we will reign in him. We do well to seek the kingdom of God, that is, the heavenly kingdom, because there is an earthly kingdom too. But a man who has already renounced the world is greater than its honors and its kingdom. And so a man who dedicates himself to God and to Christ desires heavenly kingdoms, not earthly ones. But there is need of constant prayer and pleading, so that we do not fall away from the heavenly kingdom as the Jews fell away, to whom that promise had first been given. The Lord sets it out and proves it: “Many will come from the east and from the west, and will recline at table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the children of the kingdom will be thrown out into the darkness outside; there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.” He shows that the Jews were previously children of the kingdom, as long as they went on being children of God as well. But once the name of Father stopped being recognized among them, the kingdom stopped too. And so we Christians, who begin our prayer by calling God our Father, pray also that God’s kingdom may come to us. [s]