The Prayer That Teaches to Pray

Far better than all instructions and precepts about prayer is this simple model. Using this, we learn both how to pray and what to pray for. And when we have learned this prayer, it will be time to consider how we shall expand the teaching of our Lord. If it is "after this manner" we are to pray, then who can restrain prayer on the ground of lack of time for devotion? This is the "five words with understanding" preferable to ten thousand of formality or repetition. Here is no vain and heathenish babbling, as if the length of our prayer were to measure the value of its answer; nor any explanatory repetition, as if God did not know what tilings we have need of. But there is here only a straightforward laying before God of one desire after another. Simplicity and brevity are discernible at a glance, and are taught at the first lesson.