Lent Talk 2 - The Spiritual Discipline of Prayer
Download the talk here or read it below. Further Resources are at the end of the ‘Short Form’ section.
Lent Talk 2 - The Spiritual Discipline of Prayer (Short Form)
Summary
Lent isn’t about guilt-tripping yourself into better behaviour. Think of it like an annual review—a chance to reflect, reset, and build better spiritual habits. And just as athletes and professionals stick to routines to succeed, we need an element of discipline.
Prayer isn’t about chasing feelings or expecting instant answers. It’s about regularly reminding ourselves who we are in God’s story.
The talk uses the Old Testament prayer (‘The Lord your God is the only Lord …) as a reminder of rescue, and the Lord’s Prayer (Our Father …) from the New Testament.
Key Themes:
1. Prayer is a Daily Reorientation to God
o We don’t do prayer to get an emotional experience or even a divine response – to place ourselves, to re-locate ourselves, in God’s story.
o The discipline of prayer helps us remember who we are in relationship to God.
o Just as structured habits shape other areas of life, spiritual disciplines like prayer help align us with God’s presence and purpose.
2. Pre-written (‘Liturgical’) Prayers are a great foundation
o In Jewish practice the Shema (Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength) was/is recited three times daily to remind believers of their covenant with God, of God’s presence, and of the rescue God has given them.
o Early Christians replaced this with the Lord’s Prayer, as recorded in the Didache (circa 130 AD), praying it three times a day.
o Pre-formed prayers function as anchors, grounding faith rather than expecting divine responses. Examples are the Shema, the Lord’s Prayer, the psalms and many prayers in our own prayer book. Often they ‘do the thinking for us’, particularly when we can’t form our own thoughts.
3. Don’t chase Spiritual Highs or Emotions
o These structured prayers are about faithfulness rather than expecting a response from God. Prayer is about faithfulness, not emotional highs.
o Martin Luther resisted the temptation to repeat prayers just to replicate a feeling – in fact he chucked his inkwell at the wall!
o Prayer isn’t about "getting God to show up"—He’s already everywhere. Prayer is about reminding ourselves of that.
4. Prayer’s not about Manipulating God
o Prayer isn’t as a way to “get” something from God.
5. The Psalms are a great Model for Honest Prayer
o The 150 Psalms cover every emotion—joy, anger, despair, gratitude, lament, thanks.
o Psalm 88 ends with “the darkness is my closest friend”—proof that even frustration and doubt have a place in prayer.
6. Try to develop a Regular Prayer Habit
o Prayer should be consistent, not dependent on mood or expectation of divine answers.
o Simple morning and evening prayers serve as spiritual disciplines that shape daily life.
o Prayer should be regular and intentional, not just spontaneous.
o Using pre-written prayers (liturgical prayers) can be valuable, whether at home or in church. Examples are the Lord’s Prayer, many in our Prayer Books, or those in Luther’s Small Catechism,
o Even if you don’t feel anything, prayer keeps you rooted in God’s presence.
Key Takeaway:
Prayer is a discipline of remembering—a daily practice that orients believers toward God’s reality. It’s not about emotional fulfillment or getting divine responses but about placing oneself in God’s ongoing work. Structured prayers, like the Shema, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Psalms, serve as touchstones to keep faith anchored in daily life.
Resources
The Lord’s prayer
Our Father in heaven
hallowed be your name
your Kingdom come
your will be done on earth as in heaven
give us this day our daily bread
and forgive us our debts
as we have also forgiven our debtors
and do not bring us into the time of trial
but rescue us from evil
Martin Luther’s prayer (morning)
I thank you my heavenly Father through Jesus Christ your dear son
that you have kept me this night from all harm and danger.
And I pray that you would keep me this day also from sin and every evil,
that all my doings in life may please you.
For into your hands I commend myself, my body and soul,
and in all things let your holy angel be with me
that the evil foe may have no power over me.
Amen
Then joyfully go to your work singing a hymn or whatever your devotion may suggest.
Martin Luther’s prayer (Evening)
I thank you my heavenly Father through Jesus Christ your son
that you have graciously kept me this day.
And I pray that you would forgive me all of my sins where I have done wrong
and graciously keep me this night.
For into your hands I commend myself, my body and soul and all things.
Let your holy angel be with me
that the evil foe may have no power over me.
Then go to sleep at once and in good cheer.
Luther’s Small Catechism (scroll to about half way through) https://blc.edu/comm/gargy/gargy1/elscatechism.htm
The Didache (Chapter 8)
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0714.htm
New Zealand Prayer Book
https://anglicanprayerbook.nz/
Wellington Cathedral Pattern of Life Daily Prayer Book
https://www.wellingtoncathedral.org.nz/s/Pattern-of-Life-2024-Daily-Prayer.pdf
Wellington Cathedral Cycle of Daily Prayer
https://www.wellingtoncathedral.org.nz/discipleship/prayer
Wellington Cathedral Cycle of scripture-readings
https://www.wellingtoncathedral.org.nz/discipleship/reading-and-understanding-the-bible
Lent Talk 2 - The Spiritual Discipline of Prayer (LONG Form)
Lent Talk 2 - The Spiritual Discipline of Prayer
19 March 2025
Wellington Cathedral of Saint Paul
We’re continuing our series of Lent talks, viewing Lent as a chance to have an ‘annual review for a job that we love’. This means less a ‘perpetual and constant struggle to not do the things we know we shouldn't and to do the things that we really should’, but more an opportunity to be ‘disciplined’ about how we choose to live – and to take practices on board which help us with that.
This isn't rocket science and it's not something that's unique to spiritual people. If you want to be an accomplished executive there are practices and disciplines that you take on: ordering your day, planning it out to be productive, and all those things. If you want to be an elite athlete you do the same thing. Hence the idea that we live disciplined lives of ‘intention’, so as to be formed in a certain way, because we believe ‘the Jesus stuff’.
It's not super-spiritual either. We should see it as just kind-of normal for someone who takes something seriously. I guarantee everybody here takes something seriously in their life - being a good grandparent, being a good parent, being the boss, whatever. We take something seriously, and we have disciplines in our life that help us achieve what we want.
In our spiritual lives this looks like what we call spiritual disciplines. We talked about this last week and said we’d consider our disciplines under broadly two rubrics: first the great commandment to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and the second to love our neighbours as ourselves.
The first of these is shorthand for the notion that in everything that you do in your life you should live as if God is real, and the Jesus stuff is real, and you have been saved by God from something – a something which includes yourself. Organise everything around that truth like it’s as real as the ground you’re standing on.
The second – love your neighbour as yourself – is shorthand for the way we become holy people: people that God uses for God's purposes in creation. And we primarily understood that to mean be people of a certain moral quality and people who are socially active on behalf of those who society considers trash. Those who have no value according to society, God values – and so we do. We show them God has not forgotten them by (at least) showing up: and as we do that we become more and more faithful as God's holy people.
Note you don't have to be a Christian to not be a moral catastrophe: Aristotle and Plato got us to good morals 300 years before Jesus. You don't have to be a Christian not to be a jerk: but if you believe the Jesus stuff there’s a moral life which is fitting and appropriate for the people of God. Broadly understood, it’s ‘have nothing to do with darkness; have nothing to do with yuck; be people of light’.
We said we’d look at prayer and scripture-reading, as both of these are aspects of orienting ourselves in the light of God and God’s story: the great challenge is pushing ourselves to a space where we live our daily lives in the light of the reality of God and God’s salvation. Prayer and scripture-reading are two disciplined practices we can do that help place us in that space within the story.
So with prayer tonight I want us to think about this as a way by which we re-orient ourselves to our place in the story: who we are in relationship to God, and more importantly who God is in relationship to the creation of which we are a part.
Deuteronomy 6: the Shema
To begin with we're going to start out with the Deuteronomy 6 passage:
Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door-frames of your houses and on your gates.
Deuteronomy 6.4-9
This passage of Deuteronomy is known as the Shema. (‘sheh-mah’). How this functions in Jewish prayer life is – it’s prayed at least twice a day, most often or most piously three times a day in your home: in fact stories are told that the best possible way to die is that your final words as you're dying would be the Shema.
So you would have this fixed to the door, going in and out of your house. It was prayed morning noon and night, and it’s a ‘liturgical’ prayer: the words are already written for you, and when you pray this prayer you don’t think God is going to speak back: it’s not meant as a conversation with God where we expect God to talk back. The point of this prayer is that it locates us as being in relationship to God.
And the other point about Jewish use of scripture is: a verse is never just about the verse, but the verse brings the person to the chapter and then to the rest of the Bible book. So reciting the Shema immediately brings to mind the salvation of Israel and God's command issued to the nation through his prophet Moses to take everything that's happened and teach it. Tying things on your wrists, writing symbols on your forehead, and the way in which we conduct our household, make these commandments obvious and everywhere in your life.
You can't be aware of these commandments without immediately being ‘in the story’ – which is that God saved us out of Egypt, brought us and delivered us because he loved us, fulfilled his promise to our ancestor Abraham and brought us here. So I pray this prayer to centre myself as a touchstone and I am immediately placed in the story and ‘located’ in it. The discipline of prayer three times a day is about the need to remember who I am in the light of God's salvation.
Talk about it with your children when you wake up, when you go to sleep, when you're walking around – so that you will know and you will not forget and you will be my faithful people.
And so you pray this three times a day - not expecting that God's going to talk back, because it's not about that. And yet as we know every once in a while when we're praying and we don't think God's got something for us, God will deal with us as God wants to do: it's kind of like earthquakes here right? In the unlikely but possible event of an earthquake…’ So in the unlikely but just possible event that God has something for me in this prayer I'm here: but I don’t pray this prayer expecting God to talk back.
For most of us this is probably a very different way to approach prayer, particularly as a discipline that we would do on a very regular basis: that we would pray a prayer because it locates us and reminds us of God's work for us.
Early Christian practice developed from the Jewish background
Moving on in time, lets look at the Christians of around 130-140 AD. There’s a piece of writing known as the ‘Didache’ (‘didda-kee’) which shows some of how they thought. Originally of course the Christians had been a sect of Judaism; but now they’re beginning to separate themselves out and say ‘no we're not Jews, we’re something different.’
But how different? The Didache says ‘your prayers and your fasts must not be identical with those of the ‘hypocrites’ (which is the unfortunate term for those who still practised Judaism - it wasn't exactly a tolerant society.) So:
Don’t fast like the hypocrites: they fast on Mondays and Thursdays, but you should fast on Wednesdays and Fridays.
And don’t pray like the hypocrites, but pray as the Lord taught us:
Our father who art in heaven hallowed be your name your Kingdom come your will be done on earth give us today our bread for tomorrow and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors and do let us fall temptation but save us from the evil one for yours is the power and the glory forever.
You should pray in this way three times a day
Didache, Chapter 8.
The parallels and the contrasts are simple. The ‘hypocrites’ pray the Shema three times a day; Christians now pray the Our Father three times a day: they fast on Mondays and Thursdays, we fast on Wednesdays and Fridays’.
Audience question
Is this more like a daily ‘office’ (you say it just because you say it, and that’s good but you don’t expect a feeling to come out of it) – and less like a prayer-meeting (where you expect some feeling while you’re doing it or at the end of it)?
It’s probably a bit of both because yes, that's the nature of a daily ‘office’ – sometimes you're just there and you're praying it to be faithful and then for whatever reason sometimes the same old words have new passion and life. Now the danger of prayer in all forms is when it becomes a means by which we try to manipulate God. One of the more disturbing phrases that Christians utter is the notion that ‘God showed up’ – as if God does not already fill every corner of creation with ceaseless movement. Is there a place where God isn't, such that all of a sudden God shows up? No. (Certainly not according to Psalm 139.7: Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there…)
What seems better is that God at times will use the mundane and the average for God's purpose. And that purpose could be as simple as a friend turning up and saying ‘oh I'm here for you right now’. The temptation is that if we once get a feeling in prayer we begin to chase the feeling like a ‘user’ chases a ‘high’; and then we think that something is wrong with us – or with God – if we can't get that hit again.
There’s a great story about Martin Luther where he's sitting in his study at the Wartburg Castle and he's doing his translations – and he's reflecting on a prayer where he had this intimate moment when God was close to him. Later on he wants to pray again and thinks ‘oh maybe if I pray in the same way then I'll have that same encounter’. And the story goes he grabs his inkwell and throws against the wall – where apparently the tempter’s voice was coming from – and he rebukes the devil himself, as this is the temptation of the devil leading him away from pious trust in God.
So we pray not so that we get an emotional hit. But that's a danger of prayer, so we want to say we enter into this space as a place of orientation. Not for something we experience, but rather as placing us ‘in the story’.
Matthew 6 – Jesus teaches the Lord’s prayer
Now we’ll go to Matthew chapter 6. Jesus says:
When you are praying do not keep up empty phrases as the gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then in this way:
Our Father in heaven
hallowed be your name
your Kingdom come
your will be done on earth as in heaven
give us this day our daily bread
and forgive us our debts
as we have also forgiven our debtors
and do not bring us into the time of trial
but rescue us from evil
Matthew 6.5-11
That sounds like a really ‘liturgical’ prayer that Jesus said. When his disciples ask ‘teach us how to pray’ he gives them a prayer which is not a prayer where you expect God to answer or talk back right now. And the counter-example is ‘don't heap up empty phrases as the gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard because of their many words’. Instead, pray this way … and this places us in relationship to who God is and God's ongoing work. ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ is the only real ‘ask’ here for something tangible.
The is a relationship with God that’s different from ‘Jesus is my buddy’: it’s ‘I have redeemed, established, forgiven the creature of my creation whom I have relationship with’. The ‘buddy’ idea isn’t wrong, but this form of ‘liturgical’ prayer as a daily discipline functions differently. So if you go back to where they would pray this prayer three times a day in the very early church tradition … just as the Shema comes from Deuteronomy chapter 6, so we have the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew which brings us to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7.
And what’s the end-point of the Sermon on the Mount? It’s the story of the wise man building his house on the rock and the foolish man building his on sand. Jesus is saying the one who hears my words and does what I say is like the wise men who builds a house on rock: and when the storms of life come – because come they will – the house stands.
So praying that prayer three times a day can be to us a spiritual discipline of prayer. It doesn't mean that every single time you pray you put yourself in that huge massive wide story - because we're human, we're people, and sometimes not ‘at the top level’. Sometimes ‘the tank is empty’, and that's OK - because it's not about getting a hit from God but it's about remembering even when the tank is empty we can place ourselves in the story and we can remember what we talked about last week – learning how to take joy in staying in our lane and being properly located in the divine narrative.
So that's where the daily ‘office’ - morning and evening prayer - is as much as anything about simply being reminded of who we are: we pray it again not expecting that God will talk back (though miracle of miracles sometimes God does) but we don't go looking for it.
Martin Luther: The Small Catechism
Here’s a piece from Martin Luther’s Small Catechism, which would have been written probably somewhere around 1540. After the German Reformation, Luther went round a bunch of churches and figured ‘everything is so horrible, nobody knows anything, I'm just gonna write this short catechism for them’. What he's talking about here is morning prayer:
In the morning when you get up make a sign of the Holy Cross and say:
In the name of Father Son and Holy Spirit. Amen
Then kneeling or standing repeat the creed and the Lord's prayer.
If you choose you may also say this little prayer [hear this prayer in the light of all the we’ve already talked about]:
I thank you my heavenly Father through Jesus Christ your dear son
that you have kept me this night from all harm and danger.
And I pray that you would keep me this day also from sin and every evil,
that all my doings in life may please you.
For into your hands I commend myself, my body and soul,
and in all things let your holy angel be with me
that the evil foe may have no power over me.
Amen
and he writes:
Then joyfully go to your work singing a hymn or whatever your devotion may suggest.
Note this idea that you joyfully go to your work because you know and can trust that God has heard you – that God is kind and that God is good and so you after praying you can joyfully go about your day.
Then in the evening:
In the evening when you go to bed, kneeling or standing repeat the creed (no Lord’s prayer this time, which is interesting). If you choose you may also say this prayer:
I thank you my heavenly Father through Jesus Christ your son
that you have graciously kept me this day.
And I pray that you would forgive me all of my sins where I have done wrong
and graciously keep me this night.
For into your hands I commend myself, my body and soul and all things.
Let your holy angel be with me
that the evil foe may have no power over me.
Then go to sleep at once and in good cheer.
(Echoes of the compline / night prayer service here.) This is touching those same types of things: who we are in relationship to God, the desire for the day to be protected, and then the big thing – once it's done, go about your day and sing a song. Thanks, yeah. Like when Jesus is teaching on prayer he has like ‘even you as parents do good: if your kid asks for a loaf of bread you don’t give them a stone or a snake: no, even you “horrible” people know that. So imagine how much better God is’.
Bonhoeffer: The Psalms – The Prayer Book of the Bible
And now to Bonhoeffer … One of his least read books is a little thing called The Psalms - The Prayer Book of the Bible. Here’s part:
‘Lord teach us to pray’, so spoke the disciples to Jesus. In doing so they were acknowledging that they were not good at praying: they had to learn to pray. This sounds odd to us – we tend to think either the heart is so overflowing that it begins to pray by itself, or it will never learn to pray: but this is a dangerous error which is certainly very widespread among Christians today.
If we imagine that it is natural for the heart to pray well, then we confuse wishing, hoping, sighing, lamenting, rejoicing – all of which the heart can certainly do on its own – with praying. In doing so we confuse earth and heaven, human beings and God.
Praying certainly does not mean simply pouring out one’s heart. It means rather finding the way to and speaking with God whether the heart is full or empty. No one can do that on one’s own: for that you need Jesus Christ.
The Psalms – for every emotion we have
In the Benedictine tradition they still practice the Latin mass; and in the Benedictine tradition and many monastic traditions they sing or pray the psalter (a fancy word for the Book of Psalms) once a week. All 150 once a week! That is the discipline of their prayer.
What happens is you come to see these songs as the prayers of God's people. It’s been an ancient tradition in the church that in praying the psalms you learn God's words of prayer: we learn the language of God to us and we learn to place ourselves in that space where we can lay things before God – the entire spectrum of human emotions are present and affirmed by God.
Pray the entire psalter and most of the time there will be words that you don't feel that day. And then you come across one where you wonder ‘how did they know just how I feel today?’ There’s every kind of emotion in the Psalms – anger, despair, joy, thanksgiving, lament – and they teach us things like ‘it’s OK to be mad at God’.
You’ll feel amazingly comforted when you're really angry at God because life kind of sucks - because in like a third of the psalms that’s legit. And when you don't feel like anything's going right and you really just don't want to see anybody who's gonna tell you to trust in God because you might punch them in the forehead because you're having one of those days … go and read Psalm 88, which finishes ‘the darkness is my closest friend and there ain't no joy’.
God gave those words to us – so when that's your day it's all fine.
And then when you're reading Psalm 88 and it's not about your day, you enter into a space of burden-bearing because it’s somebody else's day – and you can carry them.
Some other notes
On the word liturgical …
If anyone’s put off by the idea that liturgical means you have to be in church to say these prayers, that’s not the point here: it’s really that liturgical means someone else has written the words for you. You can use them sitting at your table at home or in your kitchen – in fact don’t be afraid to use them as ‘dressing gown and slippers’ prayers.
On the question of supplicating or petitioning prayer …
Yes, Jesus talked about the woman who beat on a judge to the point of getting what she needed. And he said we should ask God for what we need. The prayer we’re considering here that ‘grounds us in God’ is only part of overall praying. But sometimes we’ve under-played this part and assumed everything in prayer must be either be feeling an emotion or presenting God with a list of requests. By contrast the Jewish and Christian experience, and the Bible itself, points to this multiple-times-a-day grounding as fundamental. We have a regular discipline practice precisely because we're pretty garbage at living without being reminded.
Now Pentecostal and other traditions fare rather differently, and we don't wanna set up tensions – yes, they have their fingers on Bible verses that are, well you know – they're real Bible verses in the real Bible. Generally this is good – but when prayer becomes a mode by which we manipulate God then that's probably not awesome. The point here is that most of the prayers that you read in the Bible or not prayers that expect an immediate answer.