In delivering my sermon on the Lord’s Prayer last Sunday I was reminded of a devotional I wrote that was included in the book Gathering Our Prayers Together: 60 Reflections on the Anglican Collects edited by Lee Gatiss and published by Church Society (UK).

The invitation was to write a devotional on one of the collects from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (the BCP that remains the standard in the Church of England). The collect I was assigned is not included in our 1979 American Prayer Book but overlaps with my sermon from Sunday:

(The Tenth Sunday after Trinity)

Heavenly Father,

mercifully hear the prayers of your people,

and, so that we may obtain our petitions,

teach us to ask for such things as may please you,

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

I am the father of four boys and they often come to me with requests. Because I love my boys, I want to say yes to their requests, so as to make them happy. However, there are frequent occasions when my sons come to me with a request that they think will make them happy. These requests are at best selfish and at worst are requests for things that (even though they don’t realise it in their youth and naivety) would bring them harm.

We as sinful humans (even those who are God’s people through the waters of baptism) err in praying by not asking appropriate things of our Heavenly Father. At best we err out of naivety, at worst we err because of our sinful desires. In both instances we need to be taught to ask for the things that please our heavenly Father.

How does God teach us what we should pray for? He teaches us in and through Holy Scripture. As we immerse ourselves in Holy Scripture our prayers will no long “conform to the pattern of this world, but [will] be transformed by the renewing of [our minds]. Then [we] will be able to test and approve what God’s will is — his good, pleasing and perfect will” (Romans 12:2).

But what about all the times that we continue to pray sinfully or naively? For those times we have the collect’s petition that our Heavenly Father would mercifully hear our prayers. Jesus in Matthew 7:9 rhetorically asks; “Which of you, if your son asks for bread will give him a stone?” Because our Heavenly Father is merciful towards us and “is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20) he can and will give us bread, even when we in our naivety of sinfulness ask for stones.