This brings us to the question of Prayer.  Some of us, of course, do not believe very much in prayer for certain philosophical reasons, which perhaps, as a matter of fact, are not quite as sound as we think, because our definition of prayer is a wrong one, resting on insufficient experience and insufficient reflection.  What is prayer?

We shall agree that it is the act by which man definitely tries to relate his soul and life to God.  What Jesus then teaches on prayer will illuminate what he means by God; and conversely his conception of God will throw new light upon the whole problem of prayer.  It is plain history that Jesus, the great Son of Fact, believed in prayer, told men to pray, and prayed himself.  The Gospels and the Epistle to the Hebrews lay emphasis on his practice.  Early in the morning he withdrew to the desert (Mark 1:35), late at night he remained on the hillside for prayer (Mark 6:46).  Wearied by the crowds that thronged him, he kept apart and continued in prayer.  He prays before he chooses the disciples (Luke 6:12).  He gives thanks to God on the return of the seventy from their missionary journey (Luke 10:21).  Prayer is associated with the confession of Caesarea Philippi (Luke 9:18), with the Mount of Transfiguration (Luke 9:29), with Gethsemane (Luke 22:41).  The writer to the Hebrews speaks of his “strong crying and tears” (Heb. 5:7) in prayer.  The Gospels even mention what we should call his unanswered prayers.  The prayer before the calling of the Twelve does not exclude Judas; and the cup does not pass in spite of the prayer in Gethsemane.  It is as if we had something to learn from the unanswered prayers of our Master.  Certainly the content of the Gospel for us would have been poorer if they had been answered in our sense of the word; and this fact, taken with his own teaching on prayer, and his own submission to the Father’s will, may help us over some of our difficulties.  But Jesus had no doubt or fear about prayer being answered.  “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” (Luke 11:9)—­are not ambiguous statements in the least; and they come from one “who based himself on experience.”  It is worth thinking out that the experience of Jesus lies behind his recommendation of prayer.  All his clear-eyed knowledge of God speaks in these plain sentences.

“As he was praying, they ask him, Teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples” (Luke 11:1).  It looks as if at times his disciples caught him at prayer or even overheard him, and felt that here was prayer that took them out beyond all they had ever known of prayer.  There were men whom John had taught to pray; was it they who asked Jesus to teach them over again?  There may have been some of them who had learnt the Pharisee’s way in prayer, and some who stuck to the simpler way they had been taught in childhood.  In each case the old ways were outgrown.