We can put together what he taught them.  In the first place, the thing must be real and individual—­the first requirement always with Jesus.  The public prayer of ostentation is out of the reckoning; it is nothing.  Jesus chooses the quiet and solitary place for his intercourse with his Father.  The real prayer is to the Father in secret—­His affair.  And it will be earnest beyond what most of us think.  We are so familiar with Gospel and parable that we do not take in the strenuousness of Jesus’ way in prayer.  The importunate widow (Luke 18:2) and the friend at midnight (Luke 11:5) are his types of insistent and incessant earnestness.  Do you, he asks, pray with anything like their determination to be heard?  The knock at the door and the pleading voice continue till the request is granted—­in each case by a reluctant giver.  But God is not reluctant, Jesus says, though God, too, will choose his own time to answer (Luke 18:7).  It does not mean the mechanical reiteration of the heathen (Matt. 6:7)—­not at all, that is not the business of praying; but the steady earnest concentration on the purpose, with the deeper and deeper clarification of the thought as we press home into God’s presence till we get there.  It was so that he prayed, we may be sure.  It is not idly that prayer has been called “the greatest task of the Christian man”; it will not be an easy thing, but a strenuous.

One part of the difficulty of prayer is recognized by Jesus over and over again.  Men do not really quite believe that they will be answered—­they are “of little faith.”  But he tells them with emphasis, in one form of words and another, driving it home into them, that “all things are possible with God” (Mark 10:27)—­“have faith in God” (Mark 11:22).  One can imagine how he fixes them with the familiar steady gaze, pauses, and then with the full weight of his personality in his words, and meaning them to give to his words the full value he intends, says:  “Have faith in God.”  To see him and to hear him must have given that faith of itself.  If the friend in the house to your knowledge has the loaves, you will knock till you get them; and has not God the gifts for you that you need?  Is he short of the power to help, or is it the will to help that is wanting in God?

Once more the vital thing is Jesus’ conception of God.  Here, as elsewhere, we sacrifice far more than we dream by our lazy way of using his words without making the effort to give them his connotation.  To turn again to passages already quoted, will a father give his son a serpent instead of the fish for which he asks, a stone for bread?  It is unthinkable; God—­will God do less?  It all goes back again to the relation of father and child, to the love of God; only into the thought, Jesus puts a significance which we have not character or love enough to grasp.  “Your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things,” he says about the matters that weigh heaviest with us (Luke 12:30).