It’s possible your greatest need in prayer is not to know more about it, but rather to know how to use the most foundational and comprehensive tool given to us in Scripture. As with any tool, its purpose is found not by focusing on the tool, but rather on setting our eyes on our praiseworthy Father, King, Provider, Pardoner, and Protector—and to shape our lives by his sovereign rule and care.

The reason there are so many books on prayer is that even after reading them, we still struggle to pray. Some reasons are intellectual—we don’t know how or why to pray in a particular situation. Some are volitional—our hearts are distracted or apathetic. Still other reasons are due to lacking proper practical tools.
As I’ve pondered how to grow in prayer, one simple solution has stood out as a versatile tool for overcoming our struggles: the Lord’s Prayer. This should come as no surprise, since this is the way Jesus taught his disciples to pray (Matt. 6:9–13).
Here’s how the Lord’s Prayer helps us overcome six common prayer struggles.
1. We forget why prayer matters.
Perhaps the most foundational reason we struggle to pray is that we forget prayer’s purpose. The Lord’s Prayer reminds us. We pray in order to glorify our heavenly Father. We pray in order to unify our hearts with his kingdom vision for the world and to align ourselves with his will. We pray for provision, pardon, and protection from the evil that comes from both inside and outside us.
2. We aren’t sure God hears us.
This suspicion leads many to neglect prayer, which is the only guaranteed way for God not to hear our prayers. The Lord’s Prayer reminds us that we pray to God our Father. A good father hears the cries and requests of his children. God, our perfect Father, always hears us and always answers us in his way and his timing (not always in the way we want, however).
3. We don’t know what to pray.
Sometimes believers don’t know what to pray, or they pray the same thing over and over and stop praying due to the monotony. The Lord’s Prayer gives us a Spirit-inspired path for knowing what to say in prayer. You might take a general approach to saying the Lord’s Prayer, using its petitions as a template and filling them in with specific praises and requests.
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Natural law, then, remains as indispensable for Christians today as it was for the many centuries in which it held a central role in Christian ethics. As Protestants, however, we cannot retrieve natural law without allowing Scripture to remain the final authoritative norm of our teaching. 

How should we then live? So Francis Schaeffer famously asked in his 1973 book and subsequent video series. The question has certainly had renewed urgency over the past two years, as Christians around the world have confronted the for-us-unprecedented (although not so much for our ancestors) moral and political challenges of navigating a global pandemic, and accompanying public health measures. How should we love our neighbors? By mask-wearing and vaccinating? By moving worship services and schools online or carrying on as normal? And by what standard should we evaluate the many answers proffered by TV personalities and public authorities?
For many Christians, the answer is quick and easy: “By Scripture, of course.” But a few minutes’ reflection will be enough to leave us scratching our heads in puzzlement. For Scripture, clearly, has very little to say on the subject of public health emergencies, and only the most general principles about how we should conduct ourselves in the face of such complex moral and legal demands. The same, we may soon realize, goes for hundreds of moral and political—and indeed ecclesiastical—decisions that we are called upon to make in the course of carrying out our vocations. If we assume that Scripture has all the answers, we are quickly bound to be disappointed. And if we say, sensibly enough, that we need to “apply Scriptural principles” to particular cases, this simply raises the question of how we identify and apply such principles? How do we engage in moral reasoning?
The answer, for generation after generation of Christian theologians and ethicists, was “natural law.” But the idea of natural law fell on hard times among twentieth-century Protestants, under pressure from Barth, fundamentalism, and modernism. It’s high time we recover it if we’re to navigate the profound moral challenges of our day with integrity.
From one standpoint, the idea that there is such a thing as natural law should be pretty uncontroversial. Everything in nature was created by God, who determined what it was and how it was meant to act. Just as a human inventor can tell you how a tool is meant to work, how to keep it in good working order, and how it’s liable to break if you don’t, so God, being a God of order rather than chaos, impressed upon all of his creatures the way they were meant to work. This is what we still often call “the law of nature” or “the laws of nature.” But man too is a creature, and as such is also subject to the law of his nature, which determines how we are meant to act and how we shouldn’t, what kinds of behaviors will achieve good results and which ones will end in brokenness. At the intersection of human nature and the natures of the rest of the world, we find natural law, the moral principles that distinguish wise and successful living from foolish and disastrous actions: sow and reap in preparation for winter, eat and drink in moderation, marry and remain faithful, honor the aged.
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Written by Stephen J. Adams |
Sunday, December 4, 2022
In matters of serving the church body, we should first consider how the Lord has equipped us to serve others instead of what our preference might be or what such service might cost us in time or energy. This cost will look different at different times. The cost to the woman at Bethany was an expensive alabaster jar, enough to make the disciples indignant at such apparent waste. The cost to the disciples on two occasions was the apparent degradation of having to consider small children (Matt. 18:1–6; 19:13–15), who were often considered in Jesus’ day as not worth the time. Instead, Christ rebukes them and holds children out as our example, and as inheritors of the kingdom of heaven. May our service in His church be marked with the same humble estate that our Lord commends in His loving rebuke.

One of the unwavering needs of a local church is finding good people to serve. To serve in Sunday school. To serve coffee. To stack chairs. To serve in the nursery. To care for the infirm. To disciple young believers. To prepare the elements of the Lord’s Supper. To serve pizza at youth group. To prepare food for congregational gatherings. The list is nearly endless. Further complicating the task of finding willing people to serve in these roles is that these roles are not all, shall we say, equally prominent or desirable to fill.

Scripture teaches the importance of cohesion in the local church in the midst of a body made up of many and differing parts (1 Cor. 12:12–31). While some of the needs undoubtedly looked different in the first century, the challenge of taking a diverse group and assembling them to fulfill the needs of a singular body is an old one. The Apostle Paul often used illustrations from God’s created order to communicate truths concerning the Christian life, and in writing to the Corinthians, he does so with the illustration of the human body. Of course, when we consider a human body, not every part is equally prominent; nor does each receive the same outward honor. Yet the impracticality of a body of all eyes or ears requires no further explanation. Some parts are presentable and others require greater discretion, but each illustrates the complex yet organic unity of the human body and of the church body, as Paul summarizes: “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (vv. 21–27).
Adding to the challenge of finding people to serve in the church today is what has been discussed as a problem of institutions’ losing their formative power, and in turn becoming just one more venue to highlight the individual: his aims, his interests, his agenda, and ultimately his own prominence. In a certain respect, this self-importance is not new; we see it, for example, in the jealousy of Miriam and Aaron toward Moses (Num. 12). It seems indisputable, however, that we now live in a time when technology has greatly enhanced our ability to promote ourselves over against any group or institution to which we might belong.

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