Broken hearts can yield but broken prayers.
Richard Sibbes [1]
Are we really free to pray? After long days and sleepless nights? After lonely walks or meetings in filled cathedrals? In distress and disquiet, are we still free to speak to God who is over all? When all we feel we can do is groan to God, may we still?
“When all my heart can yield is broken prayers, may I still pray?”
When Jesus taught His disciples to pray, He made this the “starting-point of all true” prayer: “Our Father in heaven.” Why? Why, because of Him, we begin with “assurance of divine love and favour.”[2]
What wonderful, simple words to pray!
All others forms of prayer, concocted from human hearts in need of breaking, makes divine favour to be the thing “merited or obtained” through prayer.[3] Jesus, though… He begins here!
How can we have this assurance of God’s love? In at least these things:
Jesus gives His Spirit to His own. It is His Spirit, and so the Spirit in us prays as He does. He cries “Our Father,” and so we can cry “Our Father.” The Spirit within us prays “Abba,” for it is Christ’s Spirit by whom Jesus has always said “Abba.”
Jesus bids you to pray – no, stronger, He commands that you pray, and that when you do, you pray to God as your Father. How? On what basis? For no less a reason than that Jesus has made us His brothers. He has purchased you for His Father, that we may be His brothers. And so are all who are saved in Him.
May we pray? Yes, always. From His throne are only emissaries of grace and favour because of Christ. In His Name, because of His life and death, we may pray in the assurance of divine love because of the assurance of the cross and empty tomb.
May our broken hearts never cease praying broken prayers.
Jesus died for those broken hearts. Jesus lives to hear broken prayers.
[1] Richard Sibbes, The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, Volume 1, p. 55
[2] Adolph Saphir, Lectures on the Lord’s Prayer, Lecture 1 – Prayer as Revealed in Christ (Bonhopai Books: 2025) Perlego.
[3] Adolph Saphir, Lectures on the Lord’s Prayer, Lecture 1 – Prayer as Revealed in Christ (Bonhopai Books: 2025) Perlego.
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