"Lord, teach us to pray."Luke 11:1. Like Jesus' immediate disciples, today's followers long to pray effectively. But true prayer is not a catchall for human desires and human will. Christ Jesus showed by his example that true Christian prayer has an ethical nature.
One might ask, "What do ethics have to do with prayer? Don't ethics refer to a moral standard of conduct?" Yes, they do. And Christianity has moral standards that prayer needs to conform to. Let us consider three.
A willingness to subdue human desires and opinions to God's will is certainly a moral demand for all Christians. So is trust in God and obedience to Him. These underlie the first ethical standard of Christian prayer: One must rely on God's will, never on human will, as the motive for all thought and action.
