One of the most important lessons that a Christian must learn in life is how to pray. We have already spoken about the meaning of prayer, and we have seen that prayer is talking with God. It is prayer to God the Father, on the basis of the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Spirit. Now we want to see how we should talk with God, bearing in mind that God is for us both our heavenly Father and the holy, righteous God of the universe. 

But prayer is also one thing more. It is prayer to God the Father. It is through Jesus Christ. And it is also in the Holy Spirit. This is the third great principle of prayer. That is why Ephesians 2:18 says of the Jews and Gentiles, "For through him” (that is, through Jesus Christ), “we both may have access by one Spirit unto the Father." 

Actually, these verses are concerned with the tendency that all men have to pray to themselves and to other persons rather than to God. They teach that prayer must always be made to God, and that as a consequence it must be made in the knowledge that God is always more ready to answer than we are to pray to Him. Let me make this the first great principle of true prayer. True prayer is prayer that is offered to God, our heavenly Father. 

Now there is one more point about how we are to give away our money that is not stated explicitly in Christ's teaching in the Sermon on the Mount and yet is involved, precisely because it is Christ's teaching and flows from His character. It is the principle of sacrificial giving. The Bible points to it in Christ's case when it says, "For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich... 

Sometime during the course of his long association with this church—presumably during his second missionary journey—Paul presented the need of the poor at Jerusalem....At any rate, the case of the poor was so bad that the church there practiced a form of voluntary communism in which the believers shared their possessions. And when the first council of the Church met in Jerusalem, a request was made through Paul for help from the Gentile churches. This request Paul honored. He wrote to the Galatians in his report about the council, "Only they would that we should remember the poor; the same which I also was diligent to do" (Gal. 2:10).