Learning to Pray by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

When our will wholeheartedly enters into the prayer of Christ, then we pray correctly. Only in Jesus Christ are we able to pray, and with him we also know that we shall be heard. And so we must learn to pray. Children learn to speak because their father speaks to them. 

The child learns the speech of the father. 

So we learn to speak to God because God has spoken to us and speaks to us. By means of the speech of the Father in heaven, his children learn to speak with him. Repeating God’s own words after him, we begin to pray to him. We ought to speak to God and he wants to hear us, not in the false and confused speech of our heart, but in the clear and pure speech which God has spoken to us in Jesus Christ.