Why Don't Christians Actually Listen to Jesus?

Why would a disciple of Jesus pray to Jesus when Jesus taught his disciples to pray to the Father?

"...and of course, we got the template because when the disciples said to Jesus, "Teach us how to pray," he told them, you know, Our Father Who art in Heaven..."

Bishop Robert Barron, The Daily Wire Gospels Series

Jesus in the Synoptics asserts that anyone, who wants to follow him, should put into practice his teachings like the wise man, who built his house on solid ground, and Jesus gave his disciples instructions for how to pray.

"When you're addressing Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner, you're basically asking God to come towards you, right, it's not just I'm addressing God in heaven, I'm saying make your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, I'm saying, Come God into the world, come into the world and engage with us..."

Jonathan Pageau, The Daily Wire Gospels Series

Jonathan Pageau on the Daily Wire Gospels Series

To pray to Jesus using the Sinner's Prayer to replace the prayer that Jesus taught to pray to the Father is to build your house on sand instead of rock.

What Jonathan Pageau thinks the Sinner's Prayer does that the Lord's Prayer doesn't do, the Lord's Prayer actually does do. The problem is that the Lord's Prayer lacks all of the later Christian theology, and it doesn't address Jesus directly in the place of the Father.

But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’

Luke 18.13 NRSVUE

The Sinner's Prayer doesn't just replace the Father in prayer and words of the Lord's Prayer, it also replaces the Father in the prayer of the tax-collector in the Gospel of Luke. This attitude of replacing God with Jesus and side-stepping the Lord's Prayer is a sort of strange fire or an avodah zara of its own kind within the Jesus movement where Jesus is replaced by the words and teachings of others, starting with Paul, but ending with the high Christology of an evolved theology in the place of the historical Jesus in the Synoptics.

While Bishop Barron seems to have built his house on solid ground in this matter, I can't say the same for some of the others on the Gospels Series panel, who seem to ignore the parts of the Gospels where Jesus warns against being someone, who hears his teachings but doesn't put them into action.

The theological significance of Christ when divorced from the teachings of Jesus will only ever qualify you to be among those to whom Jesus will declare, "I never knew you, get away from me you doers of evil!"

The "Heavenly" Christ is of lesser value through belief than the historical Jesus is through discovery, and whatever it is you believe about Jesus that didn't come from Jesus is evidence that you are not his disciple because you are not putting his teachings into action but someone else's.

Jesus taught how to pray, but he never taught his disciples to pray to him in the place of God.

Fully video clip from Dr. Jordan Peterson's Gospels Series here:

Reordering Desire: The True Purpose of Prayer | The Gospels