And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints. Eph 6:18
Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful. Colossians 4:2
Prayer is pretty important, I guess. Especially the way Paul puts it in these passages. But sometimes I think we forget just how great prayer is. I mean, I’ve been hearing it for 19 years, and to be honest, sometimes I just tune it out. But the more I think about prayer, the more captivated I become. I'm so blessed to go to a school that has literally hundreds of books on this subject. I’ll probably spend the rest of my life trying to read them all. No Twilight for me, give me some Moody or Murray. Which, on a side note, is infinitely better anyway. I mean, come on. Twilight. The Itsy Bitsy Spider could beat that. But I digress. What I want to share with you is some of what I’ve learned, some of the things that have revolutionized how I think of prayer. Hopefully, these things will help you in the same ways they did me.
The first thing that I realized was the Fatherliness of God. While God is always pictured as the Father, I don’t think that we consider all it means often enough. He’s so close to us that we can call him “Dad.” It’s mind-blowing, really. I recently finished reading With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray. One of his greatest themes is the Fatherliness of God. Every chapter is permeated by reminders that the Creator of the universe longs for our small voices to call to him, “Abba, Father.” Here's a journal entry I wrote in response to a chapter that I read that dealt especially with this topic:
I love my Dad more than just about anything on this earth and he's an awesome dad. So if an earthy, fallen human can be so amazing and so committed to taking care of me and loving me, how much more will my heavenly Father be? I can't imagine a better dad than my own, but there is One! My favorite quote of this chapter, though, is this: "We aren't supposed to learn to be holy as a hard lesson at school so we can make God think well of us. We are to learn it at home with the Father to help us. God loves you not because you are clever or good but because He is your Father. The Cross of Christ does not make God love us. It is the outcome of His love for us. He loves all His children: the clumsiest, the dullest, and the worst.”
If that is the God we are praying to it doesn’t matter what we say or the words we use, but what we mean and our attitude. If I were to talk to God the same way I talk to my earthly father, I can tell you I’d be praying a lot more. And with a lot more enthusiasm! And honestly, since I thought about this, I have! It’s amazing.
The second thing that changed my view of prayer was in Catherine Marshall’s book Adventures in Prayer. Marshall mentions a lot of interesting points on prayer, but the one that really captivated me was that we should pray to “catch a vision” of God’s plan for our lives. In her book, she writes:
He wants us to catch from Him some of His vision for us. After all, this is what prayer is, men cooperating with God in bringing from heaven to earth His wondrously good plans for us....
When we engage in prayer, we make ourselves available to God’s bigger plan for our lives. It enables him to prepare us for the incredible things that he has for us. He’ll allow the plan to get inside us, to ignite our passions, and allow us to do things for God that we never would’ve dreamed for ourselves. And I can honestly attest to this. When I’m active in my prayer life is when I dream biggest. Prayer gives us a vision for ourselves, but also for the future, for God’s glory. In his sermon entitled “Prayer or Fainting,” George Campbell Morgan says:
"Prayer is not merely position of body or of mind. Prayer is not merely asking for something in order that I may obtain it for myself. Prayer forevermore says when it asks for anything, 'Not my will, but Thine be done,' which means, if the thing I ask for,however much I desire it, however good it seems to be, will hinder or postpone by a hair's breadth or a moment, the ultimate victory, it should be denied to me. Those who know the real secret of prayer life have discovered the fact that God's denial of our requests is over and over again the graciousness of overwhelming answer. To pray is to desire forward, to seek forward, to endeavor after. It is to have a new vision of God and of the ways of God, of the perfection of all He does and of the certainty of His ultimate victory, and then to respond to the profound and tremendous conviction by petition, by praise, and by endeavor; and so men 'ought always to pray' and to 'pray without ceasing.'"
Finally, prayer gives us a chance to be real. In prayer, we can be ourselves. We don’t have to put on a face, say the right things. We’re not under any sort of rules or judgment. So why do we act like we are? Anyone who hasn’t been “in the church” for a significant amount of time will attest to the fact that Christians speak their own language. And unfortunately, that often carries over into prayer. When Kyle Lake first raised this point in [Re]understanding Prayer, I didn’t realize what a big part of my prayer life is in clichés. Then I started to try to eliminate them. Boy, is that hard. And it isn’t that I don’t mean them sincerely. But I’ve used them so often that I don’t think about what they mean anymore. For example, if I say “Bless and protect” or “Guide” so and so, what am I really praying for? If I “lift” someone up to God, what exactly am I doing? These are great expressions, and they’re cliché for a reason. But are we hiding behind them? Have we gotten to the point that we pray without thinking? Because I think that is a dangerous line to walk. So I want to challenge you to eliminate them. Spell out for God what exactly you mean. Of course, God knows. But do you? If nothing else, it’ll give you something more tangible to understand the cliché by. And if you can’t be real and honest and specific with your Heavenly Father, who can you be real and honest and specific with?
So today I challenge you to marvel at the Fatherliness of God, to catch a vision for what he wants for your life and what he’s doing around you. And finally, I want to challenge you to be real with God. For, as George Campbell Morgan says,
“If we do not pray always, we never pray. The man who makes prayer a scheme by which occasionally he tries to get something for himself has not learned the deep, profound secret of prayer. Prayer is life passionately wanting, wishing, desiring God's triumph. Prayer is life striving and toiling everywhere and always for that ultimate victory. When men so pray they do not faint. They mount up with wings as eagles, they run without weariness, they tramp the hardest, roughest road, and they do not faint."
