Month: May 2020

I can’t help it—prayer is so important to transformation that I want to post on it again before moving on.

Something struck me a few days ago, and I am sharing it in hopes that it might encourage you, too. We are familiar with passages in the Bible that explicitly are prayers, including the Lord’s Prayer and Jesus’s High Priestly Prayer. The Psalms are full of prayers, and the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was convinced that the psalms are the recorded prayers of Jesus. He even wrote a book about it, Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible. 

However, I am just becoming aware that we can pray other passages in scripture, permitting them to set our attention on the Father and the Son. And I have not been familiar with praying these prayers as my own, while staying faithful to the spirit of the scripture.

For instance, take this paraphrase of Ruth’s reply to Naomi, based on Ruth 1:16-17:

Stop asking me to turn back!
Lord, where you walk I will walk;
Where you stop to rest I will stop. 
Your other followers are my sisters and brothers,
And your Father is our Father.

Just a comment on that first line. It is not that Jesus asks me to turn back from following him. But my own feelings of unworthiness can cause me to do this. Am I unworthy of his presence, attention and love? Yes. But he has justified me and put his life in me. Because of him I have an open invitation to sit at his feet and walk by his side. To anything that hinders me from exercising my right of access I always have to say “stop!”

If you find the above example engaging, try it for yourself. You might take the encounter of the prophet Elijah with the widow of Zarephath as recounted in 1 Kings 17:8-16, and referenced by Jesus in Luke 4:25-26. Make a prayer out of it, from the widow’s point of view. Just think, what would you or I say to Jesus if he came to us under similar circumstances?

The goal is to develop an intimate relationship with our Lord. Prayer that leads us to better understand Jesus Christ; prayer that convinces us to surrender ourselves more and more to God’s ultimate intention; prayer that results in the life of Christ, which already indwells us, having more and more authority over the inner being—this kind of prayer is a tool in God’s hand to transform us. Scripture is a treasure-trove of prayers that give us access to God and allow God greater access to us. In scripture I find God’s house portrayed as a house of prayer for all who are devoted to Him (Isaiah 56:1-8). I want to live in that house forever!

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God really does have an expansive view of prayer! This week I spent some time in Romans 8:26-27, prompting me to return to this subject sooner than I expected. 

Paul mentioned that God’s remedy for our weakness in prayer is having the Holy Spirit draw near and help us. The word he used for weakness is the same one as in 2 Corinthians 12:9, when God informed him that “My power is made perfect in weakness.” The original can also be translated, “My power comes to full strength in weakness.” It has been said that transformation is following God to a place of weakness. 

I think that our principal weakness in prayer is ignorance of God’s intentions. Also, the fact that Christ often is not the center of our attention as we pray. So, in a sense, my weakness in prayer is my propensity to pray from a position of strength: what I feel that God should do, as I am focused on my needs. We have to rely on God’s provision to pray as we ought (that is, in a way that has God’s approval). If we recognize our inadequacy and enter into partnership with the Spirit, then he can transform our prayer into the prayer that is according to the will of God—a prayer that empowers God to act according to His purpose.

Clearly God means for our prayer to involve the entire trinity. This is astonishing. The Holy Spirit intercedes for us. This intercession happens in the Godhead, to reveal to us the will of the Father and to establish the Son as the center and organizing principal of our lives. Even my very limited understanding of this gives me direction in prayer: in fellowship as I acknowledge the wonder of what God has accomplished and has in store for the future, and in supplication as I harmonize my requests with what I know of God’s will. What a transformation!

Just one more word, something important that I am only starting to see. This is the distinction between the individual and the corporate approach to following Christ. The letter to the Romans, as is true of most of Paul’s letters, was written to a group of Christians who were living in community. So, although I am applying Paul’s remarks about prayer to individual believers, he originally directed them to a body of believers. Certainly, the Lord uses individuals to pray. But prayer as an expression of the life of Christ—whose life cannot be fully expressed in any individual—is wider, deeper and freer in the corporate setting.

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My motivation for a reflection on prayer is something from personal experience: I find that I can’t pray as I once did. 

The first scripture I have for consideration is Matthew 6:1 – 6:18. In this familiar passage, Jesus speaks of prayer but he does so in the context of a message about what it means to live in the Kingdom of God. The references to prayer are sandwiched in between instructions about giving to the needy (almsgiving) and about fasting. “When you give to the needy…,” “When you pray…,” “When you fast….” It seems that God intends that all of these activities should be part of our normal lifestyle. Scripture particularly links prayer and fasting. I want to focus on how this played out in the life of St. Paul. 

Luke describes the conversion of Saul of Tarsus in Acts 9. After the “light from heaven” struck him to the ground, and struck him blind, his companions brought him into Damascus. “And for three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.…” What was Paul doing during those 3 days of blindness? Praying and fasting. 

Later, in Acts 13:1-3 we see Paul as a member of the church in Antioch, one of a group of prophets and teachers. “While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.’ Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off.” In this passage, prayer and fasting appear together in the early church. 

The last passage I want to look at is in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10. Here, Paul mentions the thorn in his flesh, and recounts how he pleaded with the Lord that he should be liberated from it. “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”

We know that one aspect of prayer is fellowship with God. Another is presenting requests (supplication). Jesus told the disciples that the Father would grant anything they asked in his name. He also said that the Father always heard his own requests. James points out that we ask and do not receive because we ask out of selfish considerations. So it seems that we should present only those requests that Jesus also is praying alongside of us. In other words, prayer is an opportunity for us to join ourselves to the goals and desires of Jesus. Paul, in regard to his thorn in the flesh, requested deliverance on three separate occasions. But after God answered his prayer—in the negative—Paul turned from seeking deliverance to allowing the power of Christ to rest on him at whatever personal cost. 

The concept I once had of prayer is much too narrow. It is not primarily for me or for others. It is part of an expression of the life of Jesus. It is not about asking God to get on board with my program. Jesus speaks of it in the context of almsgiving and fasting, both of which are aimed at personal loss and surrender. So maybe prayer is about that, too. It seems to be about ascertaining God’s heart and then coming into agreement with Him. In Paul’s case prayer went beyond mere words and opened him to become a dwelling place for the power of Christ. 

One really precious characteristic of God that shines out from Paul’s experience is that our Lord will override what we are seeking explicitly to give us something better that we are seeking implicitly. Saul of Tarsus traveled to Damascus with the intention of defending what he understood to be the one true faith; God revealed the actual Truth in Jesus Christ and changed his trajectory 180 degrees. Paul pleaded with the Lord that his thorn in the flesh would leave him; God permitted that condition to persist but transformed his perspective on weaknesses, insults, troubles, persecutions and calamities suffered for the sake of Christ. The prayer of fellowship, in which we pledge ourselves to the King and His Kingdom, supersedes the prayer of supplication. 

God has an expansive view of prayer. There is much more to say on this topic, and I hope to return to it.

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