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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