When I say the word “prayer,” exactly what images come to mind? For many of us, we picture a quiet, old man sitting down at the kitchen table with his Bible and his God, hands joined together as he seeks to join his heart with heaven. It is a lovely image. And by the way, this is a truly Minnesotan image of prayer – it was originally a photograph taken in 1918 by Eric Enstrom of Bovey, Minnesota of a poor peddler who came to his home selling foot scrapers. The photographer liked the image because it showed an old man’s grateful heart at a time of great poverty, deprivation and suffering. It was a simple grace…
And yet this gracious image of prayer has become familiar stereotype and ritual for us. When I googled images of prayer on the web this week, these clasped hand postures of prayer were everywhere. There’s certainly nothing wrong with this, but it does cause me to wonder how ritual has come to dominate/influence our prayer lives. It appears even the animals have figured out how to properly talk with God. Please, oh please, can’t we do just a couple more minutes of laser dot, Pastor? Please, Daddy, please?
Oh dear LORD, please don’t let mother find out what Bowser here did to Daddy’s shoes!
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the LORD my soul to keep. And if I should die before I wake, I pray the LORD my soul to take. Amen.We all say our little prayers, don’t we? We think we know how this thing is supposed to work. We have some shockingly common and consistent ideas of what is good and bad prayer. Even the least spiritual among us have a pretty good idea what prayer is supposed to look like and how prayer is supposed to work. Prayer is asking God for stuff and getting it. Right?
I read the lovely, answered prayer story this week of a family trying to sell a car to raise money for an expensive surgery. No dealer was willing to offer much money for the car and so, the family stopped at a restaurant to pray about it. Even as they were still praying, a woman walked over to their table and asked them if they might possibly be interested in selling their car. Apparently, she had been looking for a particular, inexpensive car for a family member and couldn’t find it. So she stopped at the same restaurant for lunch and was praying about what to do when she saw them pull into the parking lot with the exact car she was looking to buy!
We love prayer stories like that, don’t we? Asked and answered – bada bing, bada boom! Those are the prayer stories we glory in – these stories just sound like little things we know our loving Father would do. There’s certainly nothing whatsoever wrong with savoring prayer moments like that, but are prayer experiences like that typical? Does good prayer usually work like that? Is our prayer conversation always supposed to work like that? Is this normal? And if it isn’t, pastor, then what is prayer? What are we supposed to expect?
For the next few weeks, we’re going to meander around in famous prayer passages of the Bible. At this the beginning of another year, I believe it is critical we become the people of prayer God intends us to be. But to do that, we need to review once again what prayer is.
In Matthew 5-7, our LORD Jesus explained to his disciples what it meant to be disciples. In what has now come to be known as the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus walked through life and explained how the relationship we were created to enjoy is more than just empty religion and attention to ritual. He took some of the ancient world’s most deeply cherished religious ideals and expanded them into gloriously liberating, hugely powerful, transformative principles. And in chapter 6, verses 5-15, he famously addressed the epic issue of prayer. Put yourself on the hillside at the feet of Jesus this morning and try to listen as if you’ve never heard these words…
And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. (ESV)
Back in the summer of 2008, I did a six week study series on this passage, so I’m not going to try to repeat that series over the next few weeks. I just thought it might be good to consider our prayer lives from three different angles in this three week series of sermons; our prayer lives as individuals, our prayer life as a church and our prayer life as a culture. And I see this epic passage as a wonderful description of our individual prayer conversations with God. I want to avoid any sort of prayer formulas or rituals we might adopt from these instructions and instead consider this great teaching in more sweeping, expansive terms. We might be leading a church in a pastoral prayer at the beginning of a worship service or kneeling at our bedside like that little boy and his dog, but wherever we are, whatever form our prayers take, it seems to me Jesus is teaching us that genuine, good and godly prayer always understands five realities.
Inevitable. And the first is somewhat startling to think about – inevitability. I believe the underlying assumption of Jesus’ teaching on prayer is that we are all going to be praying in one way or another. We might be sincerely pouring out our hearts to God or babbling on to some pointless, wooden deity of human origin, but the assumption here is that we’re all going to be praying. We are all talking and listening to someone; the only question is whether or not anyone is actually listening to us. As human beings uniquely created in the image of God, we all have that innate sense, that “god-shaped vacuum” in our hearts we seek to fill. We all pray.
I wonder how our interactions with the world would be different if we Christians stopped thinking we were the only ones interested in good prayer. How might our conversations about prayer be different if we accepted that everyone is somehow talking to someone or something?
Intimate. The second, sweeping theme I find compelling in Jesus’ teaching on prayer is the intimacy of it. If we want to enjoy a meaningful, satisfying conversation with God, we’ve just got to understand that conversation must be a deeply intimate one. We’re not interested in hypocritically standing in front of great crowds of people, trying to impress them with our fancy, flowery language or deep, profound theological understanding. We are far, far less interested in getting the words right in prayer than we are in getting our relationships right in prayer. We are privately talking to our Father. There is an intimacy in our prayers. We aren’t babbling on and on like the pagans, reciting endless, ritualized lists of magic prayer formulas intended to push just the right buttons on our vending machine God. We are sitting down with our Friend. We are sitting down with the Father who loves us and knows us better than we know ourselves.
Faithful. And seamlessly woven into the intimacy of these conversations is faithfulness. Even as we enjoy the intimacy of the great torn curtain in the Temple, we understand our God is in heaven and we are on earth. Our faith in Him reminds us that, at its very core, our prayer conversation with God is about faithful worship more than anything else. Hallowed be your name, God! Our prayer conversation is a loud declaration of our absolute, undying faith in a loving, Heavenly Father whose ways are infinitely higher than our ways. Prayer is our humble, faithful declaration that God knows everything better than we do – that He alone knows how to answer our questions and concerns. Prayer is only as valuable to us as it is full of faith in God.
While we all love those “bada-bing” instantaneous answers to prayer God sometimes enjoys giving us, we aren’t praying because those are the only answers we’ll accept from Him. Many years ago, I was praying with a pastor friend about whether or not I should continue waiting for the Ely church to call me as their pastor. Things came to a crisis moment and my friend and I asked God to do something that very night to show me what He wanted me to do. I had a decision to make the next morning; I simply had to have an answer that night. And as many of you know, no sooner did my friend and I say “amen” to that prayer, no sooner did I hang up the telephone, before I even took my hand off the phone, it began to ring with a phone call from the chair of the Ely search committee asking me to consider serving in Ely!
I would love to tell you all my conversations with God go like that, but they don’t. My prayer conversation with God is meaningful to the degree it is faithful. Most of the time, I’m taking something to God because I don’t know what to do with it myself. Most of the time, I’m waiting for God to tell me what I should even be asking for in prayer. I am trusting God alone can ever answer the questions and concerns I have. Good prayer is completely soaked in faith.
Hungry. And it is driven by faith because it is hungry. Our prayer conversation with God is full of faith because any genuinely good prayer conversation with God is truly hungry, is utterly starving, for good things from God. A good prayer conversation with God is hungry to see God’s kingdom come and God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. All genuinely good prayer is utterly starving not simply for our daily bread, the simple things we all need to survive, but more so for righteousness. A good prayer conversation with God is hungry for forgiveness and perhaps even hungrier for the ability to forgive others. A good prayer conversation with God is hungry for holiness; not simply to avoid the icky sins of this world, but avoid even any trivial temptations that might possibly lead to sin. A good prayer conversation with God is never interested in manipulatively getting what it wants out of God, but rather in getting out of the way of God. A good prayer conversation is completely driven by a God-hungering moral compass. A good prayer life is utterly ravenous for the truly valuable things only God can give.
Are you ravenous for the things of God? What are you truly, prayerfully hungry for?
I am a man of many hungers. I am hungry for the approval of others. I am hungry for fast muscle cars and large, loud motorcycles. I am hungry for long, lonely, liberating highways blissfully free of traffic, speed limits and patrol cars. I am hungry for the perfect photograph and the perfect song on my car stereo at the perfect moment. I am hungry for unlimited book budgets and time to enjoy them. I am hungry for financial independence and total control over how my lavish finances get spent. I am hungry for wisdom, information and technology. I am hungry for control over my life, my body and the world around me. I am hungry for speed and satisfaction. I am hungry for comfort and pleasure. I am hungry for love and relationship. I am ravenously hungry for all sorts of things, some good and some bad, but as Almighty God is my witness this morning, the only hunger that has never failed me is a genuine hunger for God.
When we genuinely hunger for God, we finally begin to understand how we’re supposed to properly manage all the other hungers of our lives. Many of those other hungers will vanish entirely and some will grow into the healthy hungers they were always intended to be. But the longer we learn to hunger for God, the more our conversations with God become expressions of our true hunger for God, the more our conversations and communion with God will change us. More conversation with God will itself become something we hunger for; good prayer is hungry.
Connection. And that brings us to the final, sweeping prayer theme I see in Jesus’ teaching on prayer – connection. Our prayer conversation with God is the ultimate expression not only of our connection to God but also God’s connection to every other area of our lives.
When Jesus says our forgiveness is connected to our willingness to forgive others, when James says the prayer “of a righteous person” is particularly effective, we are reminded of the total interconnectedness of everything in our lives. Any genuine hunger for God understands godly hunger will express itself not only in times spent alone in conversation and communion with God, but in how those times alone in conversation with God affect the rest of our lives.
I can spend hours every day confessing my undying, unwavering love and loyalty to my dear wife Monica, but if I spend the rest of my day betraying her, denying her, ignoring her or embarrassing her; if I live as if she has no influence in my life, I completely invalidate every single word of my prayerful conversations with her. And my conversations with her will very, very quickly become something uncomfortable and stilted instead of fulfilling and enjoyable.
Do you suppose this might be the biggest reason so many people have such utterly shallow and superficial experiences of God? Prayer isn’t just folded hands, needy wish lists and ritual – prayer is about completion and connection to life. Any genuine prayer conversation with God is also utterly intimate conversation with the every aspect of the world around us.
All genuine conversations with God implicitly understand and embrace the genuine interconnectedness of things. Of course our experience of God’s forgiveness is going to be affected by our willingness to forgive others! If we can’t seem to forgive others, it’s pretty obvious we haven’t truly understood and experienced forgiveness ourselves.
Any good prayer conversation understands the holy interconnectedness of things.
Your Father loves you! He doesn’t care what posture or particular words you use when you talk with Him. He knows you want to talk – you were created for great conversation and communion with Him. He craves intimacy with you even more than you crave it with Him. And He wants you to trust Him and hunger for Him because only in doing so will you ever begin to hunger correctly and connect everything together in the way that will bring you lasting joy.
May we discover God today! May we hunger for Him this year more than ever before! May our conversation and communion with Him be more wonderful and satisfying than ever!
Amen.
