Prayer in an age of self

Posted by Eddie in Guyspeak | 152 views since Jan 31, 2012 | 0 comments

Some put it on strict schedule, some only mumble it only before meals and bedtime, some say it religiously and others reserve it for crisis. You?

Bernard of Clairvaux, a French monk, once defined prayer as “a wine that makes glad the heart of man.”

The great English preacher, Charles Spurgeon, had no kind words for the prayerless as he once remarked, “Live and die without prayer and you will pray long enough when you get to hell.” He is also known for having called prayer the “thermometer of the church.”

Jesus, the one who gave us the Lord’s Prayer as a blueprint of communication with God is considered to have “offered all kinds of prayers and supplication …while on earth to the one who could save him (Hebrews 5:7)”.

The passage above doesn’t seem to indicate that Jesus only prayed at the dining table. It doesn’t sound like he prayed only when the wallet was thinner. He prayed while on earth, offering all kinds of prayer. He did not wait for Sunday morning or Lent. He did not wait for the mass, neither did he wait for the prayer breakfast nor the announcement on the microphone. To him prayer seemed to be a lifestyle.

“Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed,” Luke 5:16, reminding us that solitude – like corporate prayer – is key. He actually at one time went radical and advised that we lock the door behind us when we are praying (Matthew 6:5-8).

If Jesus had lived in our day, He probably would have known the distractions of office jokes enough to go downstairs and mumble a prayer. He would probably have pressed the red button on His remote control, and sat back in silence asking His father in heaven to help guard His heart from the subtle unbiblical attitudes planted by trivial television programming.

Perhaps He would have scheduled his “to do list” around consistent and intentional prayer times throughout the day. Perhaps.

Well, we may not know his probable choices, but one thing we know is that He gave us a model on how we should pray in Mathew 6:5-15.

Our Father in heaven
Hallowed be Your name
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth, as it is done in heaven
Give us this day our daily bread
Forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive those who trespass against us
Lead us not into temptation
Deliver us from evil
For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever,
Amen

For Jesus, this prayer, by principle, covered the key elements of prayer.

Prayer, regardless of the words we use:
Acknowledges the supremacy of our God.
Begs for his kingdom of God to come, not ours (self).
Seeks God’s will above all; not what we want first, as it is done in heaven.
Consists of repentance.
Seeks constant provision (give us this day our daily bread) and constant guidance (lead us not into temptation) and constant protection (deliver us from evil).

These seem to be the principles underlying Jesus’ teaching on prayer.

Prayer, for that matter, goes beyond asking for our needs, Florence Allshorns, an English missionary once put this fact so well: “The primary object of prayer is to know God, we and our needs should come second.”

Prayer is all the above –well, at least principally speaking.

In this age of self and the I-can-do-it-all-by-myself mentality, prayer also remains a sign of humility, a dependency on God, and spiritual warfare (Ephesians 6). Prayer also ought to be held in light of receiving Christ’s saving righteousness, as prayerful lives with routine unconfessed are spelt this way:
H-y-p-o-c-r-i-t-i-c-a-l.

God summons us to confess our sins to the One who is just and faithful to forgive us (1 John 1:9). That’s probably why deliberately, sinful, unrepentant and yet prayerful lifestyles may eventually degenerate into religion and legalism, for the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective (James 5:16).

There you go. Next time you think of prayer, think of bowing your heart first before you bow your head, for the Lord cautions “For they confess Me with their lips but their hearts are far from Me” –Mathew 15:8.

Honestly, if prayer “is the best use of our words” as someone once put it, and “the wine that makes glad the heart of a man” like Bernard of Clairvaux remarked, then I think it’s time for Christians to get drunk, uh?

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