I have been thinking off the top of my head here in the last few minutes about prayer. The topic of prayer can be so confusing for so many people - does prayer change God's mind or mine? Is it a way to get our will accomplished or conform our will to his? Is it essentially just access to a "Spiritual vending machine" giving us what we want with no input into our lives?
And prayer lists? I know it's probably a fault of my own, but I just don't get excited when the majority of the concerns are for Aunt Tilly's foot or Neighbor Jim's cat or Co-Worker Bob's dying mother. It's not that I am emotionally cold and don't see the great pain in other's lives - it's just that I have no connection with them. I can join in with you in prayer for them because I care about you and because I care about humanity in general - but I feel essentially empty if that's all the prayer we do ...
It's probably me ... I know that praying for concerns is biblical, and I know that there is no such thing as a big thing or small thing to God. Yet, what I long for is prayers that flow like the Psalms - not because we've memorized them, but because we have learned to pour our hearts out to God and to each other. I'm not into show, or style without substance, or great fury signifying nothing. But an authentic heart that knows Christ deeply - that's what I want. There are so few who model this - maybe looking to others is a completely wrong approach. I want my heart to beat with more intensity than any two-bit trashy novel or Steven King horror story or deep love story could ever do. It's not the emotional experience I want - it's something much deeper - but I'm not into mysticism.
The only thing I can possibly think of in this world which has the echo of what I'm looking for is my wife's eyes. To look into her eyes, a decade after marriage and two kids, is to see someone who knows me for my deepest faults and struggles and yet loves me far more than I could imagine. It's the kind of love that doesn't just shame me, but blows me to billions of bits - because I'm not in the picture at all. This, this is the kind of love that my heart runs on, the kind of love that fuels me when times crush - yet, I know there is something more. Something beyond this great love I have for my wife - something truly supernatural in all the right sense. And that - that love of God that compels my heart to seek Him - the love that enabled the writer to say "Though he slay me, yet will I praise Him!" - is what I long for. That is the echo I want to hear in prayer. That is the fuel I want for my fire. I'm tired of being guilted into attendance at prayer - please, someone, live prayer like this ...
Consider this ... the Disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray. Think of the implications - the recognition that "what they always did" or "what they were taught" was just not enough. Jesus modeled prayer to them in such a way that they thirsted after what He had. Now there's a model and goal for your prayer meeting! Saturate yourself with psalms and other prayers until people start asking you to teach them to pray ... who knows, God might even show up!
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