May 02, 2014
Standing on the Corner
The director
of the conference was a powerful woman of prayer. However, her corporate
prayers became so burdensome for me that by the second day I quit bowing my
head and closing my eyes; by the third day I quit praying altogether. Her
practice of talking to God about everything
resulted in continually slipping in and out of prayer mode in mid-sentence. As
the leader for the conference, and the one with the microphone, we were praying
for lost glasses, technical difficulties with the Power Point, travel connections,
and lost luggage. Sadly, I began questioning the motive behind the excessive
public prayers. Jesus makes a good point
when he says, “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to
your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret,
will reward you (Matt 6:6 NIV).”
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----What is prayer? Is it just a ritual act? Is it communication with God? The Bible tells us that He knows all our requests before we ask. It tells us He knows all our thoughts and feelings. So, if prayer were just communication, then it is done before it is begun. And that would show prayer not to be prayer, but rather all your thoughts and feelings would be prayer. Maybe this is not too far off target. The Bible says we should pray continually. Since all our thoughts and feelings are communicated to Him by His simply knowing them as they happen, then we are praying continually? Something seems to be missing.
-----Even though God knew all of Jesus’ thoughts as they happened, Jesus often withdrew from the crowds and His disciples to go aside and pray. And He showed us a pattern for prayer that is an obviously intentional direction of predetermined ideas unto God’s hearing for the engagement of God’s response. Was it that God would not respond to just knowing your thoughts as they pondered your needs? Maybe. But Jesus didn’t say, “Think and you shall receive.” And James straight out said we don’t receive because we don’t ask. He didn’t need to say, “…even though you do think.”
-----Prayer is then an objective selected by our will as a specifically desired response from the Lord according to His will. Although mere thought and feeling lack the willful selection and specific address to God, the fact that just thinking and feeling communicates to God is instructive of what container prayer might need. Prayer can even be contained in feelings subtler than the mind’s grasp of understanding and meaning, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” (Rom 8:26)
-----The closet Jesus said we should enter when we pray need not be at home. I hold that it is also right there in the privacy of your head and heart no matter what you’re doing or where you are. In Paul’s exhortation to pray continually I see the utility of forming and carrying in heart and mind an intentional address to God about all that is happening to you and that you are doing and thinking and feeling as we involve ourselves in whatever is happening, kind of like Norton anti-virus running in the background of your computer. So, often I too wind up praying for the lead in my automatic pencil and such. But God gave us charge over a proper portion of our surroundings for subduing them to work our needful purposes such that we really should resort to assuring the power-switch is on instead of leading a thousand people in solemn prayer because the overhead projector did not shine at our first beck. Such prayer is actually something the “Norton 360” should kind of block.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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