PRAYER! ARE YOU A SILENT PARTNER?

(these thoughts are added to three times a week)

Suppose you received a letter in the mail yesterday that had a strange looking post-mark on it? In today’s terrorist-climate-conditions you might be tempted to just throw it away, certainly think twice before you opened it. But since this is just “supposing,” let’s say you responded in a more positive way; opened it and began to read, “My dear earthly child.” This would certainly grab your attention. So much so that your eyes might immediately drop to the end to check out the signature, and when you found it read Your God you would probably be more than a little curious as to what lay in between the salutation and the closing.

Remember, we are playing a game of suppose.

The note, for it is hardly long enough to be called a letter, begins, I am sorry to inform you that I will no longer be listening to your prayers. When you sin and want forgiveness, there will be none available. When you are filled with thanksgiving, you’ll just have to get along with whatever joy you can muster. When there is a death and you need me most, I will be too busy. As of the receipt of this communication, you are out of the loop.

Hey, wait a minute! you protest. That’s not part of our deal. I pray. You listen. It’s a two way street.

And then the thought hits you…well sometimes I don’t use the street called Prayer unless I have a foxhole fixation. Sometimes I think about praying, but lose my way. Sometimes I just misplace the address and don’t work too hard at trying to find it again.

So what is prayer? Well, it is first and foremost an expression of belief. You cannot pray to an afterthought
Prayer is the one place independent man seeks dependence.

Before I learned how to fly and earned my pilot’s license, I read books on how to do it, but that didn’t make me a pilot. Before I traveled all over this old world, I read books on traveling, but that didn’t make me a traveler. There are books on prayer and you are listening to a sermon on prayer, but that doesn’t automatically make you a person of prayer. What does make you a pilot is to fly. What does make you a traveler is to travel. What does make you a person of prayer is praying

Let me give a few guidelines for praying:

SET ASIDE A SPECIAL TIME FOR PRAYER. Again, this doesn’t mean that is the only time you can pray, but if you don’t have a special praying time you may end up with no praying time. We are creatures of habit. Good ones. Bad ones.

Before I went away to college I practiced the piano every morning before breakfast and every evening before supper. When I got to college that schedule didn’t work out so well, so I practiced a little here, a little there, but as my piano skills began to diminish, I practiced less and less, and my mistakes grew more and more. If it was true of practicing a musical instrument, it certainly can be true of the more important practice of prayer.

To improve your prayer life –
Audit the obstacles to prayer.

SPIRITUAL PRIDE – I can handle it, Lord. Spiritual laziness - there’s always tomorrow.

SPIRITUAL ANGER – God, You ain’t been treatin’ me right, so I’ll show You, I just won’t talk to You for a while.

SPIRITUAL FEAR– fear that prayer might actually change you, and you are not sure you want to change. In short, don’t ask the Lord for directions unless you are willing to move your feet.

PUSH ASIDE YOUR EMOTIONAL HURTS. If we are too angry or too bitter, we really can’t pray. It can mute our desire to do anything but pout and fuss, or even worst, curse both God and man. Well, let’s put it this way, have you ever been so mad you were glad you were mad? Not in the mood for anything but more madness?

Certainly not in the mood for prayer. So if, or when, this is your problem, start a fight with these emotional devils. Pummel them. Stomp on them. Do them the damage they deserve. Clean them out of the room to your heart.

THINK ON KINDNESS. Open the windows of your mind and let beauty pour in. Remember the fact of love. Let the lives of men and women of faith come welling into the limelight. Your mind will always be filled with something, so as you prepare to pray, think on some good things.

FOLD YOUR HANDS IN PRAYER. It isn’t necessary, but psychologically it helps. It is an act of humility. An act of readiness. You have doubts? Then ball up your fists and try to pray.

Unfortunately, some folks don’t really want power to live better lives. They just want unlimited forgiveness for the wandering lives they continue to live. Or, as Thomas Aquinas put it, “Too often, when some pray they do not raise themselves to God, they ask God to lower Himself to them.”

You know, we carry with us always something that can be used to remind us to pray and who to pray for. It is our hand. Look at your thumb. It is the closest to you and should remind you to pray often for those close to you. Next is your index finger. You use it to point with. Call it the authoritative finger and let it remind you to pray for those in authority that they might use their power well. The middle finger – without it you can’t really get a good grip on anything. Without prayer you cannot really get a good grip on anything. Your ring finger? It is the weakest of them all. I early learned that as a piano student. Let it remind you to pray for the weak; those crushed by poverty or sickness or totalitarian governments. And finally, there is the little finger. It is the last and ought be a reminder that we should pray for ourselves last. (rewritten idea from “A Sure Thing” by Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Bible Way CRC Publications.)

Prayer is not a difficult skill to be mastered, but a heavenly command to be obeyed. It is not a gifted weaving of words because one day we may be eloquent and yet another day quite tongue-tied. The greatest thing about prayer is that if we practice it enough, it reveals God - private, personal, for real.

One little boy prayed over and over again for God to make Jacksonville the capital of Florida. When someone overheard him and asked why he was so earnest about such a prayer, he explained, “It’s the answer I put on my test paper this morning.”

Yes, there are some things God won’t change and obviously shouldn’t change.

But then there are other times. When I destroyed my left arm in a hang gliding accident, I prayed, “Lord, You made my arm once, please remake it. I can live with a no but I am seeking a yes. I come knocking. I come believing that if it is Your will, the mercies of heaven will open wide and a miracle will occur.”

Well, I took God at his word and He took me at mine. And my heavenly Doctor and my earthly doctor took this shattered, paralyzed arm and made it well. It can now loft a tennis ball, type a letter, race over piano keys, lift a piece of luggage. I prayed and meant it, “Thy will be done.” And it was and He did.

A little boy one night was explaining to his father why he had fallen out of bed. “I just went to sleep too close to the place where I got in.”

If you have forgotten how to pray and feel your prayers peter out not much higher than the ceiling, perhaps it is because a long time ago you went to sleep on the edge of your faith. Maybe your prayers are still not much more than “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayers or “God is great, God is good” prayers. But even these reach the ears of God.

Prayer is an attitude. It is writing the word “gratitude” across the face of each new day. It must not just be something you do. It must be something you become. Indeed, a man who damns God and means it is praying more than a man who praises God and doesn’t mean it.

Prayer is the exercise that keeps usfrom having flabby spiritual muscles which is why serious prayers start for most people after the age of 30. It is then that they begin to understand that they are not masters of their fate nor captains of their soul.

Prayer is an adventure. A moment with God. A time of truth. It is when the best in us seeks the best for us. It is sometimes weeping, sometimes joyous, sometimes a whisper, sometimes a shout. Prayer is the glue that holds one’s faith together. It is the compass that points a clear and steady course toward the gates of heaven.

It is not a matter of theology, but of experience. Prayer isn’t spiritual levitation. Not magic nor mystery. It is just talking to God Who is talking to us.

Come to think of it - maybe that is spiritual levitation, magic and mystery.