Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Prayer

Prayer.

Luke 11
Mathew 6
What is it about prayer that seems so illusive? Why do most Christians feel that prayer is never as good as it should be?

Prayer is where our life and our God meet. Prayer has been taught for so long as a means of getting and not means of knowing. Relational.
-When we pray we are with the one who loves most purely.
-When we pray we are expressing ourselves to the one who truly gets you.
Prayer is not formal does not need precise words. We like this because it feels ok and better as if we have grown in our maturity as a Christian. What does it look like to come to God the way he describes in scripture, like that of a child?
Children come messy
No pretense
You are the only solution to their problem
They are persistent
Learning to become like a child so that we ask, believe and play (wish and hope) in our prayer. Remember the point of Christianity isn’t to learn a lot of truths so you don’t need God anymore; we are going to grow in our desire and need for more of him.
Prayer is a life long journey my hope is that you will never feel as if you have made it. When we feel like we have made it we tend to feel like “what is next” and move on.
Prayer is where real life is… God wants us to come messy and overwhelmed, he wants our scattered thoughts. He is the only one who can really sort through them any way. I think that prayer like this would help keep marriages out of the counseling offices. Our spouses are not equipped to fix our needs it is not their job. God is the only one who knows you best and has all the tools necessary to handle everything that is on your heart and mind. God speaks your language, he understands you babbling he can sort through the tears the words he knows you best.
So Prayer becomes one of our greatest outlets for being with our heavenly father. Luke 11 becomes for me the passage that shows me my need for him. I know that my heart can try to accomplish a lot. I am good at fixing my problems. I know that I have lots of ways to have my needs met with out prayer. “ Money can do what prayer can and its quicker and less time consuming.”
So how do we pray? We need to pray with our whole lives, our everyday with out fixing ourselves first giving God what he already knows about us.
“If God is sovereign, then he is in control of all the details of my life. If he is loving, then he is going to be shaping the details of my life. If he is all-wise, then he’s not going to do everything I want because I don’t know what I need. If he is patient, then he is going to take time to do all this. When we put all these things together- god’s sovereignty, love and wisdom, and patience- we have a divine story.”
Learning to pray does not offer us a less busy life it offers us a less busy heart. In the midst of outer busyness we have inner quiet. But as we learn to pray as well, we’ll discover that this is my father’s world. Because my father controls everything, I can ask, and he will listen and act. Since I am his child, change is possible- and hope is born.
Pray in the midst of the chaos. As your heart or your circumstances generate problems, keep generating prayers. Pray is not cut and dry and a simple system it is messy and sometimes way out of control just like your life.
If you are going to enter this divine dance we call prayer, you have to surrender your desire to be in control, to figure out how prayer works. You’ve got to let God take the lead.

Prayer Cards-
Prayer journal-
Systems should not cause guilt in us. When we allow them to be a measuring stick to our growth as prayers we have lost the point. Journals and Cards are one way for us to have some sense of remembering the journey God is taking us on.


Thoughts from the book: a praying life, by Paul Miller