Prayer 101
March 7, 2004
Lent is a penitential season of self-examination, prayer, and fasting. It is the time during our year when we look honestly at the parts of our lives that are hurting our relationship with God. When we examine these hurting places it gives us an opportunity to experience a deeper joy, find a wider trust, a love, a peace within. And, as I progressed through this past week, I repeatedly found myself involved in dialogues surrounding prayer. As Irene, Jim and I attended the Tom Bandy session on Friday, the call and vision to spend the rest of Lent exploring the discipline of prayer was clear.
For the next four Sundays we will cover the following topics about prayer. Today, I will talk about what prayer is. Next Sunday we’re going to explore different types of prayer, followed with how we choose the type of prayer and how to begin praying. Then I’ll end the series with why we pray and why it’s important as a Christian to have an active prayer life.
What is Prayer?
Prayer is a concrete expression of our love of God. It is personal communication with God, calling upon God as a strong and caring father or mother (Matt. 6:9, Rom. 8:15, Isa. 66:13). For the Christian, God is not something but someone – and primarily someone who is spoken to rather than only spoken about. Moreover, this someone addressed in prayer is not feared as a tyrant but genuinely loved as the sovereign and free God who exercises dominion with astonishing goodness and mercy. Prayer is our acceptance of the invitation to call upon God in confidence. Maturing in prayer does not mean mastering certain techniques or becoming virtuosos of the spiritual life. It means, being open and honest to God, praising God but also crying to God in our need and even sometimes crying out against God.
Prayer means to converse with God, talk with God, Ask God, Communicate with God. Prayer is a direct address to God. Prayer is how we make contact with God. And, it is also through prayer that God communicates with us. Prayer is the fundamental exercise of the new human freedom in partnership with the Spirit of God. Calvin calls prayer “the chief exercise of faith.” While it includes adoration and thanksgiving, prayer is essentially bold petition. As instructed by Jesus, we are to pray for the hallowing of God’s name, for the coming of God’s reign, for the doing of God’s will, for daily bread, for forgiveness, for deliverance from temptation.
In the Bible prayer is used in many ways and on many levels. Prayer can be a humble and earnest request for one’s self or for others. When we make a request for ourselves it’s known as a petition. When we ask for others it’s called intercession. Both petitions and intercessions, prayed from a humble and earnest position, are in themselves an act of worship. It is an act of worship because you are acknowledging the existence and your reverence of God. And, concurrently, that’s the definition of worship, gathering to revere and praise God. Prayer allows you to begin wrestling with God about something and everything. Prayer is both a pleading with God that God will hear and act upon our requests and a trusting surrender to God in the confidence that God will act in God’s time and God’s way. Prayer is a covenant partnership with God. It is a sharing with God of our needs and desires so we might be more fully conformed to the ultimate will and purpose of God and our role and our call to purpose in this time.
Prayer takes many forms in worship: praise, thanksgiving, confession, intercession, benedictions, and others. Each of these operates in a somewhat different way, yet all have in common that they are the creature’s voice to the creator. We may beg forgiveness, offer praise, plead for someone else, but whatever the function the method is similar: the articulating of deeply felt human needs as we confess, rejoice, or beg. Prayer gives us the opportunity to speak the right words, to say to God whatever concerns us most deeply. It is an essential part of all worship.
During parts of Christian history services of daily public prayer were held. Daily public prayer had a different and more personal focus, our response in praise to God in the midst of daily life. It is a response not just to word and sacraments but to the totality of daily experience, the sun coming up, the squabbles in the family, the tedium of work. Thus it is a corporate sharing of our words to God. Even though common forms must be used to make it fully communal, each of us supplies the gifts for which we give thanks, the complaints that we express, the joys for which we give praise. This ability to express ourselves in the setting of daily life makes daily public prayer distinctive. Private prayer brings energy and focus to public prayer. Public prayer provides good balance for private prayer in relating it to the whole of praying Christianity. Essentially, the company of many voices makes Christian prayer Christian. We do not pray against people but for them and with them. And we need the discipline of public prayer to make our own private prayers fully Christian.
John Calvin referred to prayer as the “soul of faith.” I often hear people say, “I’m not religious I’m spiritual.” Well, in Christianity, prayer is the spirituality of theology. Prayer is the vehicle that brings about transformation of the world for the glory of God. We yearn for the blessed vision of God, but even more we seek to bring our wills and the wills of all people into conformity with the purposes of God. We pray not simply for personal happiness or for protection but for the advancement and extension of the kin-dom of God. Maturing in prayer means being ready to learn in the presence of the God of costly grace, the difference between what we want and what we need. It means learning that at the beginning, middle, and end of every fruitful human action is prayerful recognition of the prevenient and sustaining grace of God.
So, to review and share with your family, friends, neighbors a dialogue about prayer, seven points:
- Prayer is a concrete expression of our love of God
- Prayer is learning the difference between what we want and what we need
- Prayer is how we contact God and one way that God communicates with us
- Prayer is a humble and earnest request for oneself or for another
- Prayer is done in many ways in order to communicate our deepest needs
- Prayer is public and private each supporting the other joining our voice with all of Christianity
- Prayer is the vehicle that brings us into focus about our own personal role in understanding the differences between wants and needs, transforming this world into the kin-dom of God.
Now as those who profess to be Christians. As those who desire to grow and mature in faith. Let us come together in the form of intercessory prayers or petitions acknowledging the things that are troubling our souls.