Genesis 20:7 NIV
Now return the man's wife, for he is a
prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live. But if you do not return
her, you may be sure that you and all yours will die."
What is
the Big Deal about Prayer?
I
have a shirt that across the front has in bold, bright letters, “Pray”. I enjoy the reaction it stirs. I usually wear it when I am going to be
around a lot of different people. It
would be fun to have a web cam record the response of those who notice it for
the first time. A typical reaction is
for a person to glance at the letters, then pause a moment as if trying to
grasp the meaning of the word found on my shirt. Almost always, the woman or man quickly looks
away without meeting my eyes. It is as
if I stop being a real person to many, just a walking billboard. Some smile and tell me they like the shirt,
most try to pretend they didn’t see it or me.
I did not realize prayer was controversial, or something that made
people uncomfortable. Perhaps it is now;
maybe prayer is no longer recognized as a critical part of being human; not
thought to be important to making life better.
It
seems odd that there has to be a rationale given for prayer but perhaps one
must be given. Does it really matter
if you pray or not? Is anyone affected
by the shortness of your praying or your lack of prayer? The problem is that you almost never get any
feedback on how you pray. If you diet or
don’t, you see how you are doing. When
you send a check to a charity, you get a note back thanking you for the support
and perhaps even a report of how much help you provide. If you save for your retirement, eventually
you find out what your disciplined living did for you. Fail to keep oil in your car and at some
point you will find out how important oil is to your car engine. It is not like that with prayer. How do you ever find out what your praying
did or didn’t do for yourself or others?
You never get a report card. No
one knows how effective your praying is and you probably don’t know
either. Unless you are someone like
George Muller who kept rigorous records of his praying and how his prayer
requests fared, you probably haven’t a clue about your prayer success
rate. The default setting for most
people is that they just don’t pray much for themselves or others because they
don’t know why they should. Is there a
reason why you should pray often? Let us
look at this question carefully because it may really matter how much you pray.
The
Bible has an intriguing account of prayer that must be considered. The book of Job is most famous for its report
of the terrible suffering of Job and how he tried to understand why God let him
face such horror. Yet it could be argued
that the most important point made in the book is not even the narrative of Job
and his trials but rather what we are told at the end. Job had three friends who came to him
ostensibly to comfort him but ended up berating Job for imaginary wrongs he had
committed. The friends decided that Job had
to have been a terrible sinner for God to make him suffer so much. More than half the book is a dialogue between
Job and his friends; the later accusing Job of secret sins and the former denying
the charges and asserting his holiness.
Famously Job pleads for someone to intervene for him, someone to defend
him to God. He insists, “…God
has wronged me and drawn his net around me. “ (Job 19:6 NIV)
The
final chapters of Job are given over to the Lord’s response to Job’s
accusations. God never explains His
actions; He merely makes it clear that He is sovereign Lord over all and that
no one rises above Him in authority and power.
God challenges Job to bring his charges directly to Him. The Lord said to Job: "Will the one who contends with the
Almighty correct him? Let him who
accuses God answer him!" (Job
40:1-2 NIV) Job’s response is quick and
decided. Then Job answered the Lord: "I am unworthy — how can I reply to
you? I put my hand over my mouth. I spoke once, but I have no answer — twice,
but I will say no more." (Job
40:3-5 NIV) Then we come upon perhaps
the most compelling aspect of the entire book…at least as far as we discover
the value God gives His people and the part they play in the course of history.
At
the conclusion of the book of Job, the Lord turns to Job’s friends and
addresses their critique of Job. After
the Lord had said these things to Job, he said to Eliphaz the Temanite, "I
am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken of me what
is right, as my servant Job has. So now
take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and sacrifice a burnt
offering for yourselves. My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept
his prayer and not deal with you according to your folly. (Job 42:7-8 NIV) What an astonishing revelation! God will wait for someone to pray before He acts. In this case it is Job. Consider the implication. After God’s monologue in which He declares
His supreme authority over the universe, He warns Job’s friends that if they do
not want to face the consequences of making false accusations against Job, they
must depend upon Job to pray for God’s mercy.
Why did God have Job pray for his friends? Clearly it was because the friends needed Job
to pray for them.
This
is a stupendous revelation! God waited
for Job to pray before He decided the fate of Job’s three friends. It is as if you did not want to act until one
of your friends gave her opinion. Or it
is more like your father not punishing your brother until you said whether he
should or not. Prayer has a real effect
with God and changes the course of human events. Remember what Jesus said about His people? I no longer call you servants, because a
servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you
friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.
(John 15:15 NIV) One characteristic of
friendship is that friends influence each other. They start to think alike as the bond between
them strengthens. Friendship is never a
one-way street. Friendship is by
definition the linking of people so that they impact each other through love
and loyalty. If prayer is the way we
bond with God, then it seems reasonable that in our prayers, there is a back and
forth impact that takes place between us.
As your friend, God cares about what matters to you and He is affected
by the way you think and how you feel about things. We think of God as some isolated independent
being who does everything on His own but He isn’t. Our Lord is your friend and your Father and
He loves you as your friend and your Father.
That is why prayer is so important.
God is, in some way that cannot be explained, influenced by you.
Consider
the implications of Ephesians 6:18. And pray
in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With
this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints. (NIV) Jude 20 has a similar admonition. But you, dear friends, build yourselves up
in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit. (NIV) This verse, when considered in its original
Greek setting is almost identical to Ephesians 6:18 because it literally
directs us to “in the Holy Spirit continually be praying ones”. To pray “in” the Holy Spirit is like a fish
living “in” the ocean or a bird living “in” the atmosphere. The “in” of being in the Holy Spirit is an “in”
of complete immersion, of total envelopment.
The bird absorbs the atmosphere as well as moves within it. If you pray in the Holy Spirit, the Holy
Spirit is all about you in your praying.
He is “in” what you pray, the guide to your praying, He is why you pray
and the reason you have trust in God as you pray. When you “pray in the Holy Spirit”, it means
that the Holy Spirit is a part of every aspect of your praying.
But
how does God our friend want us to pray?
He wants us to pray about anything the Holy Spirit brings to mind but
especially He wants us to pray for every single Christian who comes to
mind. Why should we pray so much? It is because God cares about our opinion of
things: He wants to hear what we have to say about others. In fact He cares so much that He waits for us
to pray before He acts. Job had the same
task we have, to bring his concerns about people to God and ask for Him to help
them. How can we know what to pray about
for others? When we are in the Holy
Spirit, immersed in Him, thinking with Him and through Him, we will get it
right. Our prayers will match what God
wants to do for them.
Without
the Holy Spirit directing our thinking as we pray, it is a hit or miss
proposition. Praying becomes irrational
and filled with chaos. The Spirit
straightens out our praying, makes it coherent.
We know what we ought to pray and how we should pray because the Holy
Spirit makes sense of it for us. We have
the foundation for confident praying in Romans 8, perhaps the most important
chapter in the entire Bible. In
the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought
to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words
cannot express. And he who searches our
hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the
saints in accordance with God's will. (Romans 8:26-27 NIV)
Let
this sink in a moment. On our own we
have no idea how to pray. In our sin
weakened state we are incompetent at prayer.
But with the Holy Spirit working within us, we have no limits in prayer,
there is no ceiling. Just think about
what you could do for others if you become locked in on the Holy Spirit and
were in total sync with God. You could
bring real peace and joy to the world…to those your love. Imagine the good you could do if you took
prayer seriously; if you made it your top priority! It would not be a stretch to state that the
book of James provides us with the greatest encouragement to pray found anywhere
in literature. Consider its implication.
Therefore
confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be
healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed
earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and
a half years. Again he prayed, and the
heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops. (James
5:16-18 NIV) Elijah was a person just
like you with all your faults and weaknesses, with all kinds of idiosyncrasies
and quirks just like you. Yet he could
pray and a drought came to pass because of his praying and then after three and
a half years the drought ended because of his praying. That could be you, praying just like Elijah. You may argue that you aren’t righteous
though. The truth is that because of
Christ in you, your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of Elijah and all
the other greats of the Old Testament. But
if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one
another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. (1
John 1:7 NIV) And this is my prayer: that your
love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you
may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day
of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus
Christ — to the glory and praise of God.
(Philippians 1:9-11 NIV)
It is not a righteousness issue for you when it comes to praying. It is a willingness issue. Are you willing to stay close enough to the
Holy Spirit that you can make a supernatural difference in your circle of
influence when you pray? Do you through
the most powerful tool you have, prayer, want to make the lives of others
better. You can. You just have to decide if you are willing to
put in the effort to pray.
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