Thought for Today
1 Kings 8:28 Regard your servant's prayer and his plea, O Lord my God, heeding the cry and the prayer that your servant prays to you today;
Psalm 51:1 Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.
Luke 6:12 Now during those days he went out to the mountain to pray; and he spent the night in prayer to God.
Acts 1:14 All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.
How’s your prayer life? Do you even have a prayer life, any sort of regular prayer routine? Do you deliberately, regularly talk to God? The These Days devotional this morning talks about prayer. The focus verse of that devotional is Psalm 51:1. The author writes, “We can come to think that prayer, to be authentic, needs to be more about others than it is about ourselves.” The author goes on to note that all of the pronouns in Psalm 51:1 are singular, me, your, my.
Prayer is important. At its heart, prayer is a conversation with our Creator God. It can and should be an intimate conversation. It must be an honest conversation. It is not that our omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God isn’t already aware of everything and needs to be reminded of what’s going on. Obviously, God already knows. Long before we are aware of things, long before anything reaches to level of penetrating our own consciousness, God knows all about whatever it is.
Take out your Bible. Read the introductory remarks for Psalm 51, “To the leader. A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.” David was not revealing some secret to God. God knew. What David was doing was admitting his own sin to himself and to his God. This was David’s Confession of Sin. Many Protestant worship services incorporate a Unison Confession of Sin. Importantly, they are followed by an Assurance of Pardon. One of my favorites comes from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, “2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—”
We need to always remember that gift God so freely offers; and, we need to remember the importance of our own confession, our absolute reliance on the grace of our Creator God. We need to talk to God about all the ‘stuff’ going on in our own, individual lives. Why might God be interested? Why in the world would the Creator of Creation be interested in the life of one, small, insignificant cog in the great machine of Creation? Simply because God is God. God cares.
When we pray, when we even think about praying, we need to be aware of some basic rules. First, God is not concerned with our eloquence. Whether we pray aloud or silently in our minds, God is not ‘grading’ our prayer on the complexity of our sentences, on whether or not our grammar is correct, on whether we express our thoughts well. God just wants to talk to us. God already knows God’s name, to whom we are speaking. We don’t need to begin every prayer with a recitation of every name or title for God. We don’t even need to express our joys, cares or concerns clearly . . . although, I sometimes suspect that God does appreciate our being concise.
One of my favorite hymns about prayer is What a Friend We Have in Jesus. Think about that first verse, “What a friend we have in Jesus, All our sins and griefs to bear! What a privilege to carry Everything to God in prayer! Oh, what peace we often forfeit; Oh, what needless pain we bear, All because we do not carry Everything to God in prayer.” “Friend, All, Everything.” If we do not pray, if we do not carry everything to God in our prayers, how can we claim Jesus or God as our friend? If we do not pray about it all, about everything, how can we claim any degree of friendship, any intimacy with our Creator? How can we receive God’s grace?
If you have troubles with prayer, if you don’t ever know how to start or what to say, Jesus gave his disciples and us a model prayer. The Lord’s Prayer is a very good place to start, But, don’t stop there. Don’t limit your prayer life to a rote recitation of that prayer. “Are we weak and heavy laden, Cumbered with a load of care? Precious Savior, still our refuge, Take it to the Lord in prayer.” God cares, God listens!
Stay safe, pray often, trust God,
Pastor Ray