Prayer is basic. Prayer is Faith 101. Prayer is to faith what breathing is to life. We just gotta do it. Eugene Peterson writes in his The Jesus Way, “Prayer is the street language that we use with Jesus who walks the streets with us. It is the only language available to us as we bring our unique and particular selves” to God.
The challenge of prayer, though, is how easy it is to cheat. I’m thinking about God. Doesn’t that count? Maybe, but not necessarily. I’m singing along to Q102.7. Doesn’t that count? Maybe, but not necessarily.
I’m trying. Doesn’t that count? Actually, yes, that does count every time.
Jesus taught us to pray, “Our Father in heaven…” (Matthew 6:9-13; Luke 11:1-5). This Lord’s Prayer is not the only prayer we’re ever to pray. Jesus himself uses other words in prayer, so clearly he can’t intend these to be the only words we speak. Instead, we understand that his prayer serves also as a sort of outline for authentic prayer as God intends it.
The Lord’s Prayer teaches us that authentic prayer is God-centered. It’s addressed, after all, to God. Not luck. Not fate. Not the universe. Prayer begins with God.
More than that, authentic prayer is honest and personal. Authentic prayer gets real about who we are. We’re sinners who will face temptation.
We don’t need to be polite, and the words don’t have to be well-chosen. we spill out our lives before God, trusting that God will pick up the pieces, or give us the sense to look down at what we’ve spilled and see the patterns of new life among the pieces. Nothing is off limits in prayer, because nothing is off limits to God.
When my daughter was a little girl, we read her the story of Babar. Remember the little elephant who loses his mother to the evil hunter? For weeks, every night, when we’d ask our daughter what she wanted to pray about, she’d ask that we pray for Babar. We obliged.
A teenager once told me after worship that he thought it was silly of us to pray for peace. “It’s not going to happen, so why waste the breath?”
We “waste breath” on imaginary elephants and world peace, daily bread and brain tumors, because real prayer is always hopeful. Hope defies logic and reason; it ignores the probable and concentrates on the possible, because we know that, with God, all things are possible.
God-centered, honest, and hopeful. When our prayers fit this description, we can trust that God is drawing close.
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