THE ART OF PRAYING
Psalm 130
LUKE 11: 1-10
AUGUST 11, 2024
I am never surprised when individuals who discover that I am a pastor will either tell me that they say IT regularly or they will ask me to recite ‘OUR FATHER.’ It happened the other night quite out of nowhere as I was walking around at RIVERWINDS. Someone attending the National Night Out noticed my West Deptford Police Department chaplain shirt. And, the conversation began, “Hey Father … can you say a prayer for me.”
Together, we found a quiet space and this person told me about some of their struggles. This person said that they did not feel close enough to God to pray but that they needed to hear the Lord’s Prayer … “Pray Our Father for me please …”
I asked for specifics to pray about, but it was clear … just PRAY OUR FATHER PLEASE. And, so I prayed, or we prayed because this person seemed intently focused on each and every word that we can discover in Luke’s Gospel and Matthew’s Gospel. A prayer that Jesus taught His disciples to pray … “Our Father, who art in heaven … HALLOWED be thy name.”
Do you ever stop to consider what that word HALLOWED means? We have it memorized and we say it … oh I mean to say we PRAY it with regularity. In fact, you will join me in a few moments in that prayer and most if not all of us including those worshiping with us online will pull from our memory banks the Shakespearean translation of God’s Word that King Henry VIII mandated using Old English words that even today’s Brits don’t use … to pray. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth 1 the closing words “but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever” were added and from that day forward they have been part of the prayer we, as Protestants, memorized as kids. Jesus did not include those words in the prayer He taught His disciples but we imply that He did rather than ever stating that it was a requirement of the Queen but they do round out the Jesus’ prayer nicely don’t you think, and we always pray the Lord’s Prayer with intent and HALLOWEDNESS.
I went to the MERRIAM WEBSTER Dictionary for the definition … HALLOWED means “sacred, revered, Holy, and consecrated.” So, might our prayer life be better if we started this prayer that focuses in on God’s art collection that is in heaven … you know “Our Father whose art is in heaven … HOLY is THY name” … I wonder if kids know who THY is. As I recited The Lord’s Prayer from memory I was caught wondering if this total stranger was able to understand the words from Luke and Matthew’s Gospels, but that Riverwinds moment seemed to be pretty HALLOWED for both of us.
I offered more in conversation and prayer, but I was thanked. The brief PRAYER MEETING at Riverwinds was over. And so alone, I prayed but this time in full conversation with our God using ‘Dave words’ in 21st century English as I asked God’s Spirit to be upon that individual who clearly needed prayers in that moment.
Friends, don’t we all need prayers? Don’t we all need to be in conversation with our God? I truly believe that our faith life grows stronger … our earthly lives get better … when we have an active and two-way prayer connection with God.
Yes, prayer needs to be a two-way experience … a conversation through a relationship. That’s why I really love the words of Mother Teresa that I shared today as our worship service began, “PRAYER … is putting oneself in the hands of God and listening to His voice in the depth of our hearts.”
I know that New Jersey’s Jon Bon Jovi was not referencing God in that hit song of his, ‘Living on a Prayer,’ even though Bon Jovi does an amazing job feeding the hungry and homeless through his “Soul Kitchens” in Red Bank and Toms River. His Foundation has established programs to help the homeless and the hungry across the United States while also supporting social service and job training programs. He is an example, as is Taylor Swift for you young ones, of a multimillionaire who every single day is returning his money to the community by caring for those who are poor. By developing, promoting, and assisting in innovative and long-lasting solutions that are rebuilding lives and community or as he states taking care of, ‘ONE SOUL at a TIME.’
I am not going to sing LIVING ON A PRAYER but the song’s title strikes home with me every time I hear the opening notes. Not in the way that Jon intended but those words “We gotta hold on ready or not … we’re halfway there … livin’ on a prayer … take my hand!” Oh yes, we need God to take our hands, we need to get into God’s hands, and we definitely need to start living through our prayers.
And, there is the essence of prayer … perhaps the ART of PRAYING needs to begin when we call out to God to take our hands. To take our lives and our hearts and our minds and our souls and our actions. To connect with the Holy … pausing to sense God’s presence rather than to quickly pray ‘Bless this food now let’s CHOW DOWN’ because we know that a lengthy conversation with God at the dinner table will result in COLD FOOD.
And, I am in no way diminishing our mealtime prayers but when we sit down to eat do you really want to talk with God going on and on and on and on thanking God for the blessings God has given to us? With your food in front of you, are you really focused on asking God what God wants you to do to answer prayers? Are your meal prayers your only prayers of the day? Do you pray without ceasing always ready to strike up a conversation with God using your words?
The real question … the essence of prayer comes down to whether we, as people of faith, want our prayers to be two-way conversations. Or is it our preference to be the ones asking for something? Yesterday, Dax as he sat in the Photo Booth with two friends wanting to get their photo’s taken looked up at me and knowingly said with a smile, “Babu you have money, right?” He was praying that I’d slip in the $7 to get the photo machine working … and friends, His prayer to his GRANDFATHER was answered with my smile, my $7, and a fun strip of photos of Dax and his friends was the result.
But is that you with God? Is that me? Are we merely making requests … a list of things … and then calling it our prayers and closing off our minds, our hearts, and our connection before giving God a chance to answer us. We are busy … right? Do we want to know if God has requests of us? Perhaps we don’t want to hear that God wants us to take on solutions to answer those prayers.
In her book, “A Fresh Vision of Jesus,” Cheri Fuller features a quote from Anne Graham Lotz that I really love. Lotz wrote, “Jesus invites you and me, in His name, to come into His Father’s presence through prayers, crawl up into His lap by faith, put our heads on His shoulder of strength, “Abba” Daddy, and pour out our hearts to Him.”
That’s relational … that’s connectional … that’s having a faith relationship with God where we want to sense God, experience God, and have that absolutely honest and open conversation with God in anticipation that God will whisper back to us God’s answers to our prayers. Charles Spurgeon said, “God sees you as much as if there were nobody else in the world for Him to look at.” But my question is … when we pray … when we are trying to connect with God do, we want to hear back or are we satisfied just using a version of English that our best friends would look at us with quizzical looks wondering why we just can’t say what we mean.
Speaking of best friends … when you talk with them on the phone do you say what’s on your mind and then hang up? We do that all too often with God.
Paul offers an interesting perspective on prayer in many of his letters. Actually, Paul basically writes as he did to the Philippians, “And this is my prayer that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insights so that you may be able to discern that is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ … to the glory and praise of God.” By the way, don’t ever ever forget that God is HALLOWED oops God is Holy and Sacred … frankly God is God.
I think we can experience God in many places. We can sense God’s Holy Spirit when we quiet our souls. As I have been pushing over and over again during these last few months … our need to restore our souls beside the still waters and in the green meadows. But to hear God we need to connect with God so this prayer relationship I would hope we all want needs you and me to be intentional about hearing God’s plan for us, which comes through the words of Jesus Christ. If all of us spent the same time we spend on our social media reading the Gospels each day we would know through Jesus’ words what God’s expectations are.
Paul says, “Do not conform to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. THEN you will be able to test and approve of what God’s will is – His Good and perfect will.” Frankly Paul is telling us therein lies the answers to prayer … push aside the world and embrace God. We will sense the Spirit’s direction but it takes time offered back to God to respond to our prayers.
And, don’t be surprised to learn that you may be the answer to your own prayers or to someone else’s, which will require you to do something more than finish your meal after saying grace. The psalmist said “My whole being waits for my Lord … because faithful love is with the Lord; because great redemption is with our God!” Be in a two way communication where God’s answer to your prayers, which just might be you, is just as important as in the asking.
Eugene Peterson’s THE MESSAGE offers a modern translation of Jesus words regarding prayer … “So he said, “When you pray, say, Father, Reveal who you are. Set the world right. Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil.””
Jesus frequently stepped away from the world … from His friends … and He provided us an example to pray. Be in conversation with our God … and always remember that God’s answer to prayer comes back to us, the church and people of faith. We need to show love and joy and be the peacemakers … setting the world right as is the Kingdom of heaven. AMEN