I started working with this passage a couple of months
ago and at first it seemed that I knew exactly where it was taking me, and the more I have worked on this passage this past
week, the more I came to realize that I really didn’t know what I was getting out of the passage, until Friday afternoon. I had been struggling with this idea of prayer and whether the congregation really
needed to hear another sermon about prayer, but then I realized, that I needed to know more about prayer, I needed to have
a greater understanding of who we are all called to pray for, and what that prayer looks like.
This passage is all about telling Timothy about prayer,
and how to pray, and when to pray and who to pray for. If this is something the
early church needed to hear coming right out of the resurrection of Christ, how much more do we need to hear this lesson today.
I wonder if you are having the same question I am
right now, how anything new could possibly be said about prayer. Well the truth
is, there probably isn’t anything new to hear about prayer, but the fact still remains that prayer is a lost art form. Prayer is something that comes directly from one person’s heart and is heard
by God. Prayer is sometimes going on without our even recognizing that we are
praying.
Everyone prays differently, there are people who stand,
with their arms outstretched to the heavens and call upon the name of God. There
are people who pray in the privacy of their own room, in the secret quiet hours of the night and early morning. There are people who pray before they eat. There are people
who pray while in the presence of others, but never on their own. There are people
who pray when they feel the world has it in for them and they have nowhere else to turn.
There are people who pray only because they feel society telling them they should.
There are people who pray at the end of the day and when the day first begins, but forget about everything in between. There are people who pray when they are driving and feel the fear of those around
them. There are those who pray when the world stops because of some great disaster. There are those who pray when their children are in need, but not when they themselves
are in need. There are those who pray that no one knows that they need prayer.
But what
is prayer, why do we need to pray, why do we have to pray for other people, who are those people we are suppose to pray for,
and frankly, how does this whole prayer thing work anyway. Approaching this topic,
I realized I am completely unable to do this topic justice, because prayer is something that some people have spent their
entire lives trying to figure out, trying to unravel the secrets of prayer, so how can I possibly figure it all out while
working through this one little passage? So I did the only thing I had left to
do, I went to my bookshelf and started going through some of the great theologians, seeking their thoughts on prayer, my search
took me from the our book of daily prayer, to CS Lewis and O Hallesby and so on and so forth.
Prayer is at the heart of everything we do as Christians, so why not take some time to discover what is really at the
heart of prayer, why is it so crucial to our lives as Christians.
One of the resources we have in the Presbyterian Church
is our book of Daily Prayer and within the introduction of this book there is a thought that seems so simple and yet so important. That “there is within each one of us the drive to pray…genuine and earnest
prayer proceeds first from a sense of our need, and next from faith in the promises of God.
For the Christian, then, prayer is a means of grace as well as a result of it.
Prayer is not merely as expression of established faith; it is also the food that nourishes faith, giving it strength
and energy. By the moving of the Holy Spirit, prayer brings us to new life in
the fullness of Jesus Christ. Praying then is not a burden under which we labor,
but the release of energy for joyful living.” (11-12). Prayer as expressed through the book of daily prayer is a privilege,
through prayer we are given the opportunity to know God deeper and to find new life and joy in the one and through the one
who has given us the chance to live. Prayer gives us what we need to sustain
life and for our lives to flourish, it is through prayer that we are able to convene with God.
However, this idea of prayer and how we connect with
God through prayer is one that many would still like to dissect. Sometimes the
most beautiful things, the things that are best for us, are the things that we try to tear apart and to find some hole in. It is at this time that I turn to Evelyn Underhill who wrote about the disconnect between our need for prayer and the limitations of
our minds and our bodies and how it all relates to the importance of prayer. “Now
intellect and feeling are not wholly in our control. They fluctuate from day
to day, from hour to hour; they are dependent on many delicate adjustments.
Sometimes we are mentally dull, sometimes we are emotionally
flat. On such occasions, it is notoriously useless to try to make ourselves think
more deeply or make ourselves care more intensely. If the worth of our prayer
life depended upon the maintenance of a constant high level of feeling or understanding, we would be in a dangerous place. Though these often seem to fail us, the reigning remains. Even when our heart is cold and our mind is dim, prayer is still possible to us, our wills are ours, to
make them thine.” (Evelyn Underhill excerpt from the essentials of mysticism)
It is possible even when we don’t feel up to
praying, when we don’t have the strength or don’t think there is any reason to pray, it is still possible to pray,
because our wills are still eager for prayer, we still deep down long for that communion with God. It is that desire to be in fellowship with God that gives us the strength to pray when we don’t even
have the strength to lift up our heads. O Hallesby takes this idea for the need
and desire for prayer and shows it to us in its simplest form. “To pray
is nothing more involved than to open the door, giving Jesus access to our needs and permitting him to exercise his own power
in dealing with them. He who gave us the privilege of prayer knows us very well. He knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.
That is why he designed prayer in such a way that the weakest can make use of it.
For to pray is to open the door unto Jesus. And that requires no strength. It is only a question of our wills. Will
we give Jesus access to our needs? That is the one great and fundamental question
in connection with prayer.” (O Hallesby, prayer, pg 15)
Again, the notion of prayer comes back to our wills. The inner drive gives us the strength and desire to pray. There is a song going around the contemporary world that sings of our spirit is willing but our flesh is
so weak, and asks God to light the fire within our weary souls, to fan the flame to make us whole… This idea of our
spirit having the desire to pray but allowing our bodily limitations to stop us is a problem.
It is so easy to let the things in our lives stop us from praying, to stop us from stopping where we are and thanking
God for everything and everyone around us. For how often are we stopped in our
tracks by the need to pray for something? How often is the desire to thank God
the thing that is distracting us from our work? How often do we think, well it has been so long since I have prayed, there
is just too much to pray for right now, where would I even begin?
CS Lewis wrote a book on this very subject, on the
conversation between a man and God and all the reasons that come in between us and God, the book is called Letters to Malcolm
chiefly on prayer. And there is one letter that addresses this notion of where
to begin our prayers…“You first taught me the great principle, begin where you are. I had thought one had to start by summoning up what we believe about the goodness and greatness of God,
by thinking about creation and redemption and all the blessings of this life. You
turned to the brook and once more splashed your burning face and hands in the little waterfall and said, why not begin with
this? And it worked. Apparently,
you have never guessed how much. That cushiony moss, that coldness and sound
and dancing light were no doubt very minor blessings compared with the means of grace and the hope of glory. But then they were manifest. So far as they were concerned,
sight had replaced faith. They were not the hope of glory; they were an exposition
of the glory itself.” (Lewis, letters to Malcolm 88-89)
In this instance, prayer became something so simple
that had such an impact on the man. That his little prayer for the brook showed
him things that he never would have seen before. And through that blessing of
the brook, the magnitude of the blessing of grace and our salvation through the cross became an overwhelming idea. Through the brook, the cross came into life. How often do
the simplest things we see remind us of the glory of the cross, the promise God has made to us. For if the magnitude of this fully came into our hearts and our minds, there would be no way to stop us
from praising God. It would be an impossible feat to take that awe from us. So why is it blocked, why do we have so much trouble seeing the magnitude of the cross
in every aspect of our lives?
Perhaps prayer has lost its meaning. Perhaps we don’t feel that overwhelming burden of our sins, and the overflowing love that God has
shown us, for prayer is our door to that glory, that reunion with God. Those
deep conversations where our minds and our thoughts are taken for a spin, where the world and the heavens are open before
us, where we can truly know that we are in the presence of God. For prayer takes
us by the hand to a God who loves us and wants nothing more than to commune with us, for us to desire him and want to be known
by him.
This is an idea that should make us stop in our tracks
and praise God. To praise God for the butterflies that are enjoying the last
breaths of summer and of life. To praise God for the changing of the leaves and
the recognition that the world around us is about to slumber and rest, only to awake in the spring to new life. The image of resurrection is all around us, but if our eyes are closed to the conversation with God, we
will never be able to see how glorious this world is, and how much attention and love God put into it, and how God sent his
son to live among us and to feel what we feel and to go through what we go through.
Christ is the greatest example of our need to pray,
how often do the scriptures tell us about Jesus praying, that even as God and man, he still needed to pray, to commune with
the creator, to be in fellowship with God. Our scripture today tells us to pray,
and to pray with the purpose of having a peaceful life, one that calls our attention to God the creator, and Jesus the son. That God desires that everyone know of the glory of the cross, that everyone come
to the father through the son. Our scripture tells us it is through prayer that
we are to come to God, and that we are to lift up everyone.
The scripture highlights the rulers and kings as an
example that there is no one that prayer shouldn’t be lifted up for. We
are to pray for everyone, because don’t we also want everyone we come into contact with to have that same awe of the
cross, the knowledge that God loved us so much that he sent his son to die for our sins.
It is the greatest gift you can receive and the scripture reminds us that we are to pass it on. So I want to leave you with a song that speaks of this idea so clearly and so beautifully, that the simplest
of things should make us want to yell from mountaintops how much God loves us and how much we should desire the world to know
him and how much we ourselves should want and need to praise and pray.
“It
only takes a spark to get a fire going. And soon all those around, can warm up
in its glowing. That’s how it is with God’s love, once you’ve
experienced it, it’s fresh like spring, you want to sing, you want to pass it on.
What a wondrous time is spring when all the trees are budding. The birds
begin to sing, the flowers start their blooming. I wish for you my friend this
happiness that I’ve found you can depend on him it matters not where you’re bound.
I’ll shout it from the mountaintops I want the world to know the Lord of life has come to me. I want to pass it on.”
