Are We Really Serious When We Pray or Just Pretending?(Part 3)

If there is a topic that Christians should know about it should be prayer. Unfortunately, the average believer generally gropes around in the spiritual darkness expressing their desires to God with the hope he will listen and possibly answer. How sad that a topic like prayer is so misunderstood and so poorly practiced when Jesus expressed the utmost confidence in the power of prayer to change our circumstances in life. 

From my experience, as a believer and pastor for over 50 years, biblical prayer is still a very misunderstood topic for the average believer. Most churches spend few sermons on the topic each year because people think they understand prayer. The spiritual condition of the average Christian says otherwise.

In many churches, prayer is taught more from a recital mentality instead of a dialogue between us and our creator. The average believer generally guesses what God wants them to do or not do, and generally relies more on their understanding of scripture than on learning to understand and become familiar with the voice of God. Thus, prayer is more about expressing our feeling and presenting our request, hoping for a positive response form God.  The average believer often struggles to understand and hear the voice of God regularly, which leaves them with confusion and doubt.

As stated in the first two articles, Jesus said his house was to be called a house of prayer, meaning that prayer should be it’s primary task. Secondly, prayer is presented in scripture as the means of learning to understand God’s heart and will. It is meant to be the primary means of personal communication. As much as I believe the scriptures are God’s heart and will in written form, our relationship with God was never meant to be solely from a book but from His Spirit to ours. Jesus told the disciples that he would not leave them as “Orphans” when he was retuning to the Father. They were, in fact, feeling like that was going to be their lot in life as it was when they only had God’s word as Jewish people. Few Jews seem to have a relationship with God that has relational communication as the norm.  Rather, they relied on the rabbis and teachers of the law to tell them God’s thoughts and will, not their own personal encounters.  Thus, Jesus said they would not be left as orphans because they would be given the Holy Spirit to be with them and in them in order to continue the type of communication relationship they had learned and experienced with Jesus.

Consider the disciples of Jesus asking him to teach them how to pray. Why would they do that if they already knew how? My guess is they knew what their Jewish tradition of prayer looked and sounded like, but they had experienced something radically different hanging out with Jesus. When he prayed it was as if they felt the Father’s presence in living color! They saw the intimacy Jesus had with the Father and they were hungry for the same thing. So, Jesus taught them what we now call “The Lord’s Prayer“.   In my mind, church history and church theology has distorted this prayer to become just another recital pray, similar to what the Jews had used for years. Instead of a road map to intimacy with God, the church has turned this prayer into a speech rather than real intimate communication with our Heavenly Father. I can’t tell you how many churches I have attended where the congregation recited this prayer at the end of their service or use it regularly at a funeral. How terrible it is that we have turned a spiritual road map into a lifeless recital?

For Jesus, prayer was not something just done before or after a meal but was a “Vital Link” between himself and his Heavenly Father. Luke’s gospel says Jesus taught the disciples that they should always pray and not give up, not because he wanted them to feel good but because praying like Jesus includes intimacy and power……power to overcome and power to succeed in our walk with God.

Luke 18:1-3                                                                                                                                                                                                  Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’

When the Apostle Paul wrote to the Ephesian Christians, he taught them about God’s “Glorious Riches” that God gives to each believer through the Holy Spirit. His prayer was for believers to be “Rooted and Established in Love” in order to have the power of Christ operating inside them.  It is sad when we make our prayer life more about reciting words and giving horizontal speeches with other believers than about communicating with our creator.

Ephesians 3:14-19                                                                                                                                                                                        For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. [16] I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Before I was a Christian I could tell the difference between purely religious people and people that had a personal relationship with God. The first group of Christians may have been good people but I could tell they acted like God was a million miles away rather than a God who loved them personally and was with them. The believers that had a personal walk with God cherished and practiced prayer like breathing. It was not some religious ritual but rather their lifeline to God. They prayed like one person talking to another.

I asked one strong believer how he learned to pray with such conviction and he said that he read great Christians of the past who had a relationship with God.  One such author was E.M Bounds, a man who lived in the 1800s. He wrote on the subject of prayer with great boldness on the topics like: “The Necessity of Prayer, Prayer and Praying Men, Power Through Prayer and The Purpose of Prayer” because he had discovered how to pray effectively. Many of these great men and women of prayer were people who lived in the 18th and 19th century, way before movies and television occupied the average believers time. They learned the skill and ability to touch the heart of god and allow themselves to be touched by God in prayer.

Let me close this article with this thought. Until we start getting serious about what real biblical prayer is all about we will never experience the presence and power of God as he desires.  We should be aiming and striving for the last instructions that Jesus gave before going to the cross.

John 14:23                                                                                                                                                                                                  Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him. 

Article four in this series will explore the Lord’s Prayer as Jesus intended it to be used.

QUESTIONS:

1) Is prayer a vital link in your Christian walk or is it a casual topic?     2 Chronicles 7:14 is a good place to start.

2) Do you understand the road map to successful prayer in the Lord’s Prayer? Ask the holy Spirit to guide you as you reevaluate the meaning behind the prayer

Hungering to know God better through prayer,

Pastor Dale