Preacher's Post

1/29: Prayer as Love

All significant relationships boil down to one thing - Love.  Matt Woodley puts it this way:  “The Christian life all boils down to love…God is love.  That’s also a good summary for our prayer lives.  God is love.  Prayer connects us with God.  As we connect with God, God teaches us to love others.  Love moves us to pray for others, and praying for others is the best way to love them.  When I don’t pray for others, I am failing at love.” 

Whoa.  That’s not the way I think.  Too often my prayers for others come almost as an afterthought.  Real love means doing something, and prayer isn’t in the “doing something” column.  Loving my neighbor is a “good Samaritan” thing.  I do something to help the one who needs help.  I can come over with a meal if there’s a crisis.  If a piece of furniture is broken, I can often help with a repair.  I can give you a ride to where you need to go.  If throwing some money in a pot to help is what’s needed, I’ll dig into my pocket.  But pray?  Seems at best an afterthought.

I sit with a woman dying of lung cancer at least once a week.  It’s a powerless feeling.  Nothing is going to change the outcome.  This isn’t fixable.  We sit together and talk.  We hold hands.  Then we pray.  We pray with our eyes open and talk with God about the situation and what we need, even though we acknowledge that what we really want is to make all the pain and suffering go away.  Prayer feels like so little and hardly worth the effort.  I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something there.  Since we can never get ahold of God, maybe what I sense is the presence of God mediated through our sharing prayer together…that elusive sense there is something bigger than we are present and doing something we can’t quite grasp.

Prayer opens our hearts to the presence and possibilities of God, and when that happens, everything changes.  With gritted teeth I prayed through an incident in our cycling community that thoroughly irritated me, filling me with resentment.  Knowing resentments are the kiss of death for a recovering alcoholic, I reluctantly started to “pray” it through.  I ended up making a conciliatory phone call that I wouldn’t have thought possible even yesterday.  God can and will do for us what we can’t do for ourselves, and the key to that truth is prayer.

Love God—love my neighbor as myself.  Only through prayer is this even remotely possible in my experience.  Maybe others can pull it off on their own, but I can’t. 

I’ve always been moved by Paul’s prayer for the Philippian Christians.  It is a prayer of love and hope.  It is a prayer that recognizes and embraces the good work God is doing in us.  This is the passage I want read at my funeral…it’s that important to me.

Philippians 1:3-11 (NKJV):  I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine making request for you all with joy, for your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ; just as it is right for me to think this of you all, because I have you in my heart, inasmuch as both in my chains and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel, you all are partakers with me of grace. For God is my witness, how greatly I long for you all with the affection of Jesus Christ. And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment, that you may approve the things that are excellent, that you may be sincere and without offense till the day of Christ, being filled with the fruits of righteousness which are by Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.

Now for what’s on my desk…

For those of you who missed last Sunday’s message, you missed something important.  Tracy proclaimed God’s word to us in a powerful and compelling message we all need to hear.  Go to www.andrewpres.org and hit the audio sermon button.  It’s worth taking the time. 

Now you know what I know.

1/15: Prayer as a Dangerous Activity

I don’t trust a relationship to be true until we’ve weathered a good argument.  The surprise of the biblical story of people praying is arguing with God is part of the deal.  God isn’t looking for a phony relationship with us, He is seeking the real thing, and real relationships have space for disagreements and arguments.

The two most notable examples of prayer as a good argument involved Abraham and Moses.  In Genesis 18:16-32 God and Abraham go toe to toe over Sodom.  God essentially tells Abraham to stand back, He’s decided that it was time to obliterate this wicked town from the map.  Their wickedness was so profound as to invite such a draconian response.  But Abraham took up the cause of those who were potentially innocent and challenged God’s plan.  He started with challenging God to spare Sodom if there were fifty innocent people.  Then forty-five innocent people.  Forty.  Thirty.  Twenty.  And finally ten.  Abraham was not a by-stander in the relationship, he got right in there and mixed it up with God.

1/8: Prayer as Groaning

I wonder how many Stanford fans were praying last night (Monday, January 2 during the Fiesta Bowl), and their prayers went unanswered.  Jordan Williamson missed three field goals, the most heart breaking one being the hooked kick that would have won the game in the final seconds of regulation time.  So were the cowboy’s prayers answered when Quinn Sharp made both his field goal attempts?  Is prayer all about getting what we want, then it’s understandable why prayer is so much in evidence during sporting events, especially football games. 

Too many of us have matured physically and maybe even emotionally, but remain spiritually stunted, especially when it comes to prayer.  Prayer for us is still calling in our orders much like I pick up the phone and order Chinese food.  That is one aspect of prayer, for God really does want us to check in with what’s on our hearts and minds, and is concerned about every aspect of our lives, no matter how trivial.  But if that is all prayer is in our lives, we’re living as spiritual paupers.  That would be akin to thinking that making a grocery list with Lorna constituted a marriage relationship.  There is so much more.