Thursday, 3/5/20 – Discipleship – Prayer

Prayer – you have His full attention

As I opened our service this past Sunday morning I made reference to God’s attentiveness to our prayers. I contrasted the experience of speaking to someone deeply engaged in their cell phone with the experience of speaking to someone who has put down whatever they may have been doing, leans forward gives you full eye contact, and responds to your words with verbal affirmations or nods. I cited from Peter (who was citing from the Psalms,) “the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their prayer.”*

In his book Prayer – Does it Make Any Difference? author Philip Yancey adds, “We need not bang a drum or bring animal sacrifices to get Gods full attention; we already have it.”

“Talk to me,” pleads our Savior, Father, Brother and Lord!

Why should we pray? If God is all powerful, all loving, all knowing, what is the point? Can’t He… Won’t He… just do what’s best for us whether we ask Him to or not?

When we ask questions like these we miss the point! Prayer is not about transaction, it is not about asking and getting. Prayer is about relationship. Yancey summarizes, “Though my needs may drive me to prayer, there I come face-to-face with my greatest need: an encounter with God’s Own self.”

Relationship-based praying is conversation. You might not ask anything of God at all, or you might. Or, He may have something to ask of you… or He may not. Relationship-based conversing does not wonder such things. Relationship-based conversing is in it for the pleasure of the good company of the conversers; it is about mutual exchange and deepening intimacy. Relationship-based prayer, notes Yancey, “may be the most freedom-enhancing way of connecting to a God whose vantage point we can never achieve and can hardly imagine.”

What is incomprehensible about God to our minds is better apprehended by our hearts.

“Talk to me,” pleads our Savior, Father, Brother and Lord!

Relationship. That’s all God wants. That’s all God ever wanted.

What do you want?

Press on…

* (1 Pet. 3:12; Ps. 34:15).

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