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Cape Elizabeth Church of the Nazarene |
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Texts:
Romans
8:26-27
“I’m
too weak to pray.” Those are the
words Grace shared with me Thursday following her second surgery in three days.
She continued: “I never thought I’d be too weak to pray.”
And this alarmed her. I have
been hounded by that conversation. And
I must be honest that that conversation has affected the way I have read these
words during the last few days.
As
a church we pray a lot. From time to
time we have evenings of prayer. We’ve
established a joint prayer chain with Saint Bartholomew’s.
But still when it comes to prayer it seems that I am asked two
fundamental questions: 1) Does prayer really matter? and 2) If it does, how do I
pray?. Indeed prayer is a much
discussed topic. Thousands of books
on prayer have been written. You and
I have both read countless books on prayer.
Many of them sound like this:
All who have walked with God have viewed prayer as the main business of
their lives. The words of the gospel
of Mark, “And in the morning, a great while before day, he rose and went out
to a lonely place, and there he prayed,” stand as a commentary on the
life-style of Jesus (Mark 1:35). David’s
desire for God broke from the self-indulgent chains of sleep: “Early will I
seek Thee” (Ps. 63:1, KJV). When
the apostles were tempted to invest their energies in other important and
necessary tasks, they determined to give themselves continually to prayer and
the ministry of the word (Acts 6:4). Martin
Luther declares, “I have so much business I cannot get on without spending
three hours daily in prayer.” He
held it as a spiritual axiom that “He that prayed well has studied well.”
John Wesley says, “God does nothing but in answer to prayer,” and
backed up his conviction by devoting two hours daily to that sacred exercise.
The most notable feature of David Brainerd’s life was his praying.
His Journal is permeated with accounts of prayer, fasting, and
meditation. “I love to be alone in
my cottage, where I can spend much time in prayer.”
“I set apart this day for secret fasting and prayer to God.”
For those explorers in the frontiers of faith, prayer was no little habit
tacked onto the periphery of their lives; it was their lives.
It was the most serious work of their most productive years.
William Penn testified of George Fox that “Above all he excelled in
prayer. . . . The most awful, living, reverend frame I ever felt or beheld, I
must say was his in prayer.” Adoniram
Judson sought to withdraw from business and company seven times a day in order
to engage in the holy work of prayer. He
began at dawn; then at nine, twelve, three, six, nine, and midnight he would
give time to secret prayer. John
Hyde of India made prayer such a dominant characteristic of his life that he was
nicknamed “Praying Hyde.” For
these, and all those who have braved the depths of the interior life, to breathe
was to pray. (Richard Foster, Celebration
of Discipline, p. 34).
I read pages like that I am confronted with the realities of my own
prayer life. How do I carve out
blocks of time rather than engaging in piecemeal praying?
How do I make prayer a deep passion and not a professional
responsibility?
As I have been reading through Romans (and especially Romans 8) it seems
to me that underlying Paul’s words about “the Spirit interceding for the
saints according to the will of God” is the reality that prayer is as much a
divine action as it is a human discipline.
The greater context of the passage reminds us of God’s divine work in
us and for us. Indeed the
Spirit helps us to pray as we ought. Question:
How ought we to pray?
Answer:
In perfect conformity to the
will and purpose of God in our lives and in the world.
That’s how we ought to pray. But.
. . unfortunately sometimes we get things out of sorts.
We pray for our personal good and desires.
We pray for ourselves according to this world’s understanding of good.
If the kind of prayer of which Paul speaks in these verses is prayer God
heeds, then our praying must be characterized less by petitions for personal
good and more for the good of the community of God’s people.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t pray for ourselves, yet our
praying must be cast in terms of God’s purposes rather than our own.
Perhaps it’s time to begin praying for grander more glorious purposes!
Perhaps it’s time to really start praying for the kingdom of God to
break in upon us! Perhaps it’s
time to begin praying for all God’s creation to submit itself to becoming
conformed to the very image of Christ!
This
is not to negate or lessen the importance of the prayers we offer for one
another and for our brothers and sisters at Saint Bartholomew’s.
Rather, it’s an opportunity to evaluate our understanding of our role
in the world.
Throughout the history of the church there have been hermits who have
retreated away from the world in order to pray.
They believed that their praying made eternal differences.
This is not to say that we must retreat and disengage from the world.
But it does offer us an example of some who considered praying a means to
alter the course of an entire world. Praying
as we ought -- for the divine, holy purposes of God -- might just alter the
course; the eternal destiny of an entire world! Tonight -- in the darkness -- we have opportunity to pray. To pray that the current course of an entire world might be forever altered and saved from itself! To pray that all creation might be conformed to the image of Christ! This is bold prayer! This is praying as we ought! Let us pray.
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