What I have learned about prayer.
These past two and a half weeks, the youth group at my church has been talking about prayer, something I haven't ever paid a lot of attention to. (Unless I needed it, of couse.) This is kind of what I've come up with
P – Praise
A – Ask
C – Confess
T – Thank
Or
A – Adoration
C – Confession
T – Thanksgiving
S – Supplication
I have been convinced that prayer works. I really think it does. I think it can change God’s mind, or at least give the reins over to Him to do what needs to be done. I don’t think God will intervene if I don’t pray most of the time. But I need to make sure what I’m saying isn’t specific. Obviously, God doesn’t mind hearing my solutions, but He needs to be free to work in His ways. The prayers I have had answered have benefited me, have been specific enough to recognize God, yet unspecific enough to allow God room to work, and have allowed me to grow closer to God in ways I didn’t know were possible.
Prayer changes my outlook, much like worship does. It takes the focus off of me (if I pray how I should) and puts it on God. By starting out my prayers with praise, it makes me more willing to show my true colors to God, whether they are anger (Not saying I’m angry at God, but I can express my anger at another person in front of God instead of that person. This is where most of my anger goes nowadays.) or joy or sadness or fear. Praise allows me to realize I can feel these things because I don’t need to be super woman to be what God wants, I need to be everything He has created, which includes all the raw emotions I feel like saying, but would be too rash to speak. I am also humble when I start my prayers out with praise. I am not the one who holds everything together. I don’t need to be that person. I can be weak and have character flaws, just like everyone else. I can feel like giving up and then pray and realize that’s okay because where I am spent, God is in abundance. I am beginning to understand the phrase “His strength is made perfect in our weakness” because it is so true. I can throw in the towel and give up, and God will walk into that battle right where I left off and fight while I gain my strength back. (Haha, my enemies have to fight with God, lol!) The thing I can’t give up on is faith because faith is much more important than I originally thought. And mine sucks. (This is another topic for another time.) I rely on hope, but hope alone only makes me guess as to what the outcome will be. Hebrews 11:1 says “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (NIV). I like that verse, and what it is saying because it is saying faith is the missing link between hope and belief. Faith is knowing that what you think may be true is real. It’s the thing that when I face problems crumbles, not because of conscious doubt, but because I push faith away. I don’t want to and I need to start praying for more faith. Maybe that’s what this time has been, really, me figuring out a serious “hole” (as the pastor at my church said today) in my beliefs and now repairing it. That’s a long road that I am probably going to start on soon. I’m betting it has to do with “The Ishbane Conspiracy”, a book my church’s youth group is going to be reading in January. I have no idea what the book is about, but I think that is where God is leading me next, so maybe that’s how He plans on doing it. I don’t know, like I said, a topic for a different time.
Asking is a way of revealing to God ways that He could actively move in my life or the lives around me. Asking, like I already said above, is more about general things (in my opinion) than specifics. God wants to hear details, but He doesn’t need me to tell Him what to do and how. He wants humbleness, not someone who is a whiny old grandmother whom He obeys to respect me. I have no power and definitely shouldn’t get angry when things don’t work out my way. God eventually either says “yes”, “no”, or “wait, there’s a better way”. I know I get angry and frustrated at God when things don’t go according to my plans, but my plans only see the most limited things. I’m trapped by time, space, and a sinful desire. All that combined makes me the most inept plan-maker ever. Which means that God’s decisions, because He isn’t trapped by space, time, or a sinful nature, are infinitely more wise than mine, so much more wise that I don’t need to know why or how, just that what He says is, it just is. It hangs there and is so final that it’s already woven into the world before it has even happened. (This concept of God’s decisions being unavoidable is one of the coolest things ever. It ties back into when He spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai and told him that His name was “I Am”.) I’m not saying God is unchangeable, but that He has a plan for everything, and it’s up to me to give Him permission to carry out that plan. He could carry out His plans outside my will, of course, but then I would have no freewill. God knows what will happen, so there are no mistakes or unplanned events because God is outside time and space and can move within each as He sees fit. That fact makes it possible for God to hear and answer every prayer at the same time because He can be everywhere at the same time. (If you’re not following me, that’s okay, I’m talking quantum physics, so you’re exempt from understanding. I like quantum physics, however, so I understand what I’m saying. If you’re having trouble, I’m talking about God being omnipresent [everywhere at once] and how that is logically possible to accept, although I can’t wrap my mind around what that would be like.) God can see everything from anytime in history and before to anytime in the future, to the end of time, all at once. (This I cannot grasp. I would go insane, knowing all that.) Asking is basically recognizing that I want God to have a hand in what’s going on, and allowing Him to take the reins.
Confession also, similar to asking, is showing God ways that I need Him to help, but this is much more personal. I show Him the ways I have gone outside His instruction to me in either the mundane, like lying, or the abnormal, like killing someone. To God, all sin is the same severity, so if I say I lied to someone, but kept the fact that I murdered someone hidden, to God, I might as well have said I murdered someone and kept the fact that I lied hidden. This is also a difficult thing for me to understand because I know killing is horrendous, but I know I have lied before. They’re both the same? How? I don’t know how God can see everything the same, but I can guess the reason why. I may be totally wrong, I may be totally wrong on the whole 1,243 words I have written so far, but my guess is that all sin, no matter how bad, takes me away from God, so all is equally horrendous. The Bible talks about God being jealous (“El Kanno” in Hebrew) when things that belong to Him are taken and given away. I become a slave of sin when I sin, so I am being taken away from God, no matter the type. Confession allows me to come back to what God has intended for our relationship to be, and to have Him release me from those chains of sin that keep me in slavery. I don’t keep track of how much I sin or anything like that, and I hope I don’t have to, but to realize that I naturally sin and that at some point, I probably didn’t live up to all God intended, needs to be addressed when I come and talk to Him. This also allows me to continue recovery from this thing called my sinful nature, because it’s as bad an addiction as anything else in this world, and just as hard to drop. I have heard from addicts that there is never a time in their lives where they are not addicts, they are always recovering, and I think the same thing is true of my sinful nature.
Thanksgiving is recognizing where God has moved in the past in my life and giving Him the glory for it. I have a lot of things to be thankful for, most of which I didn’t specifically ask for. Only a small percentage of the things I have grateful for have been answers to prayers. I didn’t choose to be born in America. I didn’t choose my family or the church I would eventually attend. I didn’t choose to run into the friends I have. Most of the greatest blessings in my life have been fully arranged by God with no insight from my very limited perspective. But they have been the most incredible things ever. Most of the things I have asked for and have been thankful for getting have been totally outside what I had planned when I asked, but I would have it no other way. I have begged God for wisdom so I could help the people around me (I did that when I was in elementary school after hearing about Solomon’s wisdom) but I didn’t know that He would take that and allow me to write things like this and do even more than this. I have begged Him to show me the reason I’m alive and He has shown me the reasons I’m not dead. I have begged Him to remind me that He cares and He has walked in when I least expect it, but it matters the most. I am incredibly blessed, and I think that’s what thanksgiving is.
To conclude what has gone from a paragraph or two about prayer to an essay about it, I’ll say that prayer matters and that it really changes things. A good book to read on prayer that I’m not quite finished with, but I’m getting there is called “Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?” by Philip Yancey. It’s a long read, but a book that I am enjoying a lot.
Comments [3]
