Prayers are always on our lips. We pray before our meals, pray before
meetings, offer prayers constantly during our worship. Our prayers are cries to our God because of
our needs, our worries, our guilt. The
prayers that we offer come from our heart and are given to God because of our
incredible need not only to have our prayers answered, but to somehow know that
God is indeed in charge of this incredibly complex world.
My own
prayer life fluctuates. Sometimes I have
no problem whatsoever offering prayer not only for my own needs and the needs
of my family, but for the many other people who I know who are in crisis or are
sick or are at some kind of a moment of decision in their lives. My prayers for them are that God will touch
them with his Love and help them through whatever is messing up their
lives. Other times, because of my own
difficulties, my prayer life flags and I wander through my life needing,
sometimes desperately wanting somehow an outside force to help me to get
through the brambles that hold me back from real joy. This is when I know that I depend on the
prayers of others to get me through.
Jesus
disciples also had problems with their prayers.
In Luke’s gospel, they ask Jesus to “teach us to pray as John taught his
disciples”. Jesus responds with the
elegant formula that we call the Lord’s Prayer that has been a part of our
worship tradition from the beginning. I
love this prayer because of its completeness.
It acknowledges God as holy and asks for the coming of the Kingdom, for
the providence of our daily food and the forgiveness of our sins with the
marvelous caveat that this be based on the way that we forgive each other. That’s a tough hurdle to get over, but it is
certainly a firm part of our belief system.
Jesus then goes on to talk to them about the persistence of prayer with
the story of the man who bothers his neighbor over and over again because a
friend has come and he has nothing to give him.
Jesus says that the persistent prayer will bear fruit, the man will
provide what you need because you are a pain in the neck. If this is an allusion to the nature of God,
it is a wonderful comedy, but it is a useful reminder that the constancy of our
prayer is necessary to having the prayer answered.
thanks rodge!
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