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1 The
Prayerlessness always goes
hand in hand with a lack of Christian integrity.
then they are selling a product they don’t really believe in.
In other words, prayer is the primary way true faith expresses itself.
This also means that prayerlessness is practical atheism, demonstrating a lack of belief in God.
In one sense your prayer life is disgustingly revealing: it does reveal who you really are. For all your talk and theory of faith – you can affirm the truth of prayer and know that God is good – your prayer life reveals how much you really want communion with God and how much you really depend on him. I stress it absolutely does not tell you about your security as an unrejectable child of God, but it does tell you, very accurately, how much of a baby you are spiritually, how much of a hypocrite you are, and how much you actually love
the Lord. Thus if your tendency is to think you’re rather wonderful, just remember your prayer life.
It is the word of God, the gracious message of Christ, that awakens faith and so prayer – and so that must be the basic shape of our everyday communion with God. We need to set Christ before ourselves. That is, we hear the word of Christ in Scripture, in song, through each other and by reminding ourselves as we praise him. We should long that our eyes might be opened to see the beauty of the Lord and that we might be drawn afresh to want him – and then prayer is simply the articulation of our heart’s response. To summarise what we have discovered so far, prayer is the chief exercise of faith.
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No, he’s also showing who, eternally, he is.
The Son always depends on his Father; that is who he eternally is. For him, everything flows from his communion with his Father. And so for eternity he has enjoyed communion with him and he has prayed to him.
The Son, then, is the first pray-er. And the salvation he brings is a sharing of his own communion with his Father.
Prayer is learning to enjoy what Jesus has ...
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Our instinct is to think of the Almighty in holy transcendence – God without Christ. But Christ has brought this holy God to be our open-armed
Father.
He wants us to argue his promises and his character with him, for then who he is becomes an ever more conscious reality for us.
It may be that your heart is cold, your love is weak and your prayers are shabby, but what matters is that, united to Christ and in him, you are a cherished son – and your Father delights to hear you. Of course, with any other God we’d have to come in the strength of our own fervour; with this God we come in his.
If prayer is communion with God, then it can take many forms. We have different sorts of conversations with our friends and families – from texts and emails to rambling chats late into the evening. Similarly, we don’t need to try to ‘fit’ God into each day, that is to see our prayer life as something different from the rest of life. In fact the danger arises precisely when you do think your prayer life is something separate. No, for the Son everything flows from his communion with his Father, and so it should become for us.
When you default to thinking of prayer as an abstract activity, a ‘thing to do’, the tendency is to focus on the prayer as an activity – which makes it boring. Instead, focus on the one to whom you’re praying. Reminding yourself who you are coming before is a great help against distraction, and changes the prayer.
Instead, focus on the one to whom you’re praying.
Reminding yourself who you are coming before is a great help against distraction,...
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Now if that’s the relationship we’ve been brought into, then praising the Father as Jesus did, asking the Father for things as Jesus did and depending on the Father as Jesus did are going to be staple parts of our communion with him. By thanking him and praising him, we acknowledge his kindness and greatness, that he is good and that all good truly comes from him. By asking him for things, we exercise our belief that he really is the fountain of all good and that without him we can do nothing that is actually good.
If God was a single, independent person, independence would be the godly thing. That would be how to be like him. But as the Son always depends on the Father, that is the nature of Christian godliness. Being a Christian is first and foremost all about receiving, asking and depending.
It’s when you don’t feel needy (and so when you don’t pray much) that you lose your grip on reality and think ...
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In fact, as you grow as a Christian, you should feel not more self-sufficient but ever more needy. If you don’t, I’m no...
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Prayer is the antithesis of self-dependence.
The Spirit is the wind in the sails of our prayer as he catches us up into the Son’s love for the Father. Making us know we too are loved, he causes us to love as the Son loves. Prayer, then, is not actually a one-way conversation, us to God. No, in prayer God speaks through us to God. We’re brought into the divine fellowship. The Spirit of the Son cries to the Father through us.
So if your prayer life is a bit ropey, I suggest starting again by stammering like a child to a Father. Cry for help. Don’t try to be impressive.
But he wants them to join in with him, to be co-workers and participants in the divine, compassionate, outgoing, missional life he shares with his Father in the Spirit.
