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January 29, 2006
Why Pray?
Psalm 5 / Daniel 9: 18-23
James 5: 13-18
January 29th, 2006
If someone asked you, “What is prayer?” I suspect most of us would give the simple and obvious answer, “Prayer is talking to God.” And to mind would come the prayers you have mostly heard in church, or perhaps the prayers you have offered as families before meals at home, or as a child when your parents prayed with you before you went to sleep at night.
So, prayer is talking to God. But I was asked to speak to the question “Why pray?” Someone once said to me that the percentage of times when God seems to grant us our requests is small. And this is true. We notice this because very often our prayers are essentially requests. If prayer is essentially asking God for things, and He grants us a very small percentage of our requests, it makes sense to ask wryly, “Why pray?”
And yet we pray. Why? It is an instinct in everyone to at least think to pray when they are in distress. An atheist friend of mine told me he almost prayed when he faced a surgery whose outcome was predicted to be grim. But he could not bring himself to actually pray. Yet he thought about praying. Why?
We’re told there are no atheists in a foxhole under fire. Why? Because there is this something in everyone that cries out when all known sources of hope are exhausted. For many, I think, this source is undefined. It is a cry to Someone out there, some unseen Reality that encompasses us. And this unseen, encompassing Reality is God. “In Him we live and move and have our being,” Paul quoted a pagan philosopher with approval.
The late atheist physicist from Cornell, Carl Sagen describes in his novel, Contact conversations between people and extraterrestrial beings. I could not help but think he was trying to describe something like prayer. There is something in people that stretches beyond; we cannot help it.
“Why pray?” I have heard prayer described as spiritual breathing. We exhale to God as one part of
prayer; but we inhale the sense of His presence too. If we are conscious of the presence of God how might we speak with Him? What to say to a present God?
A recent book on prayer laments about the Church today that “Ours is the epitome of a prayer-less church.” Stanley Grenz, the author of this book is a pastor, and I think he may have been venting his personal frustration, as we pastors will sometimes do. Maybe we are prayer-less because prayer has been largely reduced to asking God for things.
Prayer is far more than asking God for things. When prayer is reduced to asking God for things it is no wonder that prayer should be a low priority. I think people succumb to the sinking awareness that God does not automatically grant us what we ask for. So they pray with uncertainty and spasmodically. I hope it will be helpful to look at the three passages we have read together to find guidance on how as well as why to pray.
The three Scriptures we have read this morning don’t exactly give us a three-point answer to the question, “Why pray.” But they point us in the right direction.
In the Fifth Psalm David talks to God. We don’t read God replying to him at any point. David opens up as though he’s talking to a psychiatrist who listens intently to him.
“Listen to me, O Lord; pay attention to my groaning.” He reminds God that every morning begins with prayer, “O Lord, in the morning you hear my voice; in the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch.” And God nods. “Yes, I know you do.” And David feels that God has nodded because he told the truth. Every morning he talks to God this way. You can’t fool God. It’s silly for David to say, “God, every morning I pray to you” if he didn’t really do this. Why does he remind God of this? For reasons why you and I remind our friends that it is good to have coffee with them, or just to see them again after an interlude. We say this kind of thing to those we care about. David cared about God.
The sacrifice he has in mind is not the bloody kind priests offered, but the sacrifice of thanksgiving and praise. An important part of prayer for David is remembering the past. I picture David thinking of how God took him from being a shepherd boy, and now here he is the king of Israel. He has replaced his small flock of sheep for vast armies over which he is the royal commander. So he thinks, “God, how amazing have been your ways not only with me, but for your people Israel through me.”
When David says, “I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch,” he lets us know he’s stopped talking to God. Now he waits on God. Quietly perhaps he kneels before an open window and looks out into the morning sky, waiting to see what thoughts God will awaken in him after he has spoken. Thoughts for the day. Thoughts about the purpose and duty of being the king of a nation that is uniquely God’s people. Who knows what thoughts will come as he waits, as he watches. Ten minutes, twenty minutes. Maybe an hour goes by. Maybe he doses in between moments of quiet listening for a still small voice from God.
We read on in his prayer and find his thoughts becoming unsettled. He thinks of difficult people he must contend with. “You are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil you cannot tolerate. Arrogant people can’t stand before you. Liars and violent men disgust you.” Self-righteous thoughts pass through his mind. “I’m not like they are,” he thinks. At times he seems like the Pharisee in the Temple that Jesus chided—the one who said to God, “I thank thee that I am not like others are, for example this lousy publican who makes a living by cheating people.”
There is such a range of thoughts that pass through our minds while we wait, we watch in prayer. As we read David’s thoughts flow in the psalm we can see a reflection of how our minds wander when we pray. And that’s part of praying. You worry that you can’t concentrate because you think you’re supposed to concentrate when you pray. You maybe think your prayer should come out as an organized flow of pious words. Not so. And when we watch, when we wait on the Lord after we have spoken to Him, our minds do wander. And God speaks to us in this wandering.
After some time of wandering thoughts, David’s mind comes back to God. And he feels peace inside. And he thinks of this peace not only in terms of his own need, but he remembers that he is the king of a people that is God’s people. “Let all who take refuge in thee rejoice.” He thinks not only of himself. His talk with God has covered quite a range of thoughts. And this is how prayer works. And this is why we pray. To expose our hearts to God. We cannot do this fast. The prayer our hearts really long for needs us to give time for it.
We make time to eat and to sleep. It’s hard to fit in the idea of giving time to prayer as well. But our instinct to pray needs time or it will get lost in the busyness of life. Maybe you see that what your ability to pray needs is simply more time given to it. Maybe that’s what you principally need—time given to praying and listening, exhaling and inhaling with God.
If you opened your Bible to the second prayer that we read this morning, the prayer of Daniel, we’d notice that the prayer begins much earlier. In verse three Daniel says, “I turned my face to the Lord God, seeking him by prayer and supplications with fasting and sackcloth and ashes.” Here we see he prepared to pray with signs of contrition before God. Fasting is not eating in order to focus our thoughts. While it is good that our prayers should often be very casual, there are times when we need them to become very specific in our preparation to pray.
You remember that Jesus chided His disciples when He found them unable to help deliver a demon-possessed boy, even though they were praying for his release. They asked Jesus why they were powerless. He told them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting.”
We cannot force God’s hand by fasting, by the intensity of our desire, but we know that there is a distinction between how we respond to casual and very deliberate acts of friends. A movie some of you have seen and I hope many of us will see, “Babbett’s Feast,” shows us the remarkable preparation of a woman to make a meal for those she wished to serve. The purpose of her costly choice of ingredients of the meal, and the lengths to which she went to secure them, are left to the minds of those who watch the story. But what struck me in the story was how beautiful it is when we offer one another our costliest hospitality.
In the casual day in which we live, we’re big into ordering a pizza out, or picking up a TV dinner to pop into the microwave. And we may bring to our prayers the same casual approach. I sometimes think our informality and casual-ness, rather than freeing us has lured us into another kind of bondage; a bondage to self that cannot think carefully of the value of the Other—whether the other be God or other people.
The way Daniel approached his prayer to God, when he had a great matter to spread before God in prayer, teaches us that it is good, at least sometimes, to approach God with great care. We may not wear sackcloth or put ashes on our hair, but perhaps the reverent attitude of supplication, and the preparation of body with fasting would teach us something about prayer that we could not know from reading a book or hearing a sermon. Had you asked Daniel, “Why are you doing all this?” I wonder if he would not even have answered you. Quietly he would have continued to prepare to pray to God, toward whom his thoughts surged. The answer to some questions can only come from within.
When we read his prayer we can see why he approached God so carefully. He prayed for his people. “We have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from thy commandments and ordinances . . . To thee belongs righteousness, but to us confusion of face . . . to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers.”
I read Daniel’s prayer and put it up before our self-justifying, competitive religious climate and wonder if we might learn something from Daniel. As John Henry Newman put it in his great hymn, “Lead, Kindly Light,” “pride rules my will.” And so we may find ourselves praying without taking inventory of our attitude as we pray. If we pray without taking inventory of ourselves, imagining that our proper theology equips us to charge into the presence of God, children of a heavenly Father who has so opened His throne-room that we can run in and out as children in their family room, something isn’t right. I cannot see into the mind of God, but I believe that God must respond to us in some way as we respond to each other. We notice when a friend means something strongly. And God notices when we come to Him earnestly.
At the conclusion of Daniel’s prayer we read that God answers him. Actually God sends a heavenly agent who says, “O Daniel, I have now come to give you wisdom and understanding . . . you are greatly beloved.” Does it seem to you that God is touched by how Daniel approached Him in prayer?
You and I will answer our own questions about prayer if we approach God with due care and not casually—at least periodically. From day to day our quick prayers are certainly appropriate. But God notices and we instruct our own hearts when we approach God with care as part of the cycle of life.
There was this care in Daniel’s approach to his prayer. And at least from time to time, you and I would teach our own hearts something in the response that would come within us if we took great care in approaching God in prayer.
The third passage of scripture we read together describes prayer as part of the life of a community. The brother of Jesus counsels his Christian friends in James 5: 16: “Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” He no doubt had in mind the 103rd Psalm where the psalmist connects God’s forgiveness of sin with healing. “Bless the Lord, O my soul, who forgives all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases.”
We think of confessing our sins to God in prayer, but here James urges us to confess our sins to each other. More commonly we don’t confess our sins. Indeed, is it not so that we may silently remember what we have done, and remember what others have done to us, and a climate of unrest takes us over. We mull on what others have done that offends us; we defensively push to the recesses of our minds what we have done to others. It should be the opposite of this.
What connection do you think there might be between confessing to one another our sins and the prayer of righteous people? It takes a person right with God to want to make right what is wrong. And it is the prayer of a righteous person that has great effects. Perhaps we find it hard to pray because we’re not righteous people? Perhaps we live up to our standards, but our standards aren’t high enough. We have not included in our standards the confession of our faults to one another, and most certainly not the forgiveness of the faults of others. In such a setting, we may try to pray; in fact, we may pray, but nothing happens. It remains a pious exercise in futility. Thus we may wonder why we pray even as we pray. We keep on because we know we should, but the zing is lost.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, there is a close connection between confessing to one another and praying that God hears. If our hearts are silent to each other, maybe this is why God is silent to us. Confess and then pray—for one another, that you may be healed. Here the preparation of our own hearts by confession is part of the prayer-equation. Should we ignore this part of the equation, our prayer seems to rise no higher than the ceiling.
Paul wrote to Christians in one of the early churches, “Pray constantly.” Why? Because we live in the presence of God. In David’s prayer in the fifth Psalm, we see his regularity and how in the wandering of his mind in prayer he prayed naturally, as God expects of us.
Before Daniel offered this very important prayer for his people, he prepared himself deliberately. He shows us an example of how our daily prayer may be supplemented with more deliberate prayer before which we should prepare ourselves carefully. This corresponds to the courtesy we extend in preparing to welcome guests who we love and want to show finest hospitality. They notice and the friendship is strengthened. This reflects something of our relationship to God that is expressed in prayer.
From James we learned that confession of offenses and sins against one another is prior to prayer that is effective. Righteous people are not righteous because they don’t ever sin, but because they confess their sin to each other. And then they pray. And then too they probably will seldom ask, “Why pray?” because the answer arises from within to that question.
You and I pray because we are a social animal. And our society is not only with each other but with the God who made us in His image and likeness. Our friendships with each other wander all over the map of interests and activities. And so does our prayer to God. We are touched when our friends honor us with consideration, and so is God. Our friendship with each other cannot survive if we go on offending each other and do not make things right. Neither can our friendship with God. We cannot talk to God about all the things that friends talk about if our heart is far from Him. Our prayers may become exercises in futility, and we will reasonably wonder why pray, if we do not keep alive to God and alive to one another by keeping the channels of friendship open.
So, let us keep on praying—letting ourselves be guided by these words of Holy Scripture.
Let us pray: O Lord God, full of grace, full of kindness, mercy, goodness, you have welcomed our prayer and taught us to pray. But teach us again and again for our faith is weak, and we need your kindly care. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at January 29, 2006 09:30 AM