Why prayer is important but how you do it is not.

It is important that we mature in faith, but it is also important that we have an accurate faith. When I was in the paid ministry it was easy to find time to read, study and pray. Over the last 20 years I have had to find a new spirituality, one that is real and not wrapped in cotton wool. One that is forged in the crucible of life.

Research indicates that 90% of people pray. This creates a dilemma, because research also indicates that more than 10% of people today are atheists. That means there are some praying atheists out there.

Everyone has the image of God distorted in some way because God transcends our ability to imagine Him. That is why everyone relates to God differently. How can we know the true God? How can we know a God who is three persons in one? Understanding God is like understanding people. God in the Old Testament is like the king, Jesus is like our friends and neighbours and the Holy Spirit is like family and His role is to draw us to Jesus and the Father. It takes time to get to know people and that happens mainly through sharing stories. We know God the father primarily through the stories of the Old Testament. We know Jesus through the stories of the New Testament, but the Holy Spirit is more personal. Through our personal experiences we can look back and recount encounters with the Holy Spirit. Moments that stand out as not being everyday occurrences through the Spirit that is there all the time. Divine appointments.

So here is my prayer journey. The worst thing I could say is that this is how YOU should do it, because we are all different and we relate to God in different ways. Christianity loves to ‘guilt trip’ us by saying we should run our spiritual life in ‘this’ particular way. There is no particular way! C.S. Lewis uses the illustration of how we are all like keys that unlock the divine contour in our own way. This should be an encouragement to us and should help us get off the treadmill of works. Lewis’s insight should enlighten our struggling spirituality.

Ever since I became a Christian 50 years ago, I have struggled with prayer. I initially had a fear of public prayer, now I have an aversion because it seems to me that I am just putting words together for the hearers and not words to God. In public prayer I struggle with my own genuineness. In private – I know who I am talking to! I learnt, on the battlefield of my spiritual life, that God does not want my spiritual gymnastics – reciting meaningless rituals and doing obligatory Bible reading. He wants me! This is the essence of Paul’s counsel to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17). I once suffered the anguish of the empty shrine until I finally realized that God does not want the mechanics of prayer, He wanted a genuine relationship with me. When I realized this, the paranoia of performance no longer had significance in my spiritual life. The best secret for a meaningful prayer life is to just do it; anywhere, anytime, as again Paul says, “Pray at all times…” Eph 6:17

I was once asked by a well meaning Christian if I was filled with the Holy Spirit. My answer was “YES, but I leak, I need to come back daily for more.”

To me theology is faith seeking understanding, but my eternal destiny is not dependent on whether I do it every day or not. That would make Bible study a means of salvation by works. The answers to life’s great questions are found in His word and it is our privilege to mine the gems. But the majority of this world’s people have been illiterate. That does not exclude them from a relationship with their creator.

The Bible lays down no formula for how I am to relate to God, but rather it is a compendium of Godly people who had related to God in different ways. They became my companions for the journey. It is the quiet moments that bring us close to God as His Spirit draws near. If you wake in the middle of the night, or the early morning – Pray. The greatest lesson of spirituality is pray wherever you are and whatever you are doing.

Understand that He who created the worlds and inhabits all eternity has the patience to hear me speak to Him about my everyday things, and my work affairs, and my plans, as well as my anguishes and my struggles. If your brain can process 5 trillion computations per second, regarding every facet of your life, then He has no problem hearing the prayers of billions of people.

To put it in other words – if there is a feather or a straw blowing about in the solar system, which has for a fraction of a second, eluded His knowledge or escaped His observation, then, by just that amount, His greatness falls short of infinity. If therefore, I do really believe that God is not only great enough to be the generator of Universes and creator of everything, but great enough to be infinite, then I cannot help believing that no sparrow falls to the ground without his notice and that the very hairs of my head are all numbered! And just as every cell must relate to my body and remain in communication with it, so must I, and so can I remain in contact with Him who made all these things.

That’s what prayer is all about! TBC Tomorrow