PONDERINGS ON PRAYER


Last month I had a kingdom encounter of sorts…..

I was attending a gathering of some 350-400 folks who are active in ministry. During one of the sessions we were given several questions to respond to. There was a monitoring system in place whereby our responses could be recorded the moment we gave them. Then (in real time) they could be tallied on computer by percentage and posted up on screens in order for everyone to know how the group had answered. One of the questions caught my attention on a base level in my spirit. It had to do with what order of priority we gave to three specific things. They were:

Prayer
Reading God’s Word
Preparation for Public Ministry (study & research)

The response(s) in a room filled with pastoral and staff leadership was profound. As a group prayer was positioned first on our collective list by almost 70%.

I have to be transparent here with what I’m going to say next. What came up inside me was this question: If prayer is really that important to us, then I wonder how much time during the day we each spend devoted to it? I may be way off base here, but, I think that if we were each approached to give our personal answer to that question most of us would admit we spend far less time in intercession and active listening to the voice of the Holy Ghost than we’d really care to acknowledge.

Following just a few days after that “encounter”, I read the following comments in a book by Richard Foster entitled “Life With God”: Reading the Bible for Spiritual Transformation”:

“The church in the West is like roses that have been cut from their bush -- they still have some blossom showing but they are wilting because they have been severed from their roots.” Foster went on to say, “for restoration (rebirth) to take place the root system would first need to be reestablished. Prayer is the root system. And it is a life of prayer that needs to be reestablished in our lives. What is so needed today is not individualized prayer experiences that we can turn on or off at will like a faucet, but prayer as a constantly flowing life.”

He continued by sharing about how such insights were linked to experiences that he’d had while visiting with Christians in Korea. There were several components of their prayer life that he mentioned in specific. They were:

Intensity / Determined Persistence / Instant Power Engagement / Longing Love / Heartfelt Sorrow / Pain & Agony

He commented that such components as those “can only be received humbly through lived experience“.

I wonder what events will have to take place in our busy, distracted and temporal lives in order for such attributes to become the building blocks which form the prayers we offer on behalf of humanity and this spiritually deprived/depraved world we’re living in?

Selah…pause & consider