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Thursday, January 13, 2005
My spiritual beginnings were very different than my current state.
Now, my church is light and airy and roomy. We have four services to accomodate the crowds. We have the latest in technological advances. We have a praise band and upbeat songs. We have land on which to expand our facility should we need to do so. We have great programs from the nursery all the way to our senior citizens.
Then, my church was dark. It was small. It was cramped. We only had one service. There were permanent pews with kneelers. We had a pump organ in which volunteers played very old hymns each week. The only technological advances were lights...and they were dimmed most of the time. We were landlocked but it didn't really matter as the church was dying anyway. The only program was the service itself and some nursery helpers who volunteered each week.
Now, the service is designed around the teaching of the Word. Sure, there are a few announcements and almost half the service time is the worship and praise time. No hymnals. No prayer book. Communion is out of plastic cups with grape juice and crackers, distributed with precision by a team of people.
Then, the service never changed from week to week. Or year to year. There was an order of things, and each week the songs were chosen by some yearly arrangement published by the denomination, as were the Scripture readings...which was just that: readings. Communion was serious business, with classes to attend and there were gold and silver chalices and wine and bread and candles. There were times when we were supposed to "respond" to readings from the prayer book (a service manual of sorts).
I can do that still to this day. I attended services with my mom from the time I was old enough to be taken out of the house until I was 13. I know the service in my brain right now. I know what to say, when to say it, when to kneel, when to get up, when to bow...the whole works.
And that was my spiritual life. Prayers included. I can still recite the prayers at the proper time with the right inflections and breaks. One of them went like this (from Matthew 6: 9--14):
"Our Father who art in heaven,
Hallowed be Thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not lead us into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For Thine is the kingdom,
and the power,
and the glory,
forever and ever. Amen."
In fact, that prayer was a common occurrence in my youth. The sports teams I was on always prayed that before games. I said it every night with my parents before I went to bed. I prayed it myself.
It was the only prayer I knew.
It was the only way I knew.
I'm guessing that I never read one of the previous verses, verse 7 right before it.
You know, the one about meaningless repetition.
That's what that prayer really was for me. Sure, it gave me comfort to do it. Sure, it was what I truly thought I was supposed to do. But I missed the point.
It's supposed to be a MODEL of prayer...NOT our prayer.
So, we can make some observations about the content of our prayer from this model. Among them are: We should take the time in our prayer to adore God...to praise Him because He is so worthy and we are so unworthy; We should pray for the time when God will set His creation back in order in His Kingdom; We should pray for His will to be done in the prayer (ugh...to be honest, most of the time, I want Him to answer my prayers the way I want them answered); We should pray for our needs, and the needs of others within the framwork of His will; We should ask for forgiveness, and the reality is that we should forgive others; and We should pray for an awareness of His presence with us (I always wonder why we somehow pray for God to be with us when we know He's already with us all the time).
And we should pray.
In fact, we should pray without ceasing (interesting, right?).
But we shouldn't take this as a prayer at all, but rather a model of how to pray. And if you take these principles and apply them to your honest conversation with God, I'm sure that you'll find your prayer life enhanced and your relationship with Him grow.
But, like so much of the spiritual walk with Christ, there's no real formula. Just speak from your heart. Talk to and with God. Listen to Him through Scripture...but there's really no formula. And I think we'd grow at a faster rate than if there were a formula.
At least that way my experience.
But, pray. Without ceasing.
Brent 4:38 AM
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