November 27 Let’s Pray

Luke 9:18 Once when Jesus was praying in private and his disciples were with him, he asked them, “Who do the crowds say I am?”
 
JESUS has paused from his miraculous work to pray and talk with his disciples. Our first lesson here is to understand the importance of stopping our work with God for two types of conversations: one is to talk with God. The second form of conversation is with his people. Both are necessary for our faith walk.       
   Let’s focus on the first. How is your experience talking with God?  This is prayer, isn’t it? I say it’s “talking with” because the Bible repeatedly points us to prayer as a two-way conversation. From what I hear and read, prayer is a difficult conversation for most of us. Truly, I can’t recall hearing anyone saying, “I’m very satisfied with my prayer life. God and I have a good time together!” Once, I attended a conference to sit under teaching from three pastors who lead very large churches. Each one of them, too, confessed he struggled with prayer. I struggle with prayer. We all wonder, “What’s wrong?”
   I don’t know about you, but I think there are three wrongs of my prayer life. One is my “let’s get it done” attitude. My mind has an impatient unwillingness to sit for a while and spend time – use up time, if you will – talking with God. There are two methods I’ve used to overcome this impatience. First, I get up out of bed earlier, so I have ample time to read the Bible and speak with my Lord. Second, I consider Psalms 46:10 “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” Being still, being quiet and being at peace with God opens the conversation to we and talk with your loving Father in Heaven.
   The second challenge I have with prayer comes in the listening part. Perhaps it’s easy to speak to him. There are days I have a heart’s desire to pray for many people (for some a list or prayer journal works very well). But am I really willing to hear from him? It has been times of prayer over the years when God has said to me, “Come, join with me to …” Those were moments he pointed me to new, very different steps in my faith walk. Those new places have changed nearly everything about me. Praying today, I have this restless uncertainty that he’ll say something new I don’t want to hear. So I’d rather avoid the discussion than to listen to the Lord.
   A third reason prayer can be difficult is that we don’t know what to pray. We’ve prayed for certain things for so long, we may be tired of God’s silence. Or we may not trust he’s listening. We get very uncomfortable speaking to someone who is silent, don’t we? We stop talking to the person and distance ourself from him. Could it be we feel this way about our Lord on too many days? If so, I’d encourage you to stay focused on reading the Bible to see the many ways God has revealed himself to his faithful people.
   That revelation is essentially what Jesus is about to do in this passage. He is conversing with the Father. And then he speaks with his disciples to draw them into a most compelling conversation. We’ll talk more about the question tomorrow.
 
Prayer: Our Father in Heaven, teach me to pray, to speak and to listen to you. In Jesus’ name, amen.