The Heart of Prayer

Scripture: Psalm 138

Have you ever really wondered what the point of prayer really is? Maybe I am weird and am the only on that thinks about these things, but there has to be something that prompts peple to engage in any activity. Along with that question rises another, what is the point of worship? These two activities are related, so closely related that you cannot truely have one without the other. 

The Friends Church has a long history of meeting in silence. For many people this sounds a bit odd, but if you think about it a bit deeper you would see that these meeting are some of the most pure personal as well as relational expressions of faith. There is not any room to be fake in these meetings you are doing one of two things worshiping or sitting there. You can probably get a since why I say prayer and worship are related.

I think the Psalmist would agree also. So often these poems are written not about the incredible awe inspiring performace at the temple of the living God, but about the life of the worshiper as they still their hearts to meet God in the holy place. I find that many of these poems would actually point to the actual wrship experience being outside the worship space and in the fields they worked through out the week.

Consider this psalm, it speaks of the renewed strength received from the daily disipline of worship. This renewed strength is not the point of the prayer or the poem. The vast majority of the words are praising God, and recognizing the status of their own life in relation to God. That recognition of status is the heart of prayer. In my last post I spoke about being honest. Humility is essential to a healthy relationship. If we approach God thinking to highly of ourselves we are actually lowering God’s status. If we go into prayer with the false humility or the I’m a worm approach, we are actually lifting ourselves up in status instead of God.

So what is a humble aproach? It is approaching God as yourself. An imperfect person that need help through the day. If we approach God in humility the good things that happe we can honestly praise God for because we realize that there were other factors involved in it. We are able to thank God for givin us the strength, wisdom, and oppertunity to perform as well as thanking God for bringing those other personalities and circumstances. We are also able to realize that we prsonally did not cause all of our problems. In humility we can see where we errored and also see the other factors that we had no control over. Humility can allow us to improve because we are able to see the truth of the matter.

It is difficult to approach Go in humility. To be honest it is difficult to be honest. We want to rush into prayer without settling our heart down to be honest. We rush to church on Sundays, or Saturdays and we argue and yell all the way, because we are not ready to worship. We think of ourselves as great because we attend, but what have we done the rest of the week. Without prayer we cannot worship without worship we cannot pray. In both cases it is a dishonest empty shell.

I encourage each ofyou as you pray today to consider where you are being dishonest with yourself and with God. Are you being real, if you aren’t there is hope the Spirit will help us and strengthen us to be who we really are.