Today, I was reminded how important prayer is to every day life as a follower of Christ. I recognised again that without prayer and an attitude predisposed to ongoing communication with God, my life is likely to go off the rails.
What triggered that was reading another chapter in the excellent book Seven Marks of a New Testament Church by Dave Alan Black. It’s not a big book in terms of page numbers, but it is a massive book in terms of consequences of content. It goes through the lessons to learn from the formation of the early in Acts 2. (Read an excellent review of it here from King Arthur Sido and another insightful one from Editor Eric Carpenter. Needless to say it’s a book I highly recommend.)
One of the marks identified is the devotion to prayer. Black remarked how prayer is something we are able to do only with the help of the Holy Spirit.
Reading that arrested me. Prayer is something I recognise as something I go through in phases, sometimes earnest prayer, sometimes not so earnest prayer. What helps greatly, however, is when I am actually completely (or as completely as I can be) dependent on God. As a man who loves words and is full of them, I can sometimes take it for granted to have the words to approach God in prayer. In a state of dependence, however, I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to just give glib words like the ones I remembered from classic prayers. I don’t want to approach God in such a fake way.
Communion with God in prayer is about transparency, vulnerability and humility. Prayer tends to work when I know how the relationship with God is reliant on Him.
What I love about Black’s description of prayer is his reference to the role of the Holy Spirit in it all. Essentially without the Holy Spirit we don’t know how to pray as we should. Whereas when we are completely reliant on God it is the Holy Spirit that helps us to pray.
This is something I have experienced on a number of occasions where it is my voice, they are my words in my voice through my being, but their source I recognise being from elsewhere. As I engage with these words they lift me to another place.
I respect the importance of the discipline of prayer. That discipline doesn’t work, though, unless there is that humility and awareness to know it is not possible to pray without support from God Himself. It is as though God helps me to talk to God. We’re intrinsically involved He speaks through our experiences, but we’re able to pray in Jesus’ Name because it is the Spirit that helps us ensure what words we speak are for Him to Him and through Him.
To use a football analogy – the goal is effective prayer, the one who provides the assist is the Holy Spirit. Indeed all the goals of successful prayer comes through an assist by the Holy Spirit. No Holy Spirit, no assist, no goals.
That is a humbling thought. That should send us back to prayer.
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
C. L. J. Dryden
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