Tag: Prayer

This is an ongoing series of blog posts based on papers originally written for my church’s elder class. Our subject for this entry is how God communicates with His people.

One important truth that underlies the preaching of the gospel is that God is not a secret from creation, but that He is present and making Himself known to, and in, creation. As Paul says in Romans 1, “‭…what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse.” But to speak of God’s communication with us is not simply a matter of inference from what we see, but a matter of direct, and interactive, communication. 

One of the most striking truths about the relationship between God and man is that we have a truly personal relationship. God does not sit high above us unapproachable and uninterested, but He is deeply involved in His creation, and He has given us the means by which we may truly know Him. It is important to understand what this means for us in our daily lives, and what it looks like to draw near to God in reverence and expectation that He is both speaking and listening.

Speaking with our Father

Prayer is seen all throughout the Bible and Jesus is constant in His prayers. Very often we see Him withdrawing from others to spend time in prayer with the Father, and it is in His prayers that we see the true intimacy of that inter-Trinitarian relationship. Jesus teaches His disciples to pray in Matthew 6 with a confession that God is not just God but that He is “our Father.” That is an incredibly intimate confession for us to make, and the Son of God is calling all of us who are in Him to join with Him in calling God the Father, our own Father. 

Yet this is not said casually, for the very next line calls for His name to receive the highest reverence. Many of us have memorized it as “hallowed by Your name,” or as the CSB renders it, “Your name be honored as holy.” God is our Father and we may draw near Him, yet He is also our holy and perfect God, and we hold those two truths in balance with one another.

From there the prayer moves to a desire that God’s will should be seen in our world as much as it is Heaven. Not because God is not sovereign over all things, but in the sense that we would see the rebellion of sin be wiped away, and all creation be restored to true peace and obedience to God, to true harmony. We seek to bring ourselves into true obedience to the Shema, what Jesus rightly calls the greatest commandment: that we would love God with every element of our beings to the fullest.

Finally, we see the desire for God’s provision – for our needs, and against the failures of sin in our flesh. And we know God hears these and provides for them. Jesus says as much later in the same chapter, as He says “So don’t worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you.” And we see exactly that in the prayer He teaches – it begins with the kingdom, and ends with our needs. The Lord calls us to pray to Him, and often, bringing our needs to Him over and over. There is no tiring or annoyance, because this is truly another example of God ordaining both the ends – His working in our world and lives – and the means – the prayers of His people.

Our Father speaking with us

By the same token, He speaks to us, through His Word and by His Spirit. It isn’t a matter of asking God a question, flipping open a Bible and pointing at a random verse to get an answer, but rather that devoted pursuit of God in His Word along with pursuing that intimacy with God in prayer will bring us deeper into understanding God’s will for life, strengthening our wills to endure difficulty and to glorify God in the circumstances of our lives. I wrote in the last entry on election that humility is a necessary ingredient to our intimacy with God, as it should be. The order of creation is evident from the beginning of Scripture: that which is made worships that which made it. That’s why idol-worship is so consistently repudiated throughout the Bible, because the idea that someone would make an idol and then pray to this thing they just made is simply backward. We are made to know our Creator, and intimately so.

I have encountered many moments where a question or issue has been weighing on my mind and in my prayers, and I have suddenly found myself encountering a passage that seems to speak directly to it. I try to be wary about reading my own desires into Scripture, but those moments have happened to me. I had a moment just the other day when I had a weight on my heart about an issue I was wrestling with, and my tendency when left to my own devices is to just let it eat at me. In that moment however, I pushed against that and chose to stop, and sit in the Word and prayer, and wait. What I found was most certainly the peace that passes understanding, and a reassurance that was echoed from those around me without my seeking it out from them. It’s said that those who look for patterns will find them, and certainly someone who doesn’t believe would likely make that claim. I have no qualms about the fact that personal evidence is the weakest kind – yet it is as much a part of my testimony as the truths of Scripture I’ve learned, or the evidence of God written in the building blocks of creation itself.

I’ve encountered what seemed at the time to be a moment of close communication by the Spirit. I’ve experienced the Lord ministering to my spirit in dark times in ways that are difficult to articulate, yet were clearly an experience that was bigger than myself, than my own ideas. I think the reason why these particular moments are ones I attribute to the Lord ministering to me in such a moment are because these were instances that I was seeking answers in a difficult moment, and the answers I received were very much not what I would have desired. There was also the fact that they were later confirmed, again not because I sought to make them happen, but because of how these particular circumstances concluded. I’m writing about this obliquely because these moments involve the privacy of others.

God is near to us, and we know Him in Christ, through the Spirit, and thus we pray. We know His will by His Word, which points to Christ, and is brought into being through the work of the Spirit. As His church we walk in this spiritual respiration of breathing in Word and breathing out prayer, and it is what truly sustains us. It is right for us to desire knowing God intimately, because the writers of Scripture show that He desires us to truly know Him. 

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 8 about the unity of knowledge and love in God. In humans, knowledge tends to produce overconfidence in ourselves, and is why God calls us to love him in the right way, the way that lets us depend upon him as His creatures, His children. He says that “if anyone loves God, he is known by him.” And in chapter 13 he expounds on love, what it is and why it is a necessary component of humanity. It’s not a mere extension of desire, as seems to us. It involves a humility, a surrender of who and what we are to the truth of who God us, and therefore to what we as humans are to each other: fellow image bearers of God, made to trust in Him with all our beings, made not to serve the will of a petulant demanding idol but instead to rely fully on the loving grace of our loving Father, our gracious Lord.

We must heed Peter’s words in his first epistle, that we must “humble [ourselves] therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt [us] at the proper time, casting all [our] cares on him, because he cares about [us.]” Our humility isn’t rooted in fear of destruction, but in the truth that we must not deceive ourselves into self-reliance and self-aggrandizement. This is why Christian unity should not look like angry people demanding external morality in others. It shouldn’t look like a bunch of smarty-pantses who have all the answers to life’s questions. It should look like people who rest in the work of Jesus for everything they need, who love one another even and especially when they don’t seem very lovable, and who give of themselves to serve others – even to the cost of themselves. What we have is His, and He is a faithful provider at all times. He is here with us, and He is not silent.

A call to speaking and listening

I want to close with what I believe are wise actions to take as we all pursue God’s ministry to us in our daily lives:

• Be in your Bible. The Bible is given to us as a gift, and is God’s speech. It’s not a cold dead text, but a living and vibrant one that is ministered to us by the Spirit and through the church. By staying in it we find our own encouragement and instruction, and we can be prepared for serving one another by being ready to engage in “teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness.” Being in Scripture is critical when seeking to hear from God, for only by studying the true voice of our Father can we know when He is speaking with us, as opposed to us simply placing His name atop our own desires and thoughts. Scripture is sufficient to our needs for this in all things.
• Make prayer a priority. I’ll be honest, this is a tough one for me, and I’ll bet it’s a tough one for many out there. It’s easy to find yourself distracted, or to feel like the time you have to devote to it could be used elsewhere. It’s easy to make excuses. But I don’t believe there’s ever been an instance in my life where I’ve rejected those excuses and made myself sit even for a few moments to pray, that I’ve walked away saying “I wish I had done something else.” Build the habit, and pursue it. 
• Be in community. This isn’t simply a call to church attendance, though that is a given where it can be carried out. (Certainly as an American I often take for granted the fact that I can attend church freely and without fear, something that not every believer in the world is able to do.) This is a call to know and to be known. Develop friendships, have people who can pray for and with you, who can rebuke you in love when you’re going astray – and pursue the humility in your own heart to receive that. If your church is a place where you can’t truly be open because of a lack of grace, that may be a change you need to make. On the other hand, if it’s a place where confession brings about no encouragement to transformation, to repentance, that likewise is a deficiency in the ministry of the gospel. 

If there are ways we can provide help, guidance, or even simply prayer, please feel free to reach out to us. I desire that this podcast and blog is a place that encourages everyone who comes across it to hear the hope of Jesus, and to truly find their rest in Him. That includes you, whoever you may be. May the grace of Christ go with you into your home and work and everywhere else you venture.