Meeting God in prayer

Luke 10:41-42
The Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but one thing is necessary.  Mary has made the right choice [to spend time with Jesus], and it will not be taken away from her.”

The right choice.  The better meal.  We’ve been looking at how Jesus’ response to Martha gives us direction on how we are encouraged and fueled to live out the life Jesus has given us.  Last time, we saw how God wants to meet us through our time in the Scriptures.  This time, we’re looking at the other way that God meets us – through prayer.

To pray for things we want – material items or particular circumstances – that comes rather easy.  We know all the things we want or wish for because we spend a lot of time thinking about them.

When James was writing to believers, he warns them about their “wants” and the motives behind them:

James 4:1-5
What is the source of wars and fights among you?  Don’t they come from your passions that wage war within you?  You desire and do not have.  You murder and covet and cannot obtain.  You fight and wage war.  You do not have because you do not ask.  You ask and don’t receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.

You adulterous people!  Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God?  So whoever wants to be the friend of the world becomes the enemy of God.  Or do you think it’s without reason that the Scripture says: The spirit He made to dwell in us envies intensely?

God is jealous for our attention.  Think about it: He has saved us from being eternally separated from Him and He gives us never-ending, eternal life…so of course He is offended when our main interaction with Him is treating Him like a cosmic vending machine so we can get stuff to impress others with how great we are.

Fortunately for his readers (and us), immediately after James gives that harsh, well-deserved rebuke, he then gives hope and a proverb to remedy their mindset:

James 4:6-7, 10
But He gives greater grace.  Therefore He says:

God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

Therefore, submit to God.  Resist the devil, and he will flee from you…Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you.

Not only does God have grace for us to receive forgiveness of sins and eternal life, but there is also grace for when we selfishly return to a sinful mindset!  We have access to this grace when we humble ourselves before the Lord.  And how do we do that?  Through prayer that is God-focused, not us-focused!

I’m sure your next question will be “How do I pray to God, about God?  Isn’t that a little weird?”

What I can tell you is that God-focused prayers is exactly how Jesus spent His time with God the Father.  If we don’t feel like we know “how to” pray well enough, then I refer you to the blog series I wrote on learning how to pray as Jesus prayed.  Those posts started on November 5th, 2014 and ended on April 8th, 2015. 

But there is a simpler, more direct way to learn to pray like Jesus did.  All we need to do is ask, like one of the disciples did:

Luke 11:1
He was praying in a certain place, and when He finished, one of His disciples said to Him, “Lord, teach us to pray”

In the verses that follow, Jesus gave His disciples a pattern, an example of how He prayed to God the Father.  It’s worth our time to check it out and practice using that format in our prayers – all with aim of making the right choice and building our relationship with God.

Keep Pressing,
Ken

The motivation for everything

This might be a strange thought, but not every Christian will live out a Christ-focused life in the same way.  Even if we recognize this truth, we often have specific expectations (typically patterned after our own journey) of what “mature Christian behavior” should look like.  The truth of the matter is that it would be rather shallow of us to expect everyone to be “as spiritual” or be “as holy” in the identical manner that God is currently leading us in.  Maybe someone is behind us in development.  Maybe, just maybe…someone else could be ahead of us.

Think about our own families – our parents poured themselves into us and our siblings.  However, due to our varying ages and on-going development, the same efforts of our parents ended up producing very different adult people.  The expectations of behavior placed on the oldest child were often not even subjects that were being taught to the younger children.  Rarely was the same life lesson taught in the same manner to each child.  The specifics of these life-living lessons were tailored to where the child was at the particular moment.

However, the principles of the family were the same among the children.  Many of the stories and traditions of the family were the same as previous generations – stories of love, and loyalty, and bravery and the events of previous years.  You could see the family traits in the people around you, but they all exhibited them in different ways.

The same holds true for the family of God.  There is a common tie that binds us together – the incredible story of God leaving the glory and perfection of Heaven to rescue us from our selfish, sin-soaked mess.  However, as His story becomes part of our story…His character is revealed through us in a variety of ways.

As Paul continues to explain to the Colossian believers how God’s family works together and encourages one another with the message about the Messiah, take note of the guiding principle for how that message is to affect their lives and maturity:

Colossians 3:16-17
Let the message about the Messiah dwell richly among you, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, and singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, with gratitude in your hearts to God.  And whatever you do in word or in deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.

Instead of laying out a 12 point plan for maturity, Paul wants the believers to recognize that everything is to be done in the name of the Lord Jesus.  Doing anything “in someone’s name” means that we are their representative or ambassador.  We know that our manners and conduct reflect back on Jesus, and we also know that we’ll eventually have to give an account for how well we represent Him.  Whatever you do in word or in deed – that phrase pretty much covers it all, doesn’t it?

Paul’s direction is broad enough that there’s no technicality for us to escape it.  The broad-ness also allows for a wide-variety of expressions.  Take, for example, that in these two verses Paul says we are to have gratitude and we are to give thanks.  While that is a specific direction, how exactly shall we give thanks?  We could give thanks through prayer, with tears, with spoken words, with silent reverence, with charitable actions, or many other ways. 

Too often we get hung up on measuring a Christian’s maturity by looking at the things he or she does.  However, God looks beyond those things and evaluates our maturity based upon our motivations.

Colossians 3:17
And whatever you do, in word or in deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.

Keep Pressing,
Ken

What's my motivation?

We like to be recognized, especially for doing good things.  There’s nothing wrong with receiving a compliment for a job well done…unless your aim was to get a compliment.

Matthew 6:1 Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of people, to be seen by them.  Otherwise, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus discusses several areas where we may have the outward appearance of being mature or spiritual, but instead our motives behind the behavior is misplaced.  His point is that improper motives will prevent us from receiving a reward from God.  One area where he calls out our motives is prayer:

Matthew 6:5-6 Whenever you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, because they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by people.  I assure you: They’ve got their reward!  But when you pray, go into your private room, shut your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret.  And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

This isn’t a prohibition on praying in public, rather this is instruction to make sure our motivation for praying in public is the right one.  We should not be praying with the secret aim to be seen by people.  That’s what makes us hypocrites…acting like we’re talking to God, when really we’re just talking out loud with our eyes closed, hoping that others notice how “spiritual” we are.

Rather, Jesus instructs us to go into your private room, shut your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret.  This is both practical and makes sense.  If I’m focusing more on what others are thinking when I talk to God than I am focusing on my conversation with God…then the best remedy is to completely remove all other people from my conversation time with God. 

Jesus doesn’t stop there, however.  If we choose to engage God in prayer for the right motive – that we actually want to talk with him – Jesus says that your Father who sees in secret will reward you.  Ok, but what’s the reward?  In these verses, Jesus says that both the hypocrites and those who pray in secret will actually get what they are aiming for…the hypocrite will be seen by the people immediately around him, and that is his “reward” will be found in the opinion of others.  On the other hand, those that pray in secret to God, in order to spend time with him…they will also get what they aim at, namely a relationship with the King of the Universe!  That “reward” has benefits in this life and in eternity future.  The hypocrite’s motivation and perspective is much, much too small…and he misses out because of it.

If I only hold my wife’s hand when we’re in public, if I the only time I act interested in what she has to say is when other people are watching, or if I only say “I love you” when I know someone else will hear me tell her…while it may appear that I have the perfect relationship with my wife, the exact opposite is true and I’m living a lie.  The only benefit I receive is that someone thinks that I’m a good husband.  However, the truth is that my wife would feel isolated and alone, with nothing but a sham of a relationship with me.  The right way to have a relationship with my wife is to do all those things, even when no one is watching.  The reward for doing those things is a genuine, deep relationship with my wife – and that kind of relationship will be readily apparent to others.

Jesus is pointing out that when we’re more concerned with what others hear in our prayers than who we are praying to, we lose the ultimate reward of fellowship with God!

So let’s “go deep” with God – pray to him in private, purposely get to know him intimately and away from all other distractions.  If we do so, the public side of our relationship will take care of itself.

Keep Pressing,
Ken