Pray with patience, thanksgiving and humility
March 29, 2008 (Saturday)
We are taught in the Scriptures to worry about nothing but to pray about everything. The result is peace in the heart. (Phil 4:6-7).
We should pray with patience. Two songs come to mind. One, “Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave It There,” tells us to pray and then leave the matter with the Lord. The other song, “Just Keep On Praying,” says we are to pray “till light breaks through.” They seem to contradict each other, but you and I know that prayer is like that: some prayers are prayed once and that seems to be enough. Other prayers seem to require us to keep on praying about the matters. There is no set guideline; we’ll know what to do as we pray under the Spirit’s guidance. In either case, we are to be patient.
We should pray with thanksgiving. There is always something for which we can be thankful. The song advises, “Count your many blessings, name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done.” If you can’t think of any reason to be thankful, then maybe you have uncovered the reason for your problems with prayer.
We should pray with humility. The Scriptures tell us it is a very bold thing we do when we come into the presence of God in prayer. Looking at a satellite picture on the computer screen today, I could tell where Houston was, but I could not see it because the camera was so far away. Rather humbling. I thought of “Horton Hears a Who,” when an entire civilization of microscopic people was discovered by the “normal” guys. When the space probe, “Voyager,” reached the edge of our solar system, it turned its cameras back on earth, and took a picture. It is just a small pinpoint of light among the stars. Humility is in order when we pray.
There’s much more to say about how we should pray. These three thoughts should do it for today. I’ll work on these, and I invite you to join me in doing so.
If you want to pray and don’t know how, there’s always the model prayer that Jesus gave when his disciples asked him to teach them how to pray. It’s found in Matthew 6:9-13 and in Luke 11:2-4.