[Play video-clip: WITHOUT PRAYER]
• This is what it feels like when you live without prayer.
Prayer provides clarity. It is a conversation with God.
• It is a conversation that provides clarity - to our life’s purpose, our life’s path, and our life’s perplexities.
• I see things clearer with prayer. I find strength in prayer. I understand my struggles better because of prayers.
• My conversations with God help me see life from His perspective.
Such conversations does not necessary brings about simple resolutions to my problems or provide easy answers to my needs.
• It enlightens me to His nature and His will for my life. His will is always good.
• He cares not just for my physical needs, not just my material needs, but more so my spiritual needs.
Therefore prayer is MORE THAN just a help-line that we use in crisis.
• Prayer is not a therapy for weak people who need a crutch. Prayer is not putting words to our best wishes. All of these are true of prayer, but it is more.
• It is a conversation with the living God, with or without a need, in or apart from any crisis.
Prayer is keeping company with God. It fulfils us.
We are made to have fellowship with God.
• Blaise Pascal says, “There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.”
If prayer is only the cry for help in times of need, then we are in a precarious state, because we don’t always have a sense a need.
• In fact, many do not feel a need for God. The blurry, myopic vision of life has become the norm for them.
• Prayer is optional because God is optional. He is dispensable. He is just a “good to have” in life.
• That probably explains why many struggle with prayer – we feel quite fine without God. Prayer makes sense only when we are in trouble.
The Psalmists paint us a different picture of prayer, especially the psalms of David.
• When you read his psalms, you are reading his prayers to God and his conversations with God.
• David wrote almost half the psalms we have in the Bible and majority of them written in the first person.
Let us read one – Psalm 63.
• It’s a picture of two lovers coming together. David expresses his desire and longing for God. He thinks about His goodness. He trusts that God will protect him and keep him safe, as He has been in the past.
Prayer is ASKING God, but it is more than petition. David keeps company with God. He enjoys God’s presence and accepts His love.
• When Psalm 63 was written, David was in the Desert of Judah. He used his longing for water to describe rather his spiritual longing for God.
• Verse 5 “My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods.” The Lord’s presence was his fulfilment.
Ultimately, God satisfies him. No water or food can quench the deepest longing of the human heart. Only the Lord can.
• Our greatest need is not physical or material, but spiritual. Until and unless we return to Him in prayer, something will be missing in life.
• Until we understand this, we will not long for God nor pray.
God is gracious. Sometimes, He uses trials and hardships to drive us back to Himself.
• “You have not come to me. If you have, you will be fulfilled.”
Prayer takes the view from above. It assures us.
Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God’s point of view.
• Conversations with God changes us, because they change the way we see life.
• It provides us clarity, as the video-clip highlighted. God, who knows the future in His hands, enlightens us and directs our path.
Moses spent extended time with the Lord while in the wilderness.
• On Mount Sinai, he was with the Lord for 40 days. Exodus 34:29 tells us when he came down, his face was radiant.
Exo 34:29-35
29 When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the Testimony in his hands, he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the LORD. 30 When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, his face was radiant, and they were afraid to come near him. 31 But Moses called to them; so Aaron and all the leaders of the community came back to him, and he spoke to them. 32 Afterward all the Israelites came near him, and he gave them all the commands the LORD had given him on Mount Sinai.
33 When Moses finished speaking to them, he put a veil over his face. 34 But whenever he entered the LORD's presence to speak with him, he removed the veil until he came out. And when he came out and told the Israelites what he had been commanded, 35 they saw that his face was radiant. Then Moses would put the veil back over his face until he went in to speak with the LORD.
Each time he comes out of the Tabernacle (the Tent of Meeting, with the Lord), his face glowed.
• If God is light, then we can expect this to be so. It might also be His way of showing the people that Moses had been with ME.
• I believe that those who have spent time with the Lord do shines (not literally) – I means their lives shine. Their character shines. When you interact with them, you know they had been with the Lord.
But Moses’ face was radiant is not the important part.
• Each time Moses comes out from the CONVERSATIONS he had with the Lord, he had something to tell the people.
• God revealed to Moses, and to His people, what they need to know and do. He gave them directives. He showed them the good way.
• The Lord provides clarity to their life’s purpose, their path to blessings.
Prayer corrects our myopia. Prayer helps us take a perspective that we easily forget – the view from above.
• Time with God raises our sight beyond the here-and-now, the petty and mundane, to see things from His perspective.
• If I start with the mind of God – and look at the rest of my life from His point of view – then I am sure every aspect of my life will fall into place, the right place, and at the right time.
Prayer helps me align everything in my life back to where God wants it to be.
• Each time Moses meets God, God reveals. Each time Moses meets God, God speaks.
I think we misunderstand prayer when we ask, “Am I supposed to pray every day?” or “How long should I pray?” or “What should I say?”
• When we focus on prayer for prayer sake, we make it into a ritual, into a religious activity.
• It is like asking, “Am I supposed to spend time with my family? Or how long should I chat with my wife?”
Focus on God, and I think we will pray. We have yet to see Him fully as He is.
• Psalm 63 David says he sees His power and His glory, and he longs to be with Him.
• Don’t focus on your needs alone, because that would mean you pray only when you want God to give you something.
• Look at His beauty, think about His goodness, count your blessings, and I think, we will have something to tell Him.
And that’s prayer. Keeping company with God. Conversations with Him.
• It fulfils us. It assures us.
Make room for God to bless you.
• C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity says, "God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion [HIM]. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing."
• When we pray, we are giving ourselves the chance to receive from Him.
Don’t you want to pray?
