Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Romans 12:12
“In a society that seems to be filled with urgencies and emergencies, prayer appears to be an unnatural form of behavior. Without fully realizing it, we have accepted the idea that “doing things” is more important than prayer and have come to think of prayer as something for times when there is nothing urgent to do…
Concentrated human effort is necessary because prayer is not our most natural response to the world. Left to our own impulses, we will always want to do something else before we pray. Often, what we want to do seems so unquestionably good – setting ups a religious education program, helping with a soup kitchen, listening to people’s problems, visiting the sick, planning a liturgy, working with prisoners or mental patients – that it is hard to realize that even these things can be done with impatience and so become signs of our own needs rather than of God’s compassion.
Therefore, prayer is in many ways the criterion of the Christian life. Prayer requires that we stand in God’s presence with open hands, naked and vulnerable, proclaiming to ourselves and to others that without God we can do nothing. This is difficult in a climate where the predominant counsel is “Do your best and God will do the rest.” When life is divided into “our best” and “God’s rest,” we have turned prayer into a last resort to be used only when all our own resources are depleted.
Discipleship does not mean to use God when we can no longer function ourselves. On the contrary, it means to recognize that we can do nothing at all, but that God can do everything through us. As disciples, we find not some but all of our strength, hope, courage, and confidence in God. Therefore, prayer must be our first concern.”
Henri J. M. Nouwen in The Only Necessary Thing: Living a Prayerful Life, compiled and edited by Wendy Wilson Greer (New York: Crossroad, 1999) 92-93.
When I became CEO of GTP, I wanted to make prayer our first concern.
I praise God in my tenure as president we developed a network of 3,582 prayer journal subscribers and 919 intercessors who joined us for monthly prayer in 76 countries.
If we accomplished a lot for God, it flowed from a posture of surrender and dependence.
What might this look like for the church or ministry where you serve? Is prayer peripheral or central to what you do? How might today’s post inspire you to make prayer the criterion of your Christian journey?