While there are many definitions and ideas about prayer, most are often high-jacked by subjective self-serving ideas.
When people are exhorted to pray, the motive for daily prayer is often couched in terms of personal gain or advantage to the petitioner as they wrangle things out of God.
It seems as if the exercise of prayer is often carried out in the context of personal discomfort or need. In this context prayer’s purpose is often merely a matter of describing one’s symptoms to a divine doctor, in hopes he has some miracle cure to what discomforts or inconveniences the petitioner.
To pray according to such an understanding and practice of prayer is to lose the magnitude of what the Lord has given each believer in privilege of prayer.
To pray is put the realities of the moment into the context of eternal realities.
To pray is to put the values of the present into the context of eschatological values.
To pray is to put that which bound yet in sin into the hands of He who Son has set them eternally free.
To pray is to set the aspirations of life for the day into the context of the certain hope of eternal life.
To pray is to release that which I have no hold on into the hands that He who holds all things together.
To pray is to bring what is worldly into the Kingdom that shall have no end.
To pray is to be fully human in the presence of He who is God for us, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.
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