An article in the Denver Rocky Mountain News described various web sites to which people can submit prayers. One site, Newprayer.com, says, "Simply click on the ’Pray’ button and transmit your prayer to the only known location of God." The site claims "that it can send prayers via a radio transmitter to God’s last known location," a star cluster called M13 believed to be one of the oldest in the universe.
JUDITH GAINES, "TAPPING INTO GOD," DENVER ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS (3-13-00), PP.6B-7B
"Crandall Stone, 50, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, engineer and freelance consultant, set up the site last winter after a night of sipping brandy and philosophizing with friends in Vermont. The conversation turned to Big Bang theories of creation, and someone suggested that if everything was in one place at the time of the explosion, then God must have been there, too.
"’It’s the one place where we could be sure he was,’ Stone said. ’Then we thought that if we could find that location and had a radio transmitter, we could send a message to God.’ "After consulting with NASA scientists, the friends settled on M13 as the likely location. They chipped in about $20,000, and built a radio-wave-transmitting Web site."
Stone reports that they transmit about 50,000 prayers a week from seekers around the globe.
Prayer at its basic level is communication with God. Like all communication, whether face-to-face or via radio telescope, it is prone to confusion, misdirection and misunderstanding. Prayer becomes magical if we’re not careful. Magic seeks to control God, to get him to do things our way. If we believe we can talk God into something we know isn’t his will we are in fact, trying to cast a spell on Him to control God. We’re guilty of this whenever we believe that the right words, attitude, position, or tone of voice will make God do what we want.
What makes a difference is the personal experience with Jesus that those who call themselves Christians have experienced. We’ve been imagining how things might be different if Jesus were actually present with us on Sunday mornings. We would probably be ready for worship, being on time and alert. If we saw Jesus here on Sundays we would do those things that he approved of like loving others and saying no to sin. We’d want to be like Him because we love Him. And last week we saw that one way we could live like Jesus would be to serve others with eagerness because we remember that Jesus served us.
Do you imagine that His presence might impact our prayers? Do you think we’d have the same thoughts, use the same words, and go over the same old requests time and time again? When we see Christ we become free to face Him with a new power in our prayer life—we discover an authentic prayer. By authentic prayer I mean prayer that meets Christ’s approval and honors him. Suddenly Christians stop just going through the motions of praying. They cease trying to be religious, and the reality of the privilege of authentic prayer sets in. We seek to discover what God is doing and to offer ourselves to him so that we might jump on His bandwagon.
In the passages read today I want us to be grabbed by how we are to pray and what we are to pray. We are to pray bold prayers. God reminds us that the relationship we enjoy with God is that of Father and child. Not an abusive father but one who loves and cares for us. John in his letters explains that, “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us” (1 John 5:14). This confidence he described earlier in 4:17 “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him.” Confident of God’s love through Christ allows us to boldly enter into our Lord’s presence.
Our prayers are to be simple, in the vernacular, our common language. We are to pray “profanely”. Profane doesn’t mean crude the Miriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary traces it’s etymology as “Middle English prophane, from Middle French, from Latin profanus, from pro- before + fanum temple. At its heart is the idea of life in the secular world—those things that happen in front of the temple, or on the street. When Jesus prays he uses words his disciples understood. Assuming he spoke the common Greek of the day Jesus didn’t pray in 200-year-old classical Greek or change from Aramaic into the English of King James. Our prayers aren’t random babblings, repetitious and meaningless because of archaic language. Our needs, concerns, praise, etcetera can be simply told to our Father who loves us.
What we pray is just as important as how we pray. We pray certain that God is the King. This is a concept most of us Americans have a hard time understanding. As King, God has absolute power over us and creation. When we come to our Father who is the King we admit that he’s worth any and all praise that we can imagine. Our communication with God starts and ends knowing this is not a dialogue among equals.
God is “high and lifted up” God is “over and above all” God is “King of heaven and earth”. Nothing, no one, (least of all us) is equal to this King. According to Jesus’ teaching in this “model” prayer, our prayer is to reflect the fact of God’s absolute Kingship.
Our concerns are Kingdom concerns. We pray that God’s desire will be accomplished. This is more than saying, “thy will be done.” It is submitting our whole wish list to God’s editorial blue pen. It’s a heart-felt desire to see the rule, the power, the judgment, and the glory of God become evident on our world, and in our lives. When we pray with authenticity we seek to be involved in what God is doing in our world right now, not what we wish he’d do; and not what we want him to do.
Our prayers are bold but not brash. We are bold, asking for what we believe we need, but we pray with respect for who God is. We pray knowing God who loves us will meet our daily needs. In our prayer we seek the Lord. 2 Chronicles describes this “seeking”. I’m not talking “hide and seek” but a desire to understand, experience and be in the presence of God Almighty
Our concerns are voices with a sense of humility and unworthiness because we know that we stand in need of forgiveness even as we enter into God’s presence. The only section of Lord’s Prayer Jesus explains is the part dealing with forgiveness? Likewise in 2 Chronicles God explains to Solomon what to do when the land cursed. We humble ourselves. We admit we’re wrong and in need of God’s grace and mercy. Only when our lives have been changed, when we’ve turned from the evil deeds and thoughts can we expect God to hear us and heal our land.
I’ve found these 50 Day Spiritual Adventure a boost to my prayer life in many ways I hope you’ve found this too. Authentic prayer is a daily discipline, like brushing your teeth. I love what Madeleine L’Engle said in The Other Side. “Prayer is like playing the piano. You won’t do it well everyday but unless you do it everyday, you will never do it well.” Let me add that we become what we practice. If we practice badly we learn badly. It is important to daily come before God and seek to pray with an open mind, heart, and ear.
Prayer is about listening as much as talking. In many of our prayers we treat God like a spiritual Santa Claus, who is there for our amusement. As a parent how do you like your children continually making demands of you without ever asking for your input, without ever taking time to ask what you think, without ever wondering what you would like done? What might God feel about our prayers?
Authentic prayer is the way the Holy Spirit keeps us growing in Christ. In John 15, Jesus talks about us as branches and himself as the vine. We can’t live without being tied into the main vine. We can’t hope to receive the nutrients, the power to grow and remain strong without “remaining in Jesus.” I believe that it is in prayer that we discover this power to remain.
Carole Mayhall writes about an experience many of us can relate too. “The guest room—with its own bath—was inviting but cold. By the time I unpacked my small suitcase, got ready for bed, and shook out an Excedrin P.M. for a slight nagging headache, my feet were freezing. Knowing that after a stimulating and exhausting weekend women’s conference—too much to eat and too much caffeine—it would be difficult enough to sleep even without cold feet, I tried everything to get warm. Rubbed them. Put my slippers on. Rubbed them again. Nothing worked.
The late March wind whistled through the eaves. Defeated and shivering, I crawled into bed, drew my feet up as close to my body as I could, and tried to sleep. For three hours I tossed and turned, wondering why the medication hadn’t cleared the headache or helped me relax, and finally fell into a restless sleep.
The next morning as I groggily smoothed the covers of the double bed, I glanced down at the floor and saw a familiar cord pushed almost out of sight under the bed. I drew it out and discovered that the cold bed I’d slept on had an electric blanket, ready to be turned on to make the bed toasty warm. I groaned. Then I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth, glanced down at the countertop, and discovered the pill laying there where I’d put it. I groaned again.
An electric blanket doesn’t work if it’s not attached to a source of power. Likewise medications don’t work too well when they’re left sitting on a counter. How true is this spiritually? Unless we plug into God through prayer and unless we take the medications He’s given us for our life we are doomed to be miserable, ill at ease and cold hearted.
