28 April 2008
Reflection on Congregational Prayer Meeting
Grace has asked church members to give an account of participating in the Future Grace Phase 2 Campaign. In this edition, Matt McCullough reflects on yesterday’s Congregational Prayer Meeting.
by Matt McCullough
Have you ever wondered—perhaps when a moment of self-honesty breaks into the patterns, the normal, the usual—why do we pray, or what is actually accomplished? I have. Or how about this: if God is always in control and works all things for our good even when we don’t know what to ask for, what’s the point of prayer? I got a chance to reflect on questions like these—on the meaning and purpose of prayer—at the Future Grace Prayer Gathering Sunday afternoon. Here are a few of my thoughts.
Why pray? In part because it’s obedient—God commands us to pray. Yes, he’s in control of the world he created and his purposes are a lot bigger than us in any number of ways. But in his providence he’s chosen to activate his plans in genuine response to our prayers, to what we ask of him. But there’s more to it than obedience. Perhaps a bigger question is, If God can accomplish his purposes in any way he chooses, why has he chosen prayer as a means to his ends? Put differently, the question is not just why pray, but why prayer? To answer this question we’ve got to shift our focus from the effect prayer has on God to the effect prayer has on us. When we pray as God intends, we pray as the sick in desperate need of a doctor, we pray as those who have nothing that they have not received, we pray as those whose abilities and resources and solutions have run dry. Think the Publican over against the Pharisee: “Lord, have mercy on me, the sinner.” Think Mark’s helpless father of a demon-possessed son: “Lord I believe; help my unbelief.” Prayer properly construed forces us to stare our inadequacy in the face, to look through it and beyond it and because of it to the inexhaustible resources of God that are ours in Christ Jesus. In this way prayer is the embodiment of the discipleship Scott talked about Sunday in his sermon from Mark 8-10. Discipleship is about displacement—removing ourselves from the thrones of our lives and installing Christ as Lord. When its genuine and authentically biblical, this is what prayer does. It’s not the genie-in-a-bottle sort of prayer we’ve all experienced—rub it in just the right way using just the right words with just the right faith and you get just what you want. No, as Scott reminded us on Sunday, God’s not some cosmic grandfather who stands ready at our beck and call to fulfill our fallen desires. God must be Lord, and in authentic prayer we recognize him as such—we reach out to him at the boundary of our abilities, trusting him to do not just what we want but what is best, what we can’t do for ourselves. Prayer enthrones God in our lives. Prayer changes us.
This is what was running through my mind in the afternoon leading up to the prayer gathering, and I’m happy to report that these themes were the overwhelming emphasis of that hour-and-a-half. We joyfully acknowledged our corporate insufficiency for the task before us, and committed the giving campaign and building project into much more capable hands. We prayed for the building process and for the discipleship that would happen in the new building, knowing that, in things material and spiritual, “unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it” (Ps. 127:1). We prayed for our upcoming financial decisions, that God would grant wisdom and joy in sacrifice, knowing that left to ourselves we cling too tightly to the things of this world. And we prayed for our leaders, as they take on a job that’s bigger than them, that they would find strength and rest in God’s boundless grace. These are the things I plan to pray in the coming weeks; I hope you’ll join me.
Category: Event Summaries.
