Prayer

“Call to Me and I will answer you,

and I will tell you great and mighty things which you do not know.”  Jeremiah 33:3

            For many of us, prayer is a mystery.  It’s hard to talk to someone you cannot see, and yet God tells us to bring all things to Him.  We don’t understand it, yet we are better because of it. 

            As we look into His word, God shows us reasons to pray:

            First, we need it.  We need to bring our concerns, our burdens and needs before the throne of Jesus and leave them there.  Only by giving them to Him, by acknowledging our need for Him and His sovereignty in our lives can we experience His peace.  By coming to Him in petition and in worship we express to Him and to ourselves our trust in Him and His dealings in our lives.  He works through prayer.

            Second, because He asks us to.  For some reason almost beyond our comprehension, God desires a relationship with us.  He longs for fellowship with us.  He wants us to make our concerns known to Him and delights in answering them.  We can begin to understand this as we look at our own children.  Even when they are very little we desire a relationship with them.  We talk about their day, about what has happened while we were apart.  We delight in hearing them tell us what they are learning.  It wasn’t anything new to us; we mastered the alphabet years before!  Yet still we want to hear about it.  Their personality shines through, and often we end up laughing or crying together over events in their day.  As they grow and mature we continue to enjoy our conversations on topics of politics, current fashions, their love lives, and spiritual issues.  We are touched by how they deal with life.

            I imagine God feels the same about us.  He seems to want to be included in our lives and to delight in the ways we are maturing.  He wants a friendship with us, a cool-of-the-day kind of easy conversation that comes between people who are close.

            Non-Christians would say that the only power in prayer is psychological.  They are wrong.  We do not understand the power of prayer, but we do know that it holds power.  God works through the prayers of His people.

            Call out to God.  He is waiting.  He has great and mighty things to share.