Prayer

My recent prayer requests have been about prayer itself. I listened to a few sermons on prayer, and it never occurred to me that praying was so difficult. Tim Keller says that it's easier to preach for 30 mins than it is to pray for 30 mins, and it's so true! Our minds get so distracted when we're praying. The mere sound of an IM or text message will tempt us to put our prayers on hold just to see what they say.

But more personally, I found my prayers so repetitive, and pretty much like a groceries list. There was no love or adoration in my prayers. It was pure business. Especially being a fourth year now, so many different things have been occupying my mind: school, future career, family in Korea, living situation for next year, church, small group, and the list goes on.

I realized something though. It is okay for our prayers to be repetitive. It is okay to constantly ask God for things. Christ, in fact, commands us to pray like this--to be persistent, to constantly knock at his door even to the point where we pretty much bother him. Why can we do this? It's because we have a basis for our prayers. Our basis is that God is "Our Father". Notice that when Christ teaches us how to pray, he doesn't say "Our King" although he is, or "Our Creator", although he is. The first two words "Our Father" state our basis for our prayers, that it is only because we are his children that we can come to and pray to him intimately.

Just as children ask their parents for things, we should be praying to God about everything we want or need. And then as Our Father, God will either give us what we ask for, or he will give us what we should have asked for. Our Father will always answer our prayers.

-Simon