What is prayer?
Prayer, as we know, is communication between us and our Maker. In spite of the many books written on the subject, I daresay there is no single formula for prayer, as it remains communication between two people bound by love. Yet praying to an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent God, is a puzzle, for although God knows everything about us and assures us of His readiness to help us, provide for us, succour us, shield us from harm, fellowship with us, He enjoins us to pray before He acts.
Indeed one of the Scriptures I found baffling for a long time is Job 42:8, when God tasked Job to pray for his friends who had been unkind in their accusations against him in his time of adversity. I wondered why God would not simply forgive them, but required the intercession of Job (who by the way was rewarded with great blessings following his intercession for his friends).
Jesus, the Son of God, whose sonship had been acclaimed by God at His baptism and who according to Scripture, received the Spirit of God without measure, found it necessary to pray. The Book of Luke records at least three times when he went into a solitary place to pray, and it is recorded that he held an all-night prayer vigil before he selected his twelve apostles out of his numerous disciples.
It is also worthy of note that He felt the need, during his last hours on this earth, to command his disciples to watch and pray in order not to enter into temptation.
Thus, prayer is a mystery.
Jesus taught his disciples to pray, and started it with the address: “Our Father in heaven.” Prayer seeks to bring God down into our lives, our issues, our problems. Prayer gives God who surrendered His creation to us, the right to intervene in our world when our adversary, to whom man handed his inheritance, seeks to wreak havoc in our lives. Prayer screams ‘Father’ and begets the response ‘son ’ or ‘daughter’. Prayer allows God to rule in our lives and it creates the circumstance for God to express His goodness to us.
And so Christ taught His disciples, and He teaches us to pray always and in every situation.
For years I was bothered a great deal by the story of the fig tree that withered when Jesus cursed it, for I considered it to be wasteful on the part of Jesus. Of course I know better now, that when Jesus who observed a fig tree full of leaves was disappointed that it had no fruit, he used that as an opportunity to inform us about the power of prayer. Indeed He went ahead to say: in Mark 11:24: “…whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you will receive them, and you shall have them”. Thus has Jesus given us a blank cheque by giving us the tool of prayer. Indeed, in John 14:14 he assures us that “if you ask for anything in my name I will do it”.
Why then do we not pray, if prayer is so beneficial, and apparently costs us nothing? There is nothing that persuades me more of the existence and the power of Satan than the fact that we refuse, or neglect, or fail to avail ourselves of this open invitation to involve God in our situation and in our lives through prayer, and furthermore, we have little inclination to read the promise of His presence and His help in the Bible. This informs me is that there is an adversary who somehow manages to keep us from accessing what is obviously instituted for our good and our benefit.
