Nothing in all of public ministry duties feels as risky to me as leading in public prayer. When doing this I am always one religiously routine moment from slipping away from humbly petitioning the heart of God to piously giving a speech to the ears of man. Preaching and teaching ministry has within it the understanding that you are addressing people and seeking to place something within them through your words. Prayer is different – we are not to grasp for people’s hearts while we speak to the Lord. Prayer, if it is truly prayer, is solely Godward. Even our intercessions for others are directed to God as He is the object and they are the subjects. Prayer is the highest privilege afforded to mankind while we are upon earth yet for many it remains the ongoing unsought treasure. I, for one, have no lasting virtue in me that I cannot trace back and find it knotted to prayer. When I was redeemed almost twenty years ago I learned that for two years two separate, small groups of Christians, unbeknownst to each other, had been asking God to deliver me unto Himself. My very soul was birthed in a prayer room.
The foundation for prayer is an invitation from God to receive access to God; the entryway to His throne-room has no hinges because no door is ever closed there. He is an open-access Sovereign. People have asked me what my favorite part of being in vocational ministry is; without hesitation I confess that the answer is that I am afforded greater opportunities to spend time in prayer with God. It was much harder for me to do this when I worked a forty-hour workweek in that Data Center in Duluth. Serving God vocationally provides me freedom to move unhurried (most days) through the joy of speaking with the Lord while listening for His voice to communicate back to me via the Word and the Holy Spirit. For me, praying in public can be a struggle because the act itself introduces a self-awareness and an others-awareness that competes in that moment with my God-awareness. Public praying is unifying and edifying, even biblical, but it has always been potentially awkward for me because I feel like I am speaking with the One I love most in a room full of others when I would rather be behind a closed door and speaking with Him alone. So today I leave us with the very simple, yet hugely essential, call to become private pray-ers. If you are willing to become a person of purposed prayer then God will first supply the regular opportunity, then the sustained desire within you; after that the understanding of prayer’s value will cement itself in your soul and then will come the brilliant joy of praying. Once the joy of praying finds you it will never again seem to be some forced discipline, some conscience-bound duty, some religious ritual. It will be deeply sensed within you to be the breath and blood of your spiritual life. Most of the things you long for as a follow of Christ will be found on the back end of prayer. Go there with all your might.
“If you find your life of prayer to be always so short, and so easy, and so spiritual, as to be without cost and strain and sweat to you, you may depend upon it, you have not yet begun to pray.” – Alexander Whyte