Skip to main content

What is the point of prayer?

Someone asked me to blog on the point of prayer.  Actually, she might have been joking, but as I have been failing pretty dismally at my Lent discipline of blogging daily, I'll do my penance and have a go.

There are lots of different reasons to pray.  

1. To thank and praise God.  These are really two types of prayer but there is some crossover.  When you praise God for a beautiful day you're also thanking him for making it.  When I'm asked to do a children's talk as part of a service I often use interactive prayer and I usually break it down into praise, thanks, sorry and please.  But I'm not sure my 'praise you fors' and my 'thank you fors' are that distinct.

I guess prayers of praise are telling God how great he is without reference to anything he has actually done for you.  I'm reminded of the phrase 'cupboard love' used by my cynical parents when I was growing up.  I love you because I want something out of your cupboard (or because you've given me something out of your cupboard - prayers of thanks).  Prayers of praise are God-focused rather than me-focused.  That's probably why I find them tricky.

2. To say sorry.  I have become increasingly convinced of the importance of confession.  There's something about admitting to God that something I've done or said was stupid and selfish that is very freeing.  I can let go of my need to be in the right and admit that I'm in the wrong.  God doesn't smirk and hold it against us (that's why it's easier to confess to him than to other people.  But confessing to others that we've been stupid and selfish can be incredibly powerful).

3. To listen to what God might be saying.  This is really hard for people like me who find it hard to stop doing stuff, sit down and shut up long enough for him to get a word in edgeways.  But sometimes he speaks even when I'm not listening properly.  A couple of times in my life I've heard a quiet voice (telepathic rather than audible) which has said something which has brought peace with it, and which seemed too wise to have been thought up by my subconscious.  

4. To ask for stuff.  This is both the easiest and the hardest.  Easy because we all have stuff we want, either for ourselves or for other people; hard because God doesn't always give it to us, and we don't know why that is.  See my previous blog posts on God and suffering.  

I'm sure there are other reasons to pray, or ways of praying, so go ahead and add your comments, fellow pray-ers.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Halloween

It's that magical time of year again - that one night when my small neighbours knock on my door asking for sweeties.  This year, I'm properly prepared: I have two pumpkins (I wanted five, but decided to be thrifty), a big tub of sweets and a tube of 100 glow sticks.  The sweets are my concession to popular demand; the glow sticks are an attempt to represent light in darkness (a symbolism which will doubtless be lost on the kids).  I'm seeing the pumpkin as my main opportunity to communicate something of my Christian faith to my neighbours. One year, while I was at theological college, Halloween fell on a Sunday.  The new housing estate church I was assigned to met in a church hall on Sunday afternoons and many of the congregation were unaccompanied children.  I googled 'Christian pumpkin carvings' and guess what - there are a lot of ideas out there, America being a country which is big on Halloween and big on Christianity too.  I decided to carve a simple f...
6 comments
Read more

Only connect

Last year on Ash Wednesday I attended an ashing service at St Paul's Cathedral.  The service focused on confessing our sins and asking God's forgiveness.  During the service a berobed priest made the sign of the cross in ash on my forehead.  I thought this was pretty cool and refused my husband's request that I rub it off for the train journey home.  Then we ran into an old work colleague of mine and I felt rather stupid. Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, is all about sin and repentance - 'sackcloth and ashes' and all that.  But I wonder how many people in the UK today identify with the idea that they are sinners in need of forgiveness?  My final year dissertation at theological college focused on the dilemma of how to call to repentance people who do not think they have anything of which to repent.  I certainly didn't think of myself as a sinner when I first started exploring Christianity.  I knew I wasn't perfect, but hey, who is? I have hea...
4 comments
Read more

Turn or burn: OCD and evangelism

Recently I came to realise that my psychological makeup, specifically my OCD, had probably influenced my theology and indeed my vocation quite profoundly. I'm an evangelist, which is a word which means different things to different people, so I'll tell you what it means to me.  Being an evangelist means that my principal concern as a Christian minister is for people who don't follow Jesus, and that communicating the gospel or 'good news' to people who haven't heard it a thousand times already is the most important thing I do.  My faith has been nurtured in evangelical churches, and it's probably fair to say that evangelicals place a greater emphasis on evangelism than other Christian traditions.  That's partly because we emphasise conversion and making a personal decision to follow Christ.  In Baptist churches we practise believer's baptism, which means that we only baptise people who have made that personal decision for themselves (which is why ...
Post a Comment
Read more