Many of you may remember some rote prayer you were taught as a child as a place to begin the journey of prayer. Or perhaps some shared with you one of the many formulas or models out there for helping people organize and go through their prayers. The most common and personally memorable one for me was an acronym: ACTS, which stood for:
Adoration
Confession
Thanksgiving
Supplication
Many of you will recognize that model I'm sure. While none of these are ever perfect or completely adequate on their own, they can be good aids in learning to pray. More importantly almost all of them share a common implication, prayer isn't just about communicating one specific thing or in one specific way. If it was, why would we need any kind of model or aid. Consider the prayer Jesus gave us in the "Sermon on the Mount." If prayer was just about asking for things, wouldn't he have just said "And when you pray, just ask for whatever you need," and then moved on to the next part of his lesson? He doesn't do that, though. Nor does Jesus just give us a singularly themed mantra to chant. Despite its brevity, this prayer (commonly called "The Lord's Prayer") is amazingly robust and leads us to communicate about a variety of different things from a variety of internal postures. Wonder, obedience, gratitude, humble need, confidence, broken confession, etc., more than most of us really know how to unpack yet.
I guess the summary thought for me is this: balance in our prayer life is important, because God is important in so many different ways than any of us will ever really comprehend. To get into stale patterns or ruts of only communicating with God in a few specific, limited ways...no matter how good or right it is communicate in those ways...leaves us vulnerable to minimizing the greatness and significance of God in our life and all of creation. I must admit, there is a small alarm going off in the back of mind as I write this, because I believe there is an easy way to misinterpret or misapply this idea and create equally unhealthy prayers that can be overindulgent or too self-serving. Perhaps I need to share some about that in a future post. However, while caution is always appropriate, it should never be used as excuse for failing to say or do what we ought to. So, the challenge for our prayers today is to examine them a little and see if there are some important ways or things we're not opening up about because we're only praying over things or in ways that we've already grown comfortable. I believe balance is a critical component to a healthy, robust prayer life.
Such a balance became clearer to me as I learned of and now practice the ACTS approach in a Moms In Touch (MIT)prayer group. Most beneficial was being reminded to praise God and take time for confession. MIT also uses scripture as a springboard for prayer. To actually pray with words of scripture is such a blessing. That actually gave me a great start as I developed including adoration in my prayer life. Using the Word for supplication allows an expression of God's desires for my life.
ReplyDeleteI like that Sophie prays for the dogs. Rocket and Ginger are the one consistent part of Aarons' prayers. I enjoy how simply he thanks God for the small joys in his life. Reminds me to be thankful for the small joys in my life.
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