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Connecting Knowing Loving Growing
United Methodist Church August 2012 Issue
Experience
Invitation to Prayer Whether we recognize it or not, as C. S. Lewis noted, the world is “crowded” with God: “We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God, who walks everywhere incognito,” and whose disguise “is not always hard to penetrate. The real labor is to remember, to attend. In fact, to come awake.” The Trappist monk Thomas Merton understood that we live in a world “charged with the presence and reality of God.” As Christians we believe that God is present everywhere. We also believe that God is allknowing, all-powerful, and all-loving. And yet, often times we go through life taking long stretches where we don’t talk to our Creator, where we ignore His power and grace, and instead live life as if God doesn’t exist. Why do we do this? I don’t know. Maybe it is a sense of pride and independence, or maybe it is negligence and a knack to take God for granted. Maybe it is a lack of faith, or on the flip side, a faith that tells us God knows everything about us already anyway. Maybe we are just lazy. But the fact is that God wants us to communicate with Him. God desires a relationship with us. God is like the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15) who runs to meet us while we are still on the way. Like that text message, email, or voice mail you have really been waiting for, God is eager to hear your prayers.
So, what should we pray for? Well, we certainly have good models available to us. The ACTS prayer is one. It stands for Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. Or, a more simplified version of that is to put it this way: Please, Thank You, I’m Sorry, and I Love You. The same kinds of things that parents want to hear from their children are the things that our Heavenly Father wants to hear from His children. Just talk to God. Living a praying life will make us instruments of God’s peace, agents of God’s love, propelling us to work for mercy, order, beauty, and reconciliation. Over the next five months we will look in depth at the commitments we make to the church. We all commit before God and one another that we will participate in the ministries of the church through our prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness. Throughout August we will be looking at the spiritual practice of prayer in much detail. I urge you to take on a regular practice of prayer for the next 31 days and watch as it changes your life.
The power of prayer should not be underestimated. James 5:16-18 declares, "
Peace be with you, Pastor Doug
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