Wednesday Night April 23rd

This week we continued in our discussion of worship. We started the night by reading James 5:17-18. In this passage it describes the great prophet Elijah as an ordinary person just like us. We looked deeper into what made Elijah so extraordinary. We discussed how his great acts of faith are directly related to his worship and his worship is described by a word that we so often don’t think of as worship. In the passage discussed it gives us the secret to Elijah’s power. It was brought about through prayer. We used this passage to discuss 4 statements about prayer as it relates to worship.

The first statement I made was that “Prayer is the avenue for worship”. If we could take the concept of worship and how it brings change and make it an object, I would like to make it a car. Think about it, a car changes our scenery; we ride from cities to pastures, from mountains to beaches. So if worship is the car then prayer is the road that worship occurs on.

This led us to a question that demanded an answer. The question was: What is prayer? I defined prayer as communication between God and us. That sounds like a simple answer but in reality it is not. When I think of prayer I think of opening prayers, closing prayers, offertory prayers, invitation starting prayers, and all types of verbal prayers but if we truly think about communication it doesn’t always involve words. I can speak words to you or type words to you and you can do the same to me but if we chose not to listen and take in what someone is saying then we truly aren’t communicating. We thought about it this way, how many times have our parents told us to do something and we openly and blatantly refused to do it. Or we have tried to tell something to our parents and they didn’t understand what we were saying. We both may be trying to communicate, but honestly we aren’t because it requires something from both of us. We also talked about how we can communicate through facial expressions, tone, and hugs. We concluded that communication between God and us is a very complex concept. We discussed that many times we “so called” pray but our prayers never really communicate anything that God wants to hear.

This led us to another passage of scripture, Romans 8:26-27. We discussed that from this passage we can learn a great deal about real prayer. We can learn specifically that prayer changes us. Why? Because from scripture we can understand that God is unchanging. So in order for us to communicate effectively with someone who doesn’t change we must change to be like that person. At this point we discussed some of the most popular prayers of all teenagers and adults too. Number one is “God please let me date him/her; please oh please let him/ her like me.” And number two is “God please let me pass or do well on this test, even thought I didn’t study. If you will let me pass I will never cuss again.” I did make lite of these prayers but if we are honest we pray everyday for something out of selfish motive. We daily ask the infinite, holy, unchanging, everlasting God of the universe to give little bitty us exactly what we want. This is foolish. Don’t get me wrong I classify myself in that category too. This led us to another question, “If my prayers of selfishness are not going to come true, then why does the Bible tell me that if I pray in faith God will give me what I want?”

This leads us to our last statement and we can truly see this if we closely examine Romans 8:26-27. Prayer is lead by the Holy Spirit through faith in Christ. If we become followers of Jesus Christ by trusting in His sacrifice on the Cross then we are promised the Holy Sprit, the One who provides comfort in times of difficulty, the One who leads us into all truth, and the One who provides the power to carry the gospel to all nations. This Spirit is the presence of God within the heart of a believer. So if this presence is a part of God then it can know what God wants. Because it knows what God wants it can guide us to pray for God to do the work that He has destined to do and we get to be a part of God’s story. Can you imagine God saying to Elijah, “Pray that it won’t rain”? Elijah is like OK! But we so often say uh …… are You sure? We closed with a challenge to live, walk, praise, and exist in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Walk Brave, Dustin