Prayer seems
likes a pretty standard/expected/average topic to do a devotional on – however
I chose to lead a session on prayer because one of my aims for my time here in
Rwanda is to get better at praying and I wanted to share this with the team and
to have a time of praying together in different ways. I long for a life lived
with day-in-day out constant communication with Jesus, and in an attempt to
move one step closer from where I am now to that goal I’m going back to the basics
with prayer.
For many
people going back to basics with prayer looks like ‘ACTS’: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication.
This is a tool used by many people in order to remember every stage of prayer.
I find it particularly useful because it reminds me that there is so much more
to prayer than just presenting our requests to God – as we will see…
(NB. I am currently reading Bill Hybels’s
“Too busy not to pray” and therefore lots of points are taken from that book. I
really recommend it too!)
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| 'Too Busy Not To Pray' by Bill Hybels |
Adoration:
There are
many reasons why adoration and praise should be at the start of our prayers…
- It sets the tone for the whole prayer; as it reminds us of who we're addressing and whose presence we have entered. Before launching into whatever we want to say it's really important to take this pause to dwell on who it is we're talking to.
- It reminds us of God's identity and inclination. Taking this time shapes our understanding of who God is - this will inevitable motivate us to keep on praying and also make us more likely to ask for God to work in seemingly impossible situations (when it comes to supplication) - because we remember who God is and what he is a capable of.
- It gives perspective and prepares us to listen to God. Adoration softens our spirit and changes our agenda.
- It's important purely because God is worthy of our adoration and praise. For me a challenge lies in the idea that it should be a struggle to continue with reciting the Lord's Prayer past the first line without bursting into praise about how wonderful it is that we are children of God (1 John 3:1). (This isn't exactly my thought process when I say 'Our Father...').
To
put this into practice each team member individually prepared using bible
verses a short prayer about a specific characteristic of God – e.g. Holy,
Loving, Omniscient, Powerful – and then we all prayed prayers of purely praise.
Confession:
Next
up is confession, for me this is something rarely spoken about and something
I’m pretty rubbish at. So it was good to take time to dwell on why confession
is important and why we do it. A challenge was the need to be more specific
when it comes to confession. This is based on the idea that if we lump all sins
together is a vague ‘sorry God for all the times I mucked up’ sort of prayer
then we fail to fully dwell on how and why we make these mistakes and therefore
struggle to move forward in it with God.
“When
you have the courage to call your sins by their true names, several wonderful
things fall into place. Your conscience will be cleansed. I finally said it, you will think. I’m finally getting honest with God. I’m not playing games anymore and
it feels good. You’ll be flooded with relief that God has a forgiving
nature, just as Psalm 103:12 promises: ‘As far as the east is from the west, so
far has he moved our transgressions from us’. And you’ll finally feel free to
pray for strength to forsake that sin from that point forward.
“Frankly
we don’t take confession seriously enough. If we did, our lives would be radically
different. On about the fifth day in a row that you call yourself a liar, a
greedy person, a manipulator or whatever term may be true for you, you say to
yourself, I’m tired of admitting that. With
God’s power, I’ve got to root it out of my life.”
(Hybels,
Chapter 6, Loc799, Too Busy Not To Pray)
I
also emphasised the importance of taking time to dwell on and to know God’s
forgiveness when it comes to confession, otherwise writing a list of specific
times you failed to achieve God’s standards would become a depressing chore
rather than a renewing, refreshing time with God.
To
put this into practice we took a moment to each write down a specific
confession, then to pray and know God’s forgiveness and to demonstrate this by
crossing out what we had written, ripping up the paper, and then throwing it in
the bin.
Thanksgiving:
Luke
17:11-19 tells the story of ten lepers who were healed by Jesus, yet only one
comes back to express thanks. The question is: were all ten men grateful to
Jesus for what he had done in their lives? Yes of course they were. Yet only
one of them bothered to turn their gratefulness into thankfulness. There is a
difference between being grateful and thanking someone for what they did, and
Jesus is clearly disappointed by those who did not take the time to express
their thanks.
Thanking
God brings joy into our own lives too, and also motivates us to keep praying.
A
suggestion for breaking up prayers of thanks into categories is: Answered
prayers, Relational blessings, Spiritual blessings and Material blessings.
In
pairs the team took a moment to thank God for specific things in each of these
four categories. (What was pretty cool was how thanking God for our team and
putting us all together came up in every single category!)
Supplication:
The
idea is that now, having gone through the previous three stages, we are ready
to present our requests to God. This tends to be the part of prayer that we’re
all quite good at so the only thing to add is the importance of humility and
honesty. It’s important to acknowledge that if God has different plans then
that is what we want because ultimately we want his plans to outwork in our
lives rather than our own. And finally to remember that ‘nothing is too big for
God to handle or too small for him to be interested in’.
