More Than Friends, God Wants Pests 

For those of us who grew up in some church culture or another, it’s almost a compulsion to “open the service with prayer,” in which someone generally thanks God for “allowing us to be here together,” and asks for Him to guide the service.  The prayer normally takes from fifteen seconds to a minute and a half—then we’re off to do whatever we had already planned to do. 

What is right about this ritual is that it’s asking God to be with us, as Moses asked in Exodus 33.  But, like many of our prayers, our asking is more out of habit than desire, more out of tradition than out of real knowledge.  Many times, we don’t really even have a true picture of what we’re asking for.  As you may already know, when Jesus tells us to “ask, seek, knock,” the Greek verb tense implies a continual action (Luke 11:9-13).  We ask, and we keep on asking.  We seek and keep seeking, knock and keep knocking—until God either answers our prayer or tells us to shut up about it. 

Have you read recently the parable of the persistent widow (Luke 18:1-8) or of the friend who comes at midnight (Luke 11:5-8)?  I am, personally, lazy and too fatalistic, so I have to keep going back to these clear teachings again and again to remind myself that God does want me to pester Him until He breaks His silence.  These parables teach us that, more than our friendship with God, more than the righteousness of our request, it’s our persistence in prayer that will turn God’s ear (because, I think, it shows we’re actually asking something whole-heartedly, not as the double-minded man of James 1:6-8).  Even Jesus spent whole nights in prayer and had to go back to the Father three times in the Garden of Gethsemane, “speaking the same words,” before being satisfied with the Father’s answer. 

If we know that a persistence and passion in prayer, coming from a heart hungry for God’s presence, are the prerequisites for God’s answer, then how can we just toss off a brief and ritualistic prayer before our meetings together, and then assume that our meeting is as full of God’s presence as it can get?  People need to be asking all week for His presence at the meeting; we need to spend time at the front end of the service asking for Him to come and be at work; we need to be ready to drop anything else that’s going on in the service just to ask Him for His presence, especially if we sense the meeting is just carrying on with “business as usual.” 

Coming soon...Chapter 2.12:  Practical Suggestions for Seeking God’s Presence