Why do we pray?
“Why do we pray?”
Have you ever thought about this question? What’s the point of prayer? When the pastor says, “Pray every day” or when the Bible says “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:15-18), what’s the actual point of it all?
The Bible talks at length about prayer. Fun fact: There are two things that God loves to collect. Prayers & Tears. Meaning every prayer you whisper, sandwiched in between your morning yawns, is intimately collected by God. Your tears are the same. Bottled up and stored as a reminder by our Father that He is deeply connected to both our victories and our agonies. The truth of the matter is that though our earthly bodies are aging, adding more wrinkles, moles, and bald spots than we would care for along the way, our prayers and tears are stored up eternally - they aren’t old news to Jesus. God is best known for how he shares (John 3:16), but He is seldom known for how He stockpiles our prayers and tears. He is a hoarder in the best kind of way. Collecting trinkets of who we actually are.
Prayer is entering into the life of God in a way that someone enters a wooden study of the most interesting cosmic person ever to exist, only to find that their study is littered with bottles and binders, books and barrels, trinkets and knick-knacks that all remind this person of none other than you. God is utterly engrossed, delighted, captivated, and preoccupied with your prayers and tears.
Eugene Peterson says it beautifully, “Prayer is not begging God to do something for us that he doesn’t know about, or begging God to do something for us that he is reluctant to do, or begging God to do something that he hasn’t time for. In prayer we persistently, faithfully, trustingly come before God, submitting ourselves to his sovereignty, confident that he is acting, right now on our behalf.”
So, why do we pray?
We pray to bring ourselves into the life of God. Prayer is how we allow ourselves to live at the crossroads of both ecstasy and agony all at once. It’s how we learn to simultaneously hope and grieve at the same time. Prayer is the renunciation of “self-help” theology. It’s where one learns to thrust their life and entire future into the hands of the collecting God who is infatuated with the details of our lives. John Mark Comer concludes, “God is more of a friend than a formula.”
Prayer is the song we sing to ourselves to remind ourselves that weakness is good for us. Prayer is, as Bruggemann says, a form of “lyrical self-abandonment.” Tyler Staton says it best, in his book Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools, “Prayer replaces control with trust. A God-given desire is only fulfilled by God-given means.”
So why is prayer hard?
Because it requires brutally honest moments of quiet, solitude, and stillness, it requires putting life on mute for just a moment so that God’s still, small voice can get turned up to eleven.
Recently, we started Prayer Rooms at The Clearing. We now pray every Monday from 10:30am - 12:00pm. We’re only two weeks in, and a theme has risen out of our two sessions of unhurried 90 minutes of prayer. We need a sobering reminder of our weakness. In a world of individualism, self-help, self-care, and DIY Christianity, weakness is something we hardly ever care to embrace. We desperately need to become familiar with our weaknesses. When we do, we begin to search out the strength we desperately need.
Let’s finally answer the question: Why do we pray?
To remind ourselves of our need for God and His faithfulness to us. Take note, what we do occasionally will never make us what we want to be consistently. If we want to be the kind of Christian who has the strength of God operating in our daily lives, it will require that we regularly recognize our weaknesses by bottling up our prayers and tears and tossing the bottle into the sea of God’s strong love. Prayer is telling God, “I want to want you” until you actually do.
