At another recent event I similarly met and heard a young pastor by the name of JR Vassar. He is a DTS grad, and serves as the founding and lead pastor of Apostles Church in NYC. He spoke at a conference put on by RightNow Ministries, and the session I heard him do was on the topic of "Creating a Culture of Prayer". He started out by mentioning that we often affirm the necessity of prayer, but our lives are not saturated in it as they should be. His message's main objective was giving insights into how we can take prayer from the realm of Articulated Value into Activated Value.
A few things stood out to me about what he said from there on out. First, how many of you have thought of prayer as a privilege secured for us by Jesus, and that one of the main reasons He died for you was so that you might be able to pray to God? As it says in Hebrews 4:16, we can approach the throne of grace with confidence because of Jesus...Christ has won the ear of God for us!
So why don't we pray, Vassar then asked? He first cites the reason of our failure to reflect on who God is and who we are. He states that that which was Jesus' by nature becomes ours by adoption, that is "sonship". God is our wise, compassionate, merciful, loving, perfectly powerful, and limitless in power Heavenly Father. And we are His children! In order for us to view prayer in the proper light, we first must think truer thoughts about God and of ourselves. Only then will we commit more time to prayer.
Another reason he gives is that we simply don't hunger and thirst after God. And if we do ever pray, we see the reward as simply being an evident answer to our request. So if we don't see the results we desire, we chalk it up as a loss and we become discouraged and frustrated. This is the whole "vending machine" approach to prayer as he credits Paul Miller to coining in "A Praying Life". Instead of only moving quickly toward the vending machine to get what we desire and then going about our regular daily routine, we should instead employ a "family-meal" mentality and make time with God the reward. Just like when we gather in a few days with family and friends for Thanksgiving, we count the reward being simply getting to catch up and enjoy community and fellowship with loved ones. That's the whole purpose. The treasure is in the time we spend together! We should then in prayer aim our attention more on God and delighting in His presence. This should be our focus, rather than the quick-fixes and answers we want that trump intimacy with our Heavenly Father.
This next point was huge for me, and has the potential to radically change your prayer life. Vassar warns that we mustn't confuse our judicial favor with God with His relational favor. Those of us who have been saved by God's grace are accepted and favored by God solely on the basis of what Christ has done for us. The gospel is essentially that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us, and He bridged the gap between a holy God and a sin marred humanity. Christ being fully God and fully man lived the perfect life that we as fallen humans could never live, and in so doing was also the only suitable and acceptable means to which God could apply His holy and perfect wrath. On the cross God poured out His wrath and punished Christ for the sins of the entire world. All who put their faith and trust in Christ's perfect life, His substitutionary death and punishment in our place, and His subsequent burial and resurrection can be set free from sin and be born again to a living hope. We as sinners can be viewed by God as if we had the perfect righteousness of Christ, because God viewed and treated Christ as a sinner at the cross. We are accepted unconditionally now by God in a judicial sense. His judicial pronouncement of us as righteous is binding and unconditional. Nothing can be done by those of us who are in Christ to compromise this pronouncement and all that it entails.
But relationally it is another story. We as Christians, eternally secure and saved, can still in this lifetime grieve God by neglecting to seek Him. We can grieve God by letting certain sins remain a part of our lives and letting them go unconfessed and unaddressed. There is a relational capacity we have with our Heavenly Father. Certain things He wants to do in our lives and give to us are conditional, and our receiving them is based on whether or not we persistently seek after and ask Him. We mustn't presume upon God and use our judicial stance with Him as an excuse for our laziness to seek Him and persevere in prayer and service to Him.
Vassar then asked us this question, "Are your knuckles bleeding from knocking on Heaven's door in prayer...is there anything that for the last say 6 months you have been just wrestling with God about, passionately pursuing both His presence and His provision in a matter you know is in line with His will?"
Man when he said that I was very convicted, because I realized that there really wasn't. But God only does business with those who mean business, and sometimes He withholds answers for a time to see just how much business we really mean.
So then, what should we pray for? If we shouldn't view God as a vending machine and instead should consider time spent with Him as the reward - BUT He also desires that we persist in asking Him for things...then what should we be asking Him for?
Start by praying the PASSIONS OF GOD! That the renown of the Trinity would be known in all the earth, and that the Kingdom of God would gain greater and greater traction. Pray that God might bring expressions of that future kingdom to earth now. For as Dallas Willard says "You hear God's voice clearest when your passions are in line with His." Pray also for the power of the Holy Spirit, because if we are going to carry the message of God it cannot be done apart from His power at work in and through us.
Vassar closed with this "May we be freed from the fear of man by replacing it with a healthy fear of God, so caught up in sonship that we might be unleashed into the world to radically transform it with the power of the gospel."
Charles Spurgeon, regarded by many to be the greatest preacher other that Jesus to walk the face of the earth, was once quoted as saying he'd "rather teach 1 man to pray than 10 to preach." Indeed there's power in prayer, and this oft untapped resource attained through long lingering and communing with the Father is available to all His sons and daughters. Let's start knocking on His door!
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