For the past few months, our church has been meeting once a month on Sunday nites for prayer. At this past meeting, Pastor Ed asked why we fail to pray or we forget to pray so often. It’s a good question.
One answer is that we think we can make it thru things without praying. . . that we have the resource in ourselves to make it thru. It may not be consciously stated, but the fact of things in going on without prayer is that we believe we can make it thru. Often it is only when we are truly overwhelmed, when we start to sink under things, that we turn to the Lord. And this in view of the Lord’s invitation to “abide in Me and I in you,” as well as the principle of going thru things, “without Me, you can do nothing.”
Paul knew this, “I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwells no good thing.” To be alive in Christ means taking the same ground that the Lord Jesus took, “I can do nothing on My own.” It is what the Spirit will manifest and guide us into as we follow Christ in this world. . . to bring the greatness of the Lord Jesus into view and to bring us to nothing in ourselves.
When Christ is all and He is the answer to every question and trouble, prayer is the most natural thing. When Christ is all, there is no failure or forgetting to pray. . . and not just to the questions and troubles.
It is a lesson I am still learning. When the time came to share requests, I was wondering if I should share a current billing dispute I have with a client. . . a large project didn’t go ahead because of current difficulties and the client doesn’t think he should pay for work done for him. Having been thru this kind of thing before, there are always more things at stake than just money. . . it’s also the response to people and situations, the frustrations, the accusations, the capacity to bear things, to bear unjust things and not get angry or hate. . . to find in Christ the capacity to love.
It was in that moment of question about sharing this that the lesson was still needed. . . I thought I could make it thru, without the prayers of others. And yet the capacity to make it thru things is only found in Christ. . . no matter the measure of the Lord we come into as we go thru things, He remains the wisdom and power of God.
