Prayer

When I was growing up, it seemed like we were in church a lot. We had Sunday service and Sunday school on Sunday morning, but there was a Sunday evening service, too. We had a youth group gathering on one evening of the week and, of course, the ubiquitous "Wednesday night prayer meeting." It wasn't unique; it was everywhere. No more. We've grown up. We've adjusted. We've compensated. We've compromised. If you'll show up once a week, we'll be happy. Twice is really godly. And that Wednesday night prayer meeting? That's a fossil from a previous era, hardly even a memory.

It's odd, too, if you think about it. Jesus didn't recommend prayer; He urged it. He commanded it. He taught His disciples to pray (Matt 6:5-15). He commanded them to "Ask" (Matt 7:7-11). He called His house "a house of prayer" (Matt 21:13). He taught His disciples to pray and not lose heart (Luke 18:1-14). Prayer, to Jesus, was not ancillary, not peripheral, not even optional. Paul took that up, too, urging us to "pray without ceasing" (1 Thess 5:17). He called us to pray for all people (1 Tim 2:1-3) and to pray about everything that concerned us (Php 4:6-7). And neither Jesus nor Paul were alone in it. The Bible is full of prayers and praying people.

Modern American churches these days have figured out that we're just not interested. When Paul wrote, "God loves a cheerful giver" (2 Cor 9:7), we use that to say, "See? I don't have to give" rather than "I need to learn to be cheerful about giving." And when American Christians said, "Thanks but no thanks" to gathering for prayer, churches understood that to mean, "We don't need to pray" rather than "We are failing to teach our people to pray." Since so much is promised in Scripture for people who pray, and we tend not to be people who pray, I suppose it's not particularly surprising that we are weaker and less blessed than we should be, is it? We ought to be people of prayer, a people on their knees, as it were. We ought to start with, "Lord, teach us to pray!" (Luke 11:1) I think we'd see an entirely different body of Christ if we did.