Ministers LetterRestoring Prayer
In a number of churches I have preached a sermon series on 4 types of prayer based on the acronym ACTS. Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication. It seems such a key area to be speaking about and although on Sundays there will usually be elements of all 4 types in our services, in our personal devotions it is so easy to concentrate on Supplication almost to the exclusion of the others.
I was delighted recently to come across a Rabbi who was also speaking about those types though under 4 different headings: Gimme! Thanks! Oops! and Wow!”
Rabbi Marc Gellman went onto explain that although they may sound simplistic, they are responses to life events, ordinary or extraordinary, that touch us, move us, or change us.
"Wow," is the awe and wonder we might experience at seeing the sunrise, or feeling love, or participating in the birth of a baby. "Thanks" is a response we might make when we wake up to live another day, or when we escape something terrible, or when something wonderful happens. "Oops" means we blew it, and we regret it; we need to be forgiven. "Gimme" can range from let the candidate of my choice win the parliamentary election to let there be an end to war.
I was recently able to attend a conference entitled ‘Restoring Prayer’ at Ridley Hall Theological College in Cambridge. I was very keen to go both to nurture my own prayer life and to be enabled to encourage others. The keynote speaker was Eugene Peterson probably best known for ‘The Message’, his translation of the Bible in the language of today. He took the book of Ephesians as his text to reclaim the language of prayer saying that it is the primary place for understanding the life of prayer in the New Testament. There were no simple answers, no simple formulas; instead an emphasis on prayer as an all-involving way of life hence in reading Ephesians you have the sense that God is in every sentence. Prayer is the total experience of the Christian. Not that everything we do and say is prayer, but that everything we do and say can be prayer. We are praying more than we realise.
The institutional way of looking at us depersonalises us, debunks anything in us that has to do with God. We are known by our social security or NHS number, by what sort of job we do, by our qualifications…. Yet the most significant thing about us is what God has done in us: God’s action & our orientation to that action.
Paul calls the Ephesians ‘saints’, and by extension we too should accept that title. Paul doesn’t know them well – it’s some time since he was among them. But he knows they/we are saints. Not that it means that we are holy or good. ‘Saints’ doesn’t refer to them or us as who we are in ourselves – but who we are in relationship to God. It’s not an indication of how well we are doing in life. Most of us are not exceptionally good or good-looking. We are selfish, etc. But God calls us saints.
As ‘saints’ we cannot be accurately identified apart from God’s attention to us. Our conversation with God, our living in the presence of God, our living in the light both of His acceptance of us and His purpose for us: these are central to our being. Prayer is then a wonderful opportunity, a tremendous calling. Mere words are only a start.
It hadn’t occurred to me that ‘Restoring Prayer’, the title of the Conference, had a double-edged nature:
Following Jesus is not a consumer activity. Prayer is not a personal technique but a relationship, a relationship that centres on our being and purpose.
I pray that we may all continue to grow in lives of prayer and so be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Roger Dunlop |
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