Why Do We Pray?
Seth also had a son, and he named him Enosh. At that time people began to call on the name of the Lord.
Genesis 4:26 (NIV)
Charles Spurgeon would describe it this way: true prayer is neither a mere mental exercise nor a mere vocal performance. It is far deeper than these. Prayer is a spiritual transaction.
The function of prayer is never to influence God; the purpose of prayer is to change the one who is praying. Everybody is looking for ways to live past pain and human loss. And they find that the best option is to pray, not to change the outcome of terrible events, but to change their own thinking with regard to them. They pray to change their emotions in response to it all, to change how they view life, how to process pain and make healthy choices after traumatic things have happened. In order to change, they need to pray.
It is a transaction between the Creator of Heaven and those on earth. Whoever Enosh and Seth are, what we are told about them is that they apparently saw value in the transactional benefit of prayer, the transactional benefit of calling on the name of the Lord. They engaged in prayer as a transaction with God. They express pain and praise, detachment and emergence, loss and replenishment, death and life. They exchanged what was stagnating their lives for what God gave them to keep on living.
We too have surrendered to a similar kind of exchange when we say: God, I’ll give You my weakness. I know You’re going to give me Your strength. I will give You my insufficiency because I know You’ll give me what has the capacity to make me more than sufficient.
Maybe you have asked yourself, when did prayer become so convoluted? If you look at it originally, it is simple. It’s transactional. It’s an exchange: our human weakness and the decline of our human interaction for the sovereignty, grace, mercy, and power of our God.
The Bible
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
2 Timothy 3:16-17 (NIV)
Whatever is believed about the Bible these days, your life cannot be as God intended without it. You can’t ever fully understand yourself without the Scriptures. You cannot feed a healthy ethic without the Bible. Whatever opinion you have with regard to the Bible being an antiquated old book, Paul teaches that the Scriptures are breathed out by God.
What that means is that God is the source of the inspiration, and that’s the key. He is the source of the inspiration, and the effect His breathed-out inspiration has on your life is based not really on its efficacy, but on whether you value it enough to plant it in the good soil of your life.
Far too many people have shaped opinions around the Scriptures without testing their ability to transform life because they never planted it deeper than their surface intellectual suspicions or the Bible’s perceived outdatedness or its cultural “irrelevance.” However, the Scriptures cannot be understood if you come at them believing they are something other than the breathed-out expressions of God.
The Scriptures are only understood and valued when they are planted in good soil in the human spirit, meaning: “I plant it believing that it’s God’s breath, and I want to understand what God has been breathing out. I want to know why He is inspiring this kind of revelation because it teaches not only what I am to do; it teaches who I am.”
What to Do with This Story
”But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him.
Mark 16:1-6 (NIV)
They went to the tomb to make sure that the final part of Jesus’s story ended well, to offer and steward respect for His life, respect for His dying, respect for their customs, and devotion to their God. What they discovered is that the story they were motivated to help end right was really a story that was still ongoing.
It’s as if the angel were saying to them, “I know you came to put appropriate punctuation on a powerful life, but this story isn’t over. The story continues.” In fact, this belief that the story did not end at the tomb is what faith in Jesus is all about.
It’s the hope that restores, renews, reinvigorates, refreshes, and revises each and every one of us every day. And its message is this: no matter how close to the worst you can get, in Jesus Christ what looks like a story ending is always a story continuing.
There will be seasons and circumstances in our lives that hit us in ways we could never have imagined. Sometimes, we will turn corners on paths in life that we thought were stretching out before us with enormous possibilities. When we’re finally starting to believe that we can embrace joy, a sudden unexpected blow can hit us in places so deep that we don’t know if it represents the final negative punctuation to our stories. I’m talking about sicknesses, setbacks, mistakes, and regrets that we can’t wrap our brains around.
But here’s the lesson of this passage: do not give up on the rest of your story. Because if you believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, your story is not over. It is still continuing.
The One Constant
The next day the great crowd that had come for the festival heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting, “Hosanna!”
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
“Blessed is the king of Israel!”
John 12:12-13 (NIV)
The cries of Hosanna that day signaled not a symbolic celebration of victory. It was not just the prelude to feast and festival and all that is attached to a holiday. That day, the people were laying down palm branches and waving them in the air because Jesus was the arrival of a long-awaited victory. Jesus represented the answer to their collective prayers and Jesus was the reward of their spiritual discipline on the day He entered the city. The cries of Hosanna were stretched now in both directions: back to celebrate the Passover, and forward to celebrate the coming of the kingdom of God.
John is precisely descriptive when he says that there are two crowds. When Jesus enters the city, one crowd is simply described by John as a “great crowd.” They are there because they’re joining others to celebrate the Passover. They were initially there for historical observation. But then there was another crowd. This other crowd is populated by those who followed Jesus into the city because they decided they needed to be near Jesus after watching Him raise Lazarus from the dead. That miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead was the confirming proof for many that Jesus was the Messiah. They had been long anticipating Him.
One crowd is there holding palm branches based on what they have heard about Jesus. The other is there based on what they have seen Jesus do.
So, what’s the point? The point is this: there is and there always will be variability in the reception of Jesus Christ. It will vary like this consistently until the Lord returns.
Both crowds are singing and saying and celebrating the same thing: Jesus is my king. The one constant—what remains consistent from generation to generation—is the variability in the reception of Jesus.
The Church and Its Head
And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.
Ephesians 1:22-23 (NIV)
Many people think the priority of the church is to be the body of Christ. This highlights the interconnectedness of believers. The idea is that each member has a unique role to play in fulfilling God’s purposes. Each person has a function. Each person is critical to the church’s ability to fulfill its mission. Each person is responsible for the care and the wellbeing of others in the assembly.
The perspective on how the church ought to focus itself and operate, however, can vary a great deal. Some people have an image of the church and prioritize it as an institution. For them, the church is measured by its structure, its doctrines, its traditions, and its governance. People who lean heavily toward this kind of view place priority on leadership, governance, and doctrinal fidelity. Now that has a temptation associated with it: you can get stuck in the view of the church as an organization, which can mean you forget its priority to care for the people who assemble inside of it.
Some image the church as a missional community and emphasize its role in mission and outreach, both locally and globally. Some may have priority for the mission and forget the care we owe one another.
Many people view the church where the priority is as a worshiping community. For people who make this the primary function of the church, they emphasize worship, prayer, and sacraments (like communion, baptism, and weddings). The person who prioritizes the church based upon its worship will have a preoccupation with the performance and may not place any priority on the mission.
Because of all these possibilities, Paul reminds us that what brings us together, regardless of our prioritized distinctions, is the commonality of Christ.
People have all kinds of views and expectations of the church. So the question is, what was God’s original purpose? What are you a part of? You’re part of what gathers to represent Christ in the world, to carry out Christ’s mission. You are called out, summoned to gather with others who believe in Jesus. And if we meet in the common belief in Jesus, differences evaporate in His being the head over everything.
