Prayer is... Transformative

To watch the video version of this sermon, click here.

Hello and welcome back to another week here on Making Waves! So glad that you’ve decided to join us as we close out this series on prayer together. If you have missed the first two segments of this series, I encourage you to go back and check them out, but if you decide not to, I will start out with a quick summary to catch us all up to the same speed.

We set out two weeks on a journey to try and begin to open up our minds and hearts to a deeper sense of prayer. To take a look at the roots of prayer and what it is at it’s most basic level to help us understand what even happens in prayer.

During our first week, we saw that prayer is deeply personal. God so longingly desires to have a relationship with us. Prayer is our opportunity to connect with God in a direct line of communication. It’s also our means of connecting with the world: our community.

Then, last week, we saw that prayer is persistent. God calls us to be persistent in our prayer. It’s not a one-stop shop or a Q&A session. God wants a relationship and wants us to use prayer as a means of working through life with Him by our side instead of going at it alone. Instead of using prayer as our time to ask FOR things FROM God, we should use it as our time to be WITH God when we need Him the most.

And now we find ourselves in the final week of this series, so before I type any more of my own spirit-filled words, let’s turn to the Good Word and dive into some scripture. I encourage you to follow along with this scripture in your own translation or to utilize the passage listed below and follow along with this message.

“12 I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

...

9 Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; 10 love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. 11 Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. 12 Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. 13 Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.”

-Romans 12:1-3, 9-13

Will you pray with me? Dear Heavenly Father, I ask that the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts together be acceptable in Your sight, O God, for You are our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

I want to kind of divide this sermon into a mini two-part series for this one, so first let’s look at our third and final basic truth of prayer. When you think of major characters or entities in the Bible, who are the first that come to mind?

Jesus? Moses? Abraham? Paul? David? Etcetera?

There are a wide variety of characters you could pull from but, odds are, they all share one thing in common: a relationship with God. Now, it might sound like an echo chamber in here, but if I have said one thing about prayer over the past three weeks, it’s that prayer is our direct connection with God, our relationship with Him.

Now, sometimes, it might seem more like our prayer is actually our own seeking out of God. Like Elijah when he tries to find God in the wind, rain, and noise, but ultimately ends up finding God is the silent prayer. Or maybe we are like Philip when he asks Jesus to show the disciples God and Jesus says, “Do you not understand? If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”

Regardless of our prayer journey, we can see that something happens in the lives of all of the people that we listed earlier. Jesus, obviously, is crucified, dead and buried. Moses is given the task of rescuing the Israelites. Abraham has his name changed and is charged to sacrifice his own son. David is given the task of slaying a giant on a battlefield as a child. Paul murders the people that he would one day go on to call his brothers and sisters. We could go on and on, but I think we can all see that, when God is involved, when we have that relationship, things get pretty interesting.

One of the many words that translate into prayer is the Hebrew term / avodah /, which basically means, “to work or take action for a higher purpose,” or “to be of service.” Let’s break that down.

Prayer is to take action for a higher purpose.

Prayer, then, is in its very nature a call to take action, or to DO SOMETHING. Prayer is not something that is passive and lazy. We don’t pray with the understanding that someone else will do something for US. In this definition, prayer isn’t asking God to do something in our lives, nor is it asking God to influence someone else to do something in our lives. “God, please let the government give me a special lottery-style tax break this year. Amen.” Instead, it’s deepening our relationship with God so that we can go out and do what we must do.

Prayer is taking action, but for what purpose? A higher purpose. Well, what on earth does that mean? It means that prayer is pushing us to be more than we are. To be bigger and better than ourselves. It means giving 110%. Well, “Hang on,” you might say, “That’s all well and good, but I can’t be more than I am.” And you’d be right, you can’t be more than you are. But let’s look to our scripture that we read earlier. Paul calls us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Maybe we can’t achieve more than we are on our own, but thanks to the power of the grace of God, we can be transformed in our very minds and souls into the higher purpose we are daily called to achieve.

Prayer is transformative. Look to the great cast of characters we studied just a moment ago. All of them were transformed to something way bigger than they could ever be on their own accord. The only way that they ever achieved what they were meant to achieve was through their relationship, their connection, with God through prayer. They took action in their lives and pursued the higher purpose set on their shoulder by their connection with God.

Now, I could go ahead and wrap up here. I could just end with the spiritual stuff and cut it off and we could go grab some Golden Corral before the Baptists show up. But instead of just doing the words and motions, how about we dive into some real and practical means of prayer? I can tell you and tell you about prayer until I’m blue in the face, but what could be more valuable than having real, tangible means by which to better grasp and practice prayer?

This is an idea that I’ve picked up from my time at Duke Divinity School. As I had mentioned briefly last week, during my time so far at Duke we have been charged with the task of weekly spiritual formation in a small group setting. This emphasis on practical means of spiritual formation has been really interesting in discerning new methods of prayer and relationship with God and our community. You may recall the clay man statue from last week, as he/she was the result of a morning of meditation through the use of art as prayer.

Some of you may have heard me mentioning using art as prayer last week, or perhaps you’ve heard me talk about the adult coloring books (another addiction of mine), and thought to yourself that that isn’t the prayer your momma and daddy taught you so it ain’t real prayer. What if I told you that there are even more forms of prayer than just art? And way more than just the one way that we are taught by our parents? I’d like to look at some of these as we work towards the end of this series. For the most part, I think we can sum up prayer into 6 major categories that most forms of prayer fall under.

First, there is the most familiar for most of us in here: Rote Prayer. Many of us likely say this kind of prayer every Sunday. Some of our Catholic brothers and sisters might do several of these in succession on a Sunday and some through the week. These are the prayers that find themselves in memorized or structure phrases. “The Jesus Prayer” is a traditional prayer that repeats this phrase: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” In our church, we say the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday. I can also remember that my mom would always come up to my room when I got ready to go to sleep and we would pray the same memorized prayer each night. These are all examples of Rote Prayers. These mantra-style prayers may make us feel nostalgic for when we said them as a child. Some of us may find contentment in the consistency of praying the same thing. Some of us may enjoy the fanciful language that can sometimes go along with this form of prayer.

Another very familiar form of prayer is the Intercessory Prayer. At Pelham UMC, we have a time of each service where we collect prayers and praises from the congregation. It can be personal, it can be our friends and family, it can be country-wide, whatever. It can be anything. Then, after we collect the prayers, we lift those things up to God in prayer. We aren’t praying for those things to magically change, nor are we just letting our omnipotent God know just in case He forgot, but instead we are inviting God into those situations and lifting up ourselves as tools of change for God to use in those situations.

Our brothers and sisters from the East can also teach us many beneficial forms of meditative prayers, such as a Centering Prayer or a Prayer of Silence. These can both be very similar in quieting down the busy world around us and focusing instead on God within us and our relationship with Him. In a centering prayer, one sits and says the same word repeatedly and slowly as a means of tuning out the outside world and focusing on the word that he or she is saying. Perhaps that word might be “God” or perhaps “Love,” whatever the word may be, it helps to center the person with where he or she wishes for his or her mind to be during prayer. In a similar fashion, simply being silent can help us stop focusing on our own thoughts and words and instead hearing God in the nature around us.

Another form you might be familiar with and not know it is lectio divina, or the Prayer of the Divine Word (i.e. scripture). This is a form of prayer where we sit with the Word, or a section of scripture from the Bible. We read the words on the page and seek to find ourselves in the scripture. We put our situations in the instance in the passage, we relate the meaning to our world today. This prayer is essentially what we do on Sunday mornings when the preachers shares a message based off of the scripture of that week and relates it to our world of today.

There are also the Movement Prayers, which are a bit more unconventional. These are the prayers like my form of prayer that I find in art. Some might find prayer in their movements: dancing, singing, worshipping. My wife has told me before that there is no place that she feels closer to God than when she is singing harmony to the Christian Radio station, namely any song by Kari Jobe or Lauren Daigle. Some people will never be as close to God in church as they are when they mow the lawn on Saturday afternoons. These are our everyday prayers that we find in the mundane tasks that bring us peace and closeness to our life with God.

Finally, there are Prayers of Higher Purpose, or Prayers of Offering. These are the prayers of our Biblical giants who prayed for God to use them in His higher calling for their lives. These are the prayers of transformation that allow for God to take our lives as we offer them and use our lives to further His kingdom.

I hope you will practice these forms of prayers. Maybe pick one a week and try it out and see what you think, maybe do one for a month. Keep a journal and see what you find. Prayer is incredibly important and it is an incredible blessing that we get to pursue God in such an intimate method. Regardless of what means of prayer you prefer or pursue, I encourage you to remember that prayer, at it’s roots, is personal, persistent, and transformative. God desperately wants a relationship with you. He is actively seeking you out in your prayer life. How will you respond?