The Romance of Romans-Part 120

Romans Chapter 15 cont'd

Finally, I appeal to you dear friends, for Christ's sake and because of the love we share in the Spirit, that you partner with me and one another in prayer to God on my behalf. Ask God to deliver me from the unbelievers in Judea and that the believers there will be pleased with the offering I am bringing to them. And that he will send me to you with joy so that you may be refreshed. So may the God of peace be with you. Yes, Lord, let it be!

Comments:

Prayer...it's a strange and mysterious thing from a certain angle. An all-knowing, all-powerful and everywhere-present Creator-God commands us to tell him things that he already knows and has will to shape. Yet, he draws our attention in Scripture to examples of human beings, just like us, who have influenced him...to do or not do...specific things throughout history. They evoked a response from God that he would not have initiated without their offering heart-felt words to him. Though he dwells in a high and holy eternal realm, he seems to desire a genuine interactive relationship with us in "real-time". To me this communicates to us a amazing message of some aspects of God's nature...that, in spite of his penultimate self-sufficiency, he is also humble and relationally vulnerable. This is hard for us to imagine and believe and probably a couple of the main sub-conscious reasons most of us don't find it easy or natural to pray. After all, "There are so many things to do and God will do what he will do without my assistance." Right? Apparently, this is not the real picture.

From another angle, prayer makes complete sense because every genuine relationship is sustained by a mutual exchange of communication of heart and word. The Scriptures teach us that God desires to have a friendship with us human beings...despite our weaknesses...he "wants us". Moreover, he "wants to be wanted" by us. God has the longing passionate heart of a Father and/or a Lover. The heart-felt words we sing and pray to him from our innermost guts move him...they move his heart and his heart moves him to act in response to our longings, needs and wants. He longs to hear, like any lover does, the oft-repeated "I love you's" that comes from the beloved. He wants us to tell him the things about him that we have come to understand about how awesome he is...things about him that have stunned and overwhelmed us...his beauty, justice, mercy, compassion, forgiveness, miracle power, infinitude, holiness and the like.

In addition, God has always looked for willing human partners to work with and through as visible agents of his grace and truth to others who are estranged from him and who are striving to survive in a sin-burdened creation. We live in a battle zone of a noble war against evil. Our conversation with him relates not only to our worship of him, but to the co-mission we are on with him in this fallen world. It is absolutely essential to have an open line whereby many words are exchanged between us in the midst of this dramatic and sometimes, dangerous, adventure. For our own sanity, safety and success, we need to continually tell him what is on our hearts and what we need. He will regularly "draw near" to us on the mission and carry both us and our hearts if we will honor him by remembering that we are neither self-sufficient nor self-reliant. Prayer is a natural and essential outcome of such consciousness.

If we will repent from wrongly taking our lives, relationships and destinies into our own hands and make worship and mission our preoccupations, then we will see marvelous provisions appear from our conversations with the Trinity:

"You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions...Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you." James 4:2-3; 7-8