Prayer Positions You

Some years ago, I was working on a book entitled Wrestling with God, where I was dealing with some incredibly difficult intellectual questions, including our question at hand: Why should we pray if God is all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful?

I was speaking at a conference center in Tennessee, a beautiful place in a beautiful setting. I was out there for the week as their campus pastor. One day, I was playing tennis and pulled a hamstring. It was such a pull that I could barely get around the rest of the week. 

And so, I spent a lot of the week on the porch, the kind of screened-in porch they had at the minister’s cottage. This gave me a chance to think about some really tough questions, a lot of which I moved into the book I was writing.

As I was focusing on that specific question, sitting in that screened-in porch at that minister’s cottage at that retreat center in Tennessee, the thought occurred to me: 

Praying positions you to experience what God’s grace already wants to give.

That brought me back to Richard Foster. In his marvelous book, Celebration of Discipline, Foster made the point that all spiritual disciplines, whether they’re prayer, Bible study, worship, fasting, solitude, or meditation, don’t earn God’s favor. 

They don’t talk God into giving us something he didn’t want to give. They get us close enough to God that we can then receive what his grace wants to give.

Well, that’s what spiritual disciplines do, and prayer especially. 

You have to be close enough to these words to read them right now. You have to be close enough to a worship service to hear what’s going on in the worship service. So it is with praying. 

Today, recount the moments in your life where prayer positioned you to receive what God’s grace already wanted to give you. Then pray and ask God to keep drawing you close.