You Were Created to Pray預覽

Created for Communion with God

The heart of prayer is communion with God in a unity of love and purpose. We, therefore, need to learn how to enter God’s presence with the right spirit, approach, and preparation so that we can have this communion with Him.

“Entering into God’s presence” is a term frequently used in the church today in reference to worship and prayer. However, in our casual, twenty-first-century Christianity, most of us don’t understand what this concept really means. We often fall short of entering into God’s presence because we lack a genuine reverence for Him. We need to be spiritually sensitive to the fact that God is holy, mighty, and worthy to be reverenced.

One of the favorite theological ideas in many churches today is that grace cancels law. Yet because we misunderstand the nature of grace, we are casual about our obedience to God. We commit sin, and then we hurriedly ask for forgiveness on our way to church or a prayer meeting. By the time we get to the gathering, we think we’re ready to join other believers in prayer. We treat the precious blood of Jesus, which He gave His life to deliver to us as if it’s some temporary covering for our messes so we can sin all over again. Sadly, we don’t really love Jesus—we use Him. Then we wonder why God doesn’t answer our prayers. The truth is that grace supersedes law in the sense that only the grace we receive in Christ enables us to fulfill God’s law.

Jesus told us that the greatest commandment of all is, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). God is saying to us, in essence, “Don’t obey Me because of the things you want from Me. Obey Me because you love Me. ‘If you love me, you will obey what I command’ (John 14:15). If you love Me, you won’t need chastisement and discipline to do what I ask of you.”

God doesn’t want us to use Him merely as safety insurance from hell. He wants a relationship, not a religion. He wants to be a Father to us. He wants communion with us. Communion means intimacy with our heavenly Father through which we receive His love, express our love for Him, find out His will, and then do it. It is entering into the very mind and heart of God in order to become one with Him and His purposes. Jesus prayed for us, “That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21).

Heavenly Father,

Your Word says, “The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it” (1 Thessalonians 5:24). You have called us to a lifestyle of prayer, and we ask You to fulfill that calling in us. Give us hearts to seek an intimate relationship with You every day and to follow Your thoughts and ways rather than our own thoughts and ways—or others’ opinions. We pray this in the name of Jesus, our Great Intercessor. Amen.

Thought: The heart of prayer is communion with God in a unity of love and purpose.