Prayer: drawing water

from my message on 1/15/12 from Matthew 6:5-15

Prayer...it's really very simple. It's like this story (most of the stories are from Richard Foster's book, Prayer). Father was going through the mall with his 2 year old son. The boy was being a typical 2 year old, acting out, rebelluous, fussy. The dad grew exasperated...what to do? So he began to make up a song....it didn't rhyme, the dad sang off-key...it was silly. As they went from store to store, the dad took his son in his arms and sang, "I am so glad that you are my son, I love your curly hair, I like the way you put pureed carrots in your hair, it's great that you learned to poop, you are so good with the dog..." On and on the dad sang, from store to store, without rhyme and off key. The little boy grew quiet. He was fascinated by this song. As the dad was buckling his son into the car seat, the little boy said, "Sing it over again to me, Daddy, sing it again!"

This is prayer, our desire to hear our Daddy sing a love song to us. We want to be wrapped in the arms of our God and hear how much we are loved. In the model prayer, Jesus gives us, he addresses God as Daddy, Abba. I read a quote this past week from an imminent Jewish scholar who said that in all of Jewish literature, not once is God addressed as Daddy. Now we know that God is neither male nor female, that God is beyond gender, but to call God Daddy is know that God is personal and intimate.

We are in our second week of 6 week study on the Treasures of the Transformed Life. We make our commitment to pray. God makes a commitment to meet us in prayer. We have been using water imagery for this study. A quote I came across this past week captures prayer well by saying, God thirsts to be thirsted after.

I got these quotes from a book called Prayer by Richard Foster, a Quaker pastor. He talks about a social worker who kept pestering him to come to her city to lead a workshop on healing prayer. He kept putting her off, saying he didn't have time, there were plenty of resource people in her city, etc. She kept after him. Finally, he said, let's make it a matter of prayer, and if 6 people came to her asking for such a workshop in the next week, unsolicited, then he would know that it supposed to be. Frankly, he said, he was not trying to be spiritual. He was merely trying to get her to go away. Four days later, she called to say that 12 people had asked for such a workshop. So Richard Foster went very unwillingly to lead a weekend workshop for some 15 social workers on healing prayer at this woman's house. The first meeting on Friday evening, one man said, "I am not one of you." Which is to say, that he was not a Christian, he was not a follower of Jesus as Lord and Savior. The group assured him that it was ok. The Holy Spirit fell gently on the gathering for the whole weekend, opening layers of healing. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, the man who had confessed that he was not a Christian, said, "I want to know Jesus the way you know Jesus." Richard didn't know what to do...he was surprised. One young man filled in the gap. He came and laid hands on the seeking man. Richard Foster said it was a holy moment, as the young man prayed the Nestea commercial! He said, "Dear God, let your child fall back into your loving embrace like it says on the Nestea commercial and go 'Ahhhh.'" The seeking man wept at all the love washing over him. He said he felt a connection with his baptism as a child and that he was being healed. All we want is to have our Daddy pick us up and sing us a love song.

This book I mention by Richard Foster, I found on my shelf this past week, because I was teaching another class, for Stephen Ministry. I thought that I had finished it, but I hadn't. When I looked to where I had left off, guess what the chapter was? It was on the Lord's Prayer. I was reminded that it really is the Disciple's Prayer, the Lord's gift to us. When we don't have the words, there are words waiting for us. I was reminded that it is a prayer of simplicity. Basically, we are going to our Daddy and expressing our needs. Now I know what Jesus says, that the Father knows what we need before we ask. But you parents know that we still like to have our children ask for what they need. It deepens the bond, strengthens the relationship.

One more water imagery from Foster's book, a quote from an old saint in the Church. He says, in prayer it is better to be a reservoir than a canal. A canal simply has water flowing through it. A reservoir waits until it is filled to overflowing, receives until it has a superabundance from which to draw. May it be so for us. May you fill up on your Daddy telling you how much you are loved. Amen.

Invitation to prayer. Once upon a time, I attended a prayer lunch in another city hosted by another denomination, which shall remain nameless. We ate a lot. We talked a lot around the tables, but we prayed very little. It was an afterthought, as we were about to leave.

Today, I want us to pray. We will take time in worship to pray, not just talk about prayer. You may stay right where you are in the pew. You may be silent. You may pray out loud. You can use the blue prayer insert. You can pray from your heart. You can sing. You can dance. You can go to one of the prayer stations around the worship center and write a prayer to place on the wall. If you are a child or a child at heart, you can come down front here and draw a picture of your prayer. You can touch the water of baptism and be thankful. You can come here to the altar rail to kneel and pray and perhaps be anointed with oil. Youth may want to form a prayer huddle around the sound board and pray with our new assistant, Diane. There are many right ways to pray. Let's take time to do that now.