Devotion To Prayer

We do well to perceive prayers as discussion between parent and child – with restrained communication from one, and limited knowledge from the other.  (By using the family analogy we are recalling the preference of Jesus in using parables to freight his meanings.  The Apostle Paul owed much to the patterns of Aristotle’s rhetoric.  Both are used by God, although both might be faulted by divine standards.)  The child stubs his toe, begins to cry and hastens to mother for comfort and some relief.  The child may be sniffling, making some word sounds, and the gestures make clear the enormous extent of the conditions.  There is concern from mother, not nearly as dramatic as that of the child.  She knows the pain is temporary, perhaps even instructive for future attention to putting on footwear.  The conduct of the child contributes to the rather rapid recovery that includes his choice for the participation of mother’s presence – no matter what she does in alleviating the suffering.  We might call this human prayer.  Mother knows all about the matter from the first moment of a whimper from the child.  It is important for the child to do what he does, as part of the context of comfort and healing.  He is included even if only in his troubled presence.

Prayer is like that between thinking persons, young or old, approaching Father God, who knows all about the circumstances.  The humble and devout approach, related to prayer, is a key to understanding how prayer may be evaluated.  It may have some anger in it, some loss of faith perhaps, some selfishness, and the negatives may be recited at length.  Answers can only be made in the affirmative.  Because we do not always think in the affirmative we resort to the will of God for answers.  Even in a simple matter the answer may be too complex for us to achieve.  Our pleas are in hopes and desires.  God’s part is in action that includes understanding of the total complex of the prayer.  That is enough to justify prayer – talking to someone who already knows all about the issues noted in the prayer.  If we are unwilling or neglectful of the process, he assumes the matter is not worthy of our time, so may be unworthy of his interest.   

Or the prayer may be filled with devotion, with penitence, with emergency, with praise, and that list may also be extended.  Devotion is necessary to aid our humility, an important factor of truth.  Expression of devotion, something God doesn’t really need offers insight to us that God is truly effective in parenting his children, and in the process teaches something of genuine humility so to clarify the differences in heaven from earth.  Matters are not going to follow a course that earth understands so the matter must be left to prayer.  But we are like the child who brings the broken toy to the parent for repair and then keeps interrupting by putting a finger in – so protesting the time-consuming approach of the repair person.

God interprets all prayers within the needs and interpretations of the person at prayer and then extends attention to the themes of the prayers.  An excellent prayer attitude is implied in the sentence of Scripture: Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief.  Peter knew that he believed when, at the fire, he denied the Lord.  Christ looked toward Peter with understanding, some disappointment – without abandonment.  Peter went out immediately to prayer and tears, with no known correction given to the maiden who had noted his relationship to Christ.  Christ experienced a similar experience on the cross in his plaint that the Father may have abandoned him.  The Father certainly did not abandon him, but the passage tells us in a startling passage that even God has emotions.  There was suffering in the God-head.  Perhaps, God had never suffered quite like this – before this event.  There was the sorrow of God in the crucifixion of Jesus, but an enormous gift of God to mankind in that suffering moment that gave pause from the norms of God.  Perfect God, who could not deny himself by overlooking the penalty of violation in his creation, took on the violation in the penalty so to provide justification for his children.  He proved himself in mercy – and suffering.  He appears then to fulfill his love (agapao) that has no boundaries in his nature, to meet the justice that has no boundaries in his nature without violating either attribute.  Had he created a massive creature of distilled virtue to bear the burden he would not have fulfilled himself to himself.