Prayer is Engaging
Why does God expect us to pray? It’s because prayer is engaging with God, which is what life is all about.
Prayer is how He walks with us and talks with us in the garden alone! It’s how we tell Him what’s happening, and communicate with Him, and express ourselves to Him.
Prayer is nurturing a relationship with God.
A Man Called Otto
Perhaps you have watched the Tom Hanks movie “A Man Called Otto”. One of the storylines in that movie is about an elderly couple, one who has early Parkinsons and the other who is in a wheelchair and basically unresponsive.
A real estate company wants to buy their house so they can make some money on it, but the couple refuses, until their son who lives overseas and hasn’t seen or spoken to them in 10 years gets in touch with his parents and convinces them to give him power of attorney, and then he sells the house from under them.
When the real estate guys come to cart them out of the house, a few other people have rallied and are standing with this old couple who say ‘we aren’t moving, we never gave permission for this house of ours to be sold’.
The real estate guy says “who will look after you when your health deteriorates? Your son’s overseas! You gotta get to a retirement home!”
And one of the younger men there stands up and says “I’ll take care of them. These two are like family to me, I’ll take care of them as long as they need.” As it turns out, this man would spend much time with this older couple, eating with them most nights and looking out for them.
Which one was a real son to this couple? The one who didn’t interact with them, but tried to use them to get some money? Or the one who spent time with them and nurtured a relationship with them, even though he wasn’t a blood relative ?
Obvious isn’t it?
More Than A Name
It’s the same with God, in a sense. There are those who have the name of ‘Christian’, but they never interact with this God of theirs, unless it’s to manipulate Him into giving them something. And this is some people’s way of praying - it’s as if God is the old man with all the money, so we push his buttons here and there to try and get what we want.
But then there are those who engage with God. Who spend time with God. Who have a relationship with Him. THAT’s what a Christian is. THAT’s what prayer is.
In fact EM Bounds, the great Christian writer on prayer, went as far as to say “the person who does not pray cannot possibly be called a Christian. By no possible pretext can he or she claim any right to the term or its implied significance. If one does not pray, he or she is a sinner, pure and simple, for prayer is the only way in which the soul of people can enter into fellowship and communion with the source of all Christ-like spirit and energy”
Prayer is how we engage with God. It’s how we have a friendship with him. Stop praying, and your interaction with God becomes non-existent.
