When I was a kid, I thought that I had to pray a certain way. As in, I physically had to have my eyes closed and my hands folded—no questions asked, I fully believed those were requirements until I was 13 years old. It sounds funny, but I think that we still approach prayer that way. As in, we believe that we’ve got to check certain boxes before we can go and talk to our Father. Let’s talk about those and see what the Word has to say about them.
Let’s go to 1 Corinthians, Hebrews, and Colossians.
The biggest issue that a lot of us have when we go to the altar is that we think we need to show up squeaky clean and put together. After all, Jesus is King. But, He’s a different kind of King, and prayer isn’t a place for us to look our best or even to be our best, it’s for us to rest, repent, praise—for us to become our best for Jesus and His Kingdom. In fact, it isn’t up to us to make ourselves clean, because Jesus already did it for us on the Cross. In 1 Corinthians 6:11 (NIV), after listing out what terrible things the Corinthians were, Paul says, “But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” How clean we are isn’t up to us—it’s up to Him.
A little while back I used this analogy that we were like children who got hurt on the playground, and God was like the dad who smoothed a bandaid over the scrape, saying, “it’s all better now” while He wiped our tears. Prayer is the park bench we sit on as He does that. And prayer is also the shower in which we get cleaned, the bed in which we sleep, and the dinner table from which we eat. And, by the way, when I say dinner table, I don’t mean the one that you eat from when you’re on a fancy date, I mean the one you eat from when you’ve come home after a hard day and you’re outrageously hungry. The one where you don’t think about how you look. We have to approach prayer in this raw and real kind of way—as in, “Dad, I’m filthy, I’m tired and I’m starving.” That’s not exactly a pretty prayer, but I’ll tell you—it’s the ugliest prayers that are the most beautiful.
On that note, a working prayer does not have to be composed of thees and thous. In fact, it usually isn’t. There’s a lot of power behind words, but when the tongue that is speaking them isn’t doing so in faith, those words are ineffective. In fact, a lot of the most effective prayers, the ones that get us closest to God, are usually not spoken in words but cried in tears. Those tears are huge with emotion, but most of all, they are full of faith.
Hebrews 11:6 (NIV) says “And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” In fact, if you go through the entire chapter, nearly every single paragraph starts with “by faith.” God answered Abraham and Sarah’s prayers for a child, but not because Abraham spoke in free verse—because Abraham had faith. When we’re fixated on what we’re saying and how we say it, we don’t fully press into the faith that God hears us and is moving. We focus on our words rather than His.
MEET THE AUTHOR:
Katie Pennington is a writer and editor who is originally from Hazard, Kentucky, but currently resides with her family in central Tennessee (though she frequently visits her Appalachian roots). Her favorite Bible verse is Psalm 42:5, which reminds her that in despair, there’s hope in God, and there’s healing in praising Him.