Weekly Reflection for April 30th, 2020
The Transformation of Prayer
“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” Matt 6:5-8
“Prayer, whatever else it may be, is not calling God’s attention to things He’s not aware of, nor is it urging Him to do His duty. No, it’s rather a conversation in which we speak our minds and God speaks His. We talk and we listen until we get into His mind and He gets into ours. All of which means that when we get down to praying, we don’t have to worry about what to say or how to say it. We can say whatever is in us. Though our prayers may spring from anxious fears or ungodly thoughts, God will take our prayers into his heart and turn them into something else and in so doing God’s tranquility takes the place of our deep anxiety. His peace transcends our panic. Prayer thus wrung out of us by our deepest needs has been turned into something else. In our praying we have been transformed. This is God at work. This is the business of prayer – our, and our world’s, transformation.”
-excerpt from Seeing God by David Roper
