When asked what is the central, most important aim of Christians, everyone has something different to say. From “being a good person” to “becoming like Christ” to “knowing God,” you’ll hear the whole spectrum.
Lately, in a book I am reading on prayer, the author makes the case for prayer being the most important thing. Initially skeptical, I kept reading. Now I’m finding myself agreeing with him. Here’s why:
Prayer the Most Important?
Initially, I was in agreement more along the lines of Foster and Ortberg in Celebration of Discipline and The Life You’ve always Wanted, respectively: to become like Christ. However, the book I’m reading now, Murray’s With Christ in the School of Prayer makes its first point emphasizing how much our master — that is, Christ — Himself prayed. He makes it a point that though He is perfect, the foundation of His ministry is prayer, that he needs time to commune with God — even the other two persons of the Trinity.
Mulling this over, I consider how prayer walks, prayer meetings and prayer watches are seeing a comeback. Before big events and after trauma we always pray. You’d begin to suspect that this practice rose not emptily but from something substantial that at least used to exist at some time. It’s like at once we see that it has great power, but no one is quite how sure it works… or is it that we have forgotten how it works? Do we even know what it really is anymore?
Prayer: What it Really Is
Expanding further in the introduction, Murray finally makes the point of speaking of prayer as the only way to commune with the Lord Almighty Himself, directly. It is then that I agree with him, then: that when we view prayer as the venue in which we enter into his Mighty presence. Like meeting with a 40-ton semi, when we truly go and meet God, we cannot go and not be changed. Learning to love, learning to be like Christ, learning to teach his word, learning evangelism (and doing it) all become subsets of this. We learn to do as Christ did by becoming like Him. And we become more like someone by spending time with them.
So it is like with our human relationships. How much more is it like with the one who made our relationships in the image of the one that He intended for us to have with Him!
Something to Leave With
As long as we view prayer simply as the means to maintaining our own Christian lives, we will not fully understand what is is really supposed to be. But when we learn to regard it as the highest part of the work entrusted to us — the root and strength of all other work — we will see that there is nothing we need to study and practice more than the art of praying.
— Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer
4 Comments
July 24, 2008 at 9:01 am
I don’t think it’s prayer per se, if only for the simple reason that prayer, biblically understood, expresses only one side of communion with God: what we say to Him.
It is equally important to hear from Him and to respond to how He uses what He tells us to renew us inside. This is the act of reading the Bible and using it to see all other things.
By what you’ve said, though, I presume that you conclude that it is knowing God, then, that is the essence, that it is the relationship of shalom that constitutes the importance of the Christian life.
July 26, 2008 at 6:20 pm
[...] The Most Important Thing Posted in ABCs, Reading, Spontaneous by zoebios121 on July 24th, 2008 [Reposted from my site.] [...]
July 27, 2008 at 1:48 am
Some would lump “meditation” along with prayer in the same way the Hebrews always put sanctification and justification together. Listening and talking are an understood part of communication, which we — maybe just me — call “prayer.” And by spending time with God — listening or talking — we become more like Him, and everything else. But I concur.
July 27, 2008 at 2:50 am
The issue I’d have with lumping meditation too readily with prayer, though they certainly have a connexion as one thing moves into another, is that the same people would hesitate to call Bible reading and study “prayer”.
If we’re to be consistent, the only useful category, then, for the concept of “prayer” is that of what we say to God, whether in spoken word or in writing or in song. This would also be supported by the use of the word “pray(er)” in Scripture.
Knowing God. Ah, there’s a book by that title: Knowing God by J.I. Packer.