When We Pray

Cal Sullivan

Over time I have been reminded of the grace of God and His true love for us.

It would be so easy for Him to rule over us with fear, to force us to follow His ways and to make salvation by works the only way to experience eternal life.

Yet He does the exact opposite, instead He reaches out to us through Jesus in love, who paid for our sins, He give us free choice, choice to love Him, to believe in Him, God seeks relationship with us, He wants us to get to know him better and to grow in him.

For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.
John 3:16

We see God’s love for us in allowing free choice; by choosing to leave the decision to follow Him with us; by not forcing, but by calling out to us; and in this way giving us dignity. At at the same time He shows us His grace by allowing us to come to Him without judgement but rather with joy - to come as we are with all our sin and all our problems and still He loves us.

I have been attending the recent & ongoing prayer course being held by the church, and one of the themes that has come up is the idea that prayer is a form of free choice: because, although God knows our every need and thought, He still desires that we talk to Him and ask Him.

Blaise Pascal wrote “God instituted prayer in order to lend His creatures the dignity of causality”. Prayer is meaningful because God gives us the role of asking/participating, not simply being passive recipients.

When we pray we engage with our Father through Jesus, it allows us to worship Him, to tell Him our concerns for ourselves and others: our needs, joy, heartache, anger and so on. It allows us to listen to Him and hear Him,

When we pray Jesus not only listens He answers and in doing so confirms that He is a personal God, not simply concerned with the big picture but with each individual. We see we are not alone, we are not insignificant and we are loved.

My challenge to all is to remember God’s love for us and that He desires a relationship with us. All we need do is reach back to Him in prayer, talk to Him, let Him talk to you. By not regularly praying, we deprive ourselves of a closeness with Him, we limit the workings He can do in our lives and to the people around us.