For the
past couple of weeks, my church has been emphasizing prayer. I appreciate the words that have been
shared. From things that I have been
thinking about for several months and actually pet peeves that I have had for
years, I would like to take the challenge just a little deeper.
We have
heard the importance of prayer. We have
heard about the beauty of being able to commune with our Creator. We have discussed how much God wants to hear
from us and how much he wants to heal our broken world.
The
struggle that I have with modern corporate prayer is the realization of how
often it is used for transition. We pray
while the worship team quietly exits the stage.
We pray for the offering, not so much that God would bless our giving
hearts and the resources he has blessed us with, but instead the prayer
indicates to the ushers that they need to come forward so that we can take the
offering. We enter prayer times in our
service so that the tech team can sneak onto the stage and fix technical
glitches. We offer up prayers that use
special code phrases to indicate that we are skipping a song in the worship
set. So, we know about the importance
and value of prayer, but the only times that we pray in our church services are
scripted.
I
recently heard an interesting interview with the late Leonard Nimoy. The point that stands out to me in the
interview is his definition of why we close our eyes during prayer. I have always been told that we close our
eyes to help us focus, to close out the distractions around us. According to Nimoy, the reason Jews are
taught to close their eyes is because if the Shekinah glory of God showed up
while the congregation was praying, they might die. It really changes the focus not only of closing
our eyes, but the focus of corporate prayer in general.
As
Christians, we know that God is always with us, and so we don’t anticipate
anything greater happening during our services when we pray. It is okay to move about the room to exit the
stage or fix tech glitches because what is the worst that could happen if we
didn’t? We don’t expect God to really be
present in our services, and so we expect very little. Prayer helps the performance of our worship
services to run more smoothly, so why not take advantage of it?
Perhaps
we should expect more of God. Perhaps we
should expect more of our corporate prayer.
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