I like sermons. I like them better than the singing part of church for the most part. My mind likes to work and I tend to wind up discovering or even just seeing a bit more of God through exploring ideas.
This week Kevin kicked off his second sermon on prayer. I missed the first one… I could go and listen to it here, but that would require some more time.
He took us through the Lords Prayer. Now I’ve heard this done before, but for the sake of letting it stick (and I do appreciate repetition occasionally) here it is in outline form with some of my scrawlings.
Praying the Lords Prayer
Our Father in Heaven (where and who) – A prayer of focus and relationship
Hallowed (ascribe worth to/holy) be Your name – A prayer of worship
Your Kingdom come – A prayer of purpose
Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven – A prayer of surrender
Give us today our daily bread – a prayer of request (dependence)
Forgive us our sins (us/me collective?) – a prayer of confession
As we also forgive anyone who sins against us – a prayer of reconciliation
And lead us not into temptation – a prayer of protection
But deliver us from the evil one – a prayer of deliverance
For yours is the Kingdom, the power and the glory – a prayer of confidence
The last bit stuck out to me the most. The reminder that God is God is an interesting thing in prayer – most of the time I think prayer is fantastic and I really like it, however there are also times where its like you are sitting there talking to yourself or your conscience and wondering if your just praying out of this intrinsic unexplainable desire/need to, and that’s sort of it. I know not the ins and hows of God’s prayer listening/answering system but it’s a curious thing that points strongly towards humanity and our utter inability to do anything that we can’t. Beyond the obvious trust element: faith/belief, this confidence thing is a direct correlation with our dependence – which could be why lots of people don’t recognise God. If God is so insanely good, it clearly points to us being far less. We’d all like to be top dog in some form or other however much we deny our pride.
This to me feels relatively simplistic in theory and yet I don’t think we go about living very well.
The other night I watched Blood Diamond, it’s fairly full on. As with movies such as Hotel Rwanda you come away with this monster of a hole inside because you cannot do much, if anything at all about situations like those shown. It hit me strongly.
And we (collective) have the western gall to go about being frustrated at something as minor as it raining on our washing.
We really do miss the bigger picture sometimes.
In our confidence, let us pray our confession, in our confession let us recognise our dependence, in this reconciliation and surrender, protection for His and our joint purpose that stems from worship and relationship with the one who has got this kingdom thing sorted through his goodness and wisdom.
We need some perspective.
apologies I cannot remember the image source