I love This Is Us. I have no problem admitting that. Yes, I am a 6’ 3” red-blooded, American man. But I love This Is Us and I am unashamed in admitting it. If you want to judge anyone, judge yourself for being heartless!
I don’t love the show because of the amazing acting, expertly crafted script, or beautifully delivered dialogue between family members. I don’t even love it because of the emotional drama and relational tension that is present in ever episode. I love This Is Us because of how uncomfortable it makes me feel watching so many people be so incredible intimate with one another. Watch any episode and you will see countless actors bearing their souls to one another about extremely private and personal things. Relationships, goals, careers, parenting, weight issues, insecurities, addictions, parental favoritism, you name it and this shows hits on it, in an unrelenting authentic and intimate way.
Intimacy is a gamble. It can be a scary place or an incredible rewarding place to be. Being completely exposed, completely vulnerable, completely open to another person, means that you have to trust that person deeply. Yes, intimacy can be a very scary place to be, however, it can also be incredibly rewarding and fulfilling. Being in a close friendship where you have familiarity, affection, warmth, and confidence with the other person, where you feel safe and you can allow your walls and defenses to crumble because you trust that person and they know you, they understand you, they get you, and through all of your stuff they still choose you. That’s incredibly rewarding and that is exactly what Jesus offers us when he teaches us how to pray.
The spiritual habit of prayer is a huge topic because of its importance for your spiritual growth. Your prayer life is directly connected to your spiritual growth because it determines the level of intimacy between you and your Creator. Prayer, simply put, is all about intimacy.
This is hard for me, and maybe you as well, because intimacy scares me. Intimacy doesn’t just happen by chance or organically. It only happens through intentional relationship where we allow someone else to get closer to the real us. I don’t like that feeling. I don’t like feeling exposed or vulnerable. I don’t like having my walls down because my superficial walls make me feel safe, even though, in reality, they are only hindering my growth. Intimacy is hard because you have to be willing to invite and allow someone else to see inside of you, and not just at a surface level but an in-depth peering into your very soul. One way to describe intimacy is by thinking of it like this, ‘into me see,’ and that will either scare or excite you.
In the book of Psalm, which is basically the prayer journal of the Bible, David invites God to see inside of him when he says, “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” (Ps. 139:23-24)
This was David’s authentic invitation for an intimate relationship with his Creator. What’s so amazing is that same God wants to have a uniquely intimate relationship with you today. No other religion, no other god, no other idea, no other practice can offer you that! That’s why Jesus teaches us what real pray is and how to pray so that we can begin to build that type of relationship with God.
Real prayer is an intimate conversation with God that influences every area of your life because it focuses on relationship with God.
If you want to have this type of intimate relationship with God; where you are known by Him, in close friendship with Him, have familiarity, affection, warmth, and confidence in your relationship with Him, where your walls come crashing down because you feel secure enough with Him, then the only way to start doing that is to start praying real prayers. Not going through the motions, not shooting out a quick text to Jesus, or half-heartedly asking for your wants. No, if you really want to grow in 2018, then you have to start having an authentic and intimate conversation with God that influences your whole life because you are focusing on your relationship with God, that refocuses your attention upward, inward, and ultimately outward.
“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.
‘This, then, is how you should pray:
“‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliever us from the evil one.’For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”
Real Prayer focuses on Relationship (vv. 5-8)
I love how Jesus’ teaching begins with intentionality and identity. He says, ‘when you pray,’ not if you pray or when you get around to it or when you have completely exhausted every resource and relationship you can think of, then pray. No, Jesus begins by revealing the baseline standard for the believer’s life of having regular reps of prayer to our Heaven Father. We have to be intention about our prayer life because we aren’t prayer to a god far removed from us, instead we are praying to a personal God who is seeking a deeper and more intimate relationship with all us.
Why though? Why is prayer, according to Jesus, that important? Well if real prayer is, simply, an intimate conversation with our Father that influences every area of our lives, then you have to have intentional conversations with God by regularly focusing on your relationship with Him, wherever that may be and however you want to classify that. This is because for any relationship to grow you have to be intentional with it by having both a quality and quantity of conversations. You have to get to know one another and there is no better way of doing that then by having actual conversations.
The kind of prayer that Jesus is teaching here is all about real relational connection contrasted by the alternative of transactional religious communication. This is because religion does not focus on relationship, it focuses on rules and rituals. That’s not real prayer, nor is that how God wants to interact with us. Instead, Jesus teaches us what real prayer is all about because it focuses on relationship with God the Father.
“[Jesus is not] forbidding all long prayers or all repetition. He himself prayed at length (Luke 6:12), repeated himself in prayer (Matt 26:44; unlike Ecclesiastes 7:14!), and told a parable to show his disciples that “they should always pray and not give up” (Luke 18:1). His point is that his disciples should avoid meaningless, repetitive prayers offered under the misconception that mere length will make prayers [effective]. Such thoughtless babble can occur in liturgical and extemporaneous prayers alike. Essentially it is thoroughly pagan, for pagan gods allegedly thrive on incantation and repetition. But the personal Father God to whom believers pray does not require information about our needs [because He already has an intimate knowledge of them] (Mt 6:8). “As a father knows the needs of his family, yet teaches them to ask in confidence and trust, so does God treat his children” (Hill, Matthew).”[1]
Prayer is more than just a set of sayings or a prescribed list of words that you need to repeat at certain times. Prayer is much more than just making requests to God or asking for things to that you want or need. Prayer is much more than just a saying that we either passively or instinctually offer when a tragedy happens in our country or around the world. Prayer is intimate communication with your Father that deepens your trust in Him and grows your spiritual life exponentially, because it refocuses and reinforces your relationship with Him.
Jesus is confronting every form of religious prayer by contrasting it with real prayer. He takes on the Jewish religious establishment who prayed publicly daily and sought rewards from their religious culture (v. 5, 6). He then takes on the religious, non-Jewish culture that would pray by heaping meaningless words together and reciting these words over and over again nervously, as if their gods were hard of hearing or would only answer them once they got tired of their constant nagging. No, Jesus squashes all forms of religious prayer and then reconstructs and reintroduces real prayer to his followers by giving us a model of how to pray.
God wants a real relationship with you. He wants to have real conversations with you, where you communicate your most intimate desires, wants, needs, and dreams and allow Him to converse back to you. This type of relationship doesn’t happen over night, rather it is built one conversation at a time. The next time you pray, remember to be real with God. He’s your Father and wants to get real with you.
pastorjohnprice.wordpress.com 