Transform your care by prayer
While men will wring hands, we are to fold ours. While the knees of others are shaking, ours are to be bending. While many will complaint and grumble, let us seek and ask and knock. In every need and in every situation we are to come to God with the cares, concerns, and burdens of our hearts. Anxiety and prayer cannot exist together.
Last time I mentioned this wonderful divinely-appointed means. It is the practical forsaking of this means that leaves me unstable as water and as restless as the sea in my thoughts. Now I want us to consider how we are to take up this means.
How am I to pray?
Nothing I will note will be new to you. You are a brilliant bunch! I know you know these things. But blessed are you if you do them! Ah, there’s the rub! Oh, dear children of God, how much we need His grace for this grace to pray!
Prayer is the living expression (and reflection) of our relationship with our God in Christ.
Pray Constantly.
The remedy for pestering care is persistent prayer. “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17). As Oswald Sanders put it, “Be in ever-recurring prayer.” Never be weary in praying if you would be stopped from worrying. It is not that praying takes our mind off the trouble, but it brings the trouble to the right place.
Some are always worrying because they are never praying. Many are much in worry because little in prayer. Be much in dwelling before the Most High (Ps. 92:1-2). “You keep him in perfect peace who mind is stayed on you” (Isa. 26:3 ESV). I like that, a mind “stayed” on God, trusting in Him. That means “staying” with Him, abiding in Him, constantly looking to Him. Prayer is the faithful expression of such a relationship. We are not to have a “fox-hole” relationship with God.
“Well, I find still no peace.” Then, pray on, keep praying.
Pray Particularity.
Paul says we to are to make our “requests” known to God. Let Him know specifically what is troubling you. Come with definite requests and petitions. Be particular with God. He is not put off by details (though He knows them already!). He is not impatient to hear you out.
Remember Jesus’ question to Bartimaeus, “What do you want Me to do for you?” By prayer we throw off self-sufficiency and independency and manifest humble dependence upon Him. Who would want to live without communion with this blessed Burden-bearer, Caretaker, and Guide!?!
Let your crying be a confiding in childlike trust in Him who can hear, know, understand and care and respond to what has consumed you. “Use familiarity with God, tell Him as you would a friend, freely and fully, feelingly, all your case, pour out your soul and your complaints before Him. This God would have His people do, and He expects it from them; and though He knows all their wants, and what are their desires before they express them, yet He will seem not to know them, or take any notice of them, until they open them to Him in some way or another . . .” (Gill). “You do not have because you do not ask” (Js. 4:2). “Open wide your mouth and I will fill it” (Ps. 81:10). Our Father knows what we need before we ask, but He calls upon us to come and seek, ask, and knock. He is generous.
Pray Sincerely.
We are to come humbly and earnestly, feelingly. Our relationship with our Lord is not to be perfunctory. Prayer is not simply “punching in and punching out.” In its best expression it is an adoring and loving and confident communion with God. It is not something to check off a “To Do List.” It is, as has been said, the believer’s “vital breath.”
“Supplication” denotes earnest entreaty, the humble cry for needs keenly felt. This protects prayer from simply being a vain repetition. It is a fresh and warm cry. Our greatest need is not having our needs met, but meeting and living in this communion with our Father in heaven. If He were more and more to us, what David said in Psalm 16, our “portion,” our “good,” apart from Whom we have no “good”; if He were, as Asaph confessed, the Sole Desire of our hearts (Ps. 73:25), we would really have no “worries” at all! For He have Him who is All in all! Prayer ought to remind us of the greatest blessing, which is God Himself, which should shrink to their proper size anything and everything else.
Pray Pervasively.
I mentioned this last time. Paul says “in everything,” that is, in every circumstance, upon every occurrence, over any issue that provokes an unsettling of our hearts and minds. “The way to be anxious about nothing is to be prayerful about everything.”
“Everything” means every big or small care of whatever nature. “Everything” means any thing which concerns you. With every harking care that scatters your mind and upsets your heart, cry up to Him. Do not wait for great cares, but bring the common ones, the gritty and grinding ones, to Him. Little cares can wear you out as surely as great ones. Whatever touches our lives is important enough to be brought to the throne of grace. The care and concern of your Father in heaven is comprehensive. It concerns the very hairs of your head. It concerns your rising up and your sitting down. Forsake self-sufficiency even in the smallest matters of your life.
“Without God you can do nothing well, not even the smallest. Get into the habit of . . . referring everything to Him” (Harry Jones). It is a great faith that brings up little things to God in prayer. Pour out every grain of care to Him who cares for you.
There is one other vital element we must add, but I leave that for the next time.
Blessings in the Name of the God who hears.
