"We do not pray to tell God what he does not know, nor to remind him of things he has forgotten. He already cares for the things we pray about .... He has simply been waiting for us to care about them with him. When we pray, we stand by God and look with him toward those people and problems."
Tim Stafford, Knowing the Face of God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1986), 130-31; quoted by Yancey, Prayer, 58.
I gasp as I read and re-read this passage. I have not yet come across with anything else that explains intercession more vividly than this.
5 comments:
Maybe a child's heart is so much more simple and therefore, much more suitable when in prayer. Kioni always reminds Dan and I that, "God knows about this, let's not say it over and over." Wow! I guess she is right, why do we need to state something over and over? It is our flesh that want repeat, because we are afraid that God will forget?
We forget, so we think God will forget too. God is made in our image.
Too often we forget to live the other way round, trying to live in order to reflect who God is, what kind of a God He is, what kind of a God we believe in.
I suppose that we keep on repeating our prayer on the same thing because we care so much in it!
I think we mostly know that God knows about what we are praying, but just cannot stand the waiting for His action. Or we worry about how He deals with the matter. So we keep on praying to get to know the result.
But I think it is good to keep on praying on the same thing if you don't feel comfortable, soon or later God will reply by changing our mind or in the work he did.
Wai
I think Kioni's right on about the crux of the matter. It's also us putting God in a box we created "in the image of man", as what I believed Ablogaday wrote.
But, as Wai noted, praying for something continuously could mean that we're persistent and that we care deeply about the people/things that we're praying for. In the Gospel, Jesus did talk about praying persistently.
So it's more with the attitude than the act of repeating, don't you think so?
Mind that our attitude (of caring deeply about...) of praying persistently could be motivated by our will power rather than faith (both can motivate us to keep on praying). I fall into that trap so often.
Relying on our will power brings anxiety, while praying faithfully brings peace, and like what I read for devotion today, transforms God's promise to prophecy.
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