HONEST COMMUNICATION – Part 2 of 2

The prayers of godly people recorded in Scripture are examples of straightforward honesty. When they were afraid, they told God about their fears. When they doubted, they doubted out loud in front of God. When they were angry, they let it rip. Under the reign of the evil King Jehoiakim, the nation of Judah was declining rapidly during a time of injustice, immorality, and violence. The prophet Habakkuk was convinced God wasn’t doing what He should and cried out, “How long, O Lord, must I call for help, but You do not listen? Or cry out to You, ‘Violence!’ but You do not save! Why do You make me look at injustice? Why do You tolerate wrong?” (Habakkuk 1:2-3) You could call that a gut-level honest prayer. Habakkuk wasn’t the only one to talk honestly with God. Moses, Gideon, and Elijah all questioned God. Job even cursed the day God made him and said, "I loathe my very life; therefore I will give free rein to my complaint and speak out in the bitterness of my soul” (Job 10:1). Jesus never criticized prayers that were honest, only those that were long and showy…

All of us desperately need God’s guidance, leadership, and affirmation. We need to hear from God. As we increase the frequency of our prayers, and communicating with God becomes part of our everyday lives, we begin to sense that communication is always two-way. Frequent, honest prayers open our hearts and minds to God. In genuine prayer, we relate to God in a conversation. 

-- Craig Groeschel in “The Christian Atheist: Believing in God but Living as if He Doesn’t Exist”

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HONEST COMMUNICATION – Part 1 of 2

My best definition of prayer is simple: prayer is communicating with God. This straightforward concept can help put us at ease, especially when we realize that communication involves more than just talking. We communicate through music and body language and sculpting and painting and facial expressions and dancing and writing -- even macramé! We each have our favorite modes of communication, and God is fluent in all of them. So if talking isn’t your thing, you can still be good at praying.

Whether you pray by talking or by some other mode of communication, God most enjoys the prayer that is natural, direct, and simple. One of the most important qualities of effective communication is gut-level honesty. God hates it when we wear masks to the meeting, when our prayers become showy and inauthentic. Here are Jesus’ instructions: “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 men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full… And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.” (Matthew 6:5,7) 

-- Craig Groeschel in “The Christian Atheist: Believing in God but Living as if He Doesn’t Exist”

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AN “I-THOU” CONVERSATION

“Keep Your servant from willful sins; may they not rule over me. Then I will be blameless, innocent of great transgression. May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in Your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.”  (Psalm 19:14 NIV)

The Psalms are jam-packed with the first person singular. I, my, and me appear repeatedly. Thomas Cahill (in his book “The Gifts of the Jews”) says that the Psalms “are filled with I’s: the I of repentance, the I of anger and vengeance, the I of self-pity and self-doubt, the I of despair, the I of delight, the I of ecstasy.”

In the same fashion, the Hebrew poets speak vigorously and insistently of “You” in reference to God -- or “Thou” in some older translations. Dean John B. Coburn said wisely that prayer should begin, “O God, You.” Because it is only after we have said “God, You,” and not “God, He,” that we have entered into personal conversation. I become very uneasy with public prayers that begin by addressing God -- “Almighty God, we bow before You” -- and then shortly indicate that God is not really the other party in the conversation, because the prayer continues, “We pray that God will do thus-and-so.” God has somehow gone from being the one addressed to a party referred to in the third person. I sense, in such prayer, that the prayer is really addressed to the congregation or the gathering, rather than to God. So, too, when references are made to Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit. If the prayer is in truth addressed to God, then a reference to Christ is one to “Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ,” and the Holy Spirit is “Your Spirit.” The conversation is specific; God is the second person in the conversation, not a third person to whom we refer as if we were talking with someone else. The psalmists had this sense of an “I-Thou” conversation -- a specific person was talking with a specific Person. 

-- J. Ellsworth Kalas in “Longing to Pray: How the Psalms Teach Us to Talk with God “  

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