Prayer: Obligation or Invitation

 

 

…pray without ceasing. 1 Thessalonians 5:17

 

When my husband is away on business I want him to call me every night. When I go away for a few days to a retreat or on vacation with my sisters he expects to hear from me as well.

These are not phone calls to report what we’ve been doing every minute of every day or to keep an eye on each other. They are not an obligation of marriage but acts of love. We want to hear from each other – not legalistically but out of concern for each other. I liken this to the way God feels about us and prayer.

Prayer is simple communication with God. It’s not something He legalistically expects from us but out of love and concern for us He wants us to talk to Him about our lives. He invites us into fellowship with Him.

Romans 12:12 says that we are to be constant in prayer. Colossians 4:2 says we are to continue in prayer. Ephesians 6:18 says that we are to be praying at all times.

We are being obedient to God when we pray like this but it should be more to us than an obligation we keep. God wants us to pray for our sake not His. We have received an invitation to communicate with the King of Kings!

“Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need!” Hebrews 4:16

In his book, “Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life,” Donald Whitney says, “We can be prayer pessimists and see the expectation to pray merely as obligation, or we can be optimists who view the command to pray as an opportunity to receive the mercy and grace of God.”

Sometimes I pray for so long about something that I feel like I’m nagging God! Sometimes I pray about things that seem so trivial that I imagine Him rolling His eyes – which I know He doesn’t do (but I would do if someone kept asking me for something I hadn’t given them!).

So, how do we know what to pray for and how do we know how long to pray for it? Is there anything that is really too trivial for us to pray about?

After teaching His disciples to pray the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus said to them, “And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-8).

So these requests are in the spirit of hallowing God’s name and asking that His kingdom would come and be established here and now. These are requests in the will of God.

God is not a spiritual “Sugar Daddy” waiting to fulfill our every wish. He is the God of mercy and grace waiting to hear our prayers acknowledging His power and  sovereignty to which He will respond as promised…with grace and mercy.

God looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7). Are we praying out of a sense of obligation or in response to our powerful Lord’s invitation?