A week of great consequences..!

Our prayer meeting yesterday evening marked the end of our week of prayer, our annual ‘24x7 Prayer’. I am so appreciative of the enthusiastic army of Kings-folk, young & old, who sign up to take an hour’s slot in the Prayer Room, some at the dead of night, to pray for things personal, national and international. Well done!
Posted on the walls is information of all the endeavours that we are engaged in at Kings, along with prayer cards carrying handwritten requests for prayer – every one important, each expressing a heart-felt desire for God’s intervention.
Yet it is perfectly understandable, in the midnight hours (or actually at any time!) to entertain the thought “Why am I doing this? Is anybody listening?” Yet under-girding the prayer of every Christian is the promise of God’s unswerving and responsive attention.

I recently spoke on the verse: 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). This verse torpedoes so many misconceptions & obstacles to prayer. For instance, the temptation for most is to feel distinctly lacking in confidence when praying, and to feel that the most appropriate time to pray is when you’ve been doing rather well on the religious score card, and even then, one shouldn’t really make requests for oneself – that’s selfish! But that is totally back to front. This verse tells us – or should I say, in this verse God tells us that an excellent time to pray is in a time of need, that we should do so in order to receive mercy & grace to help us, and that we can do so with confidence, because it has absolutely nothing to do with our spiritual score card and everything to do with the finished work of Jesus on the cross on our behalf. Doesn’t that just make prayer more enjoyable and do-able?

And one last thing – that word ‘confidence’ actually means to speak freely, openly, with confidence. In other words, prayer for the Christian should not be the reciting of artificial, archaic dead words like some sort of mantra, but the conversation of friends. Karl Barth put it like this: In obedience the Christian is the servant of God, in faith he is the child of God, but in prayer he is the friend of God, called to the side of God, and at the side of God, living, ruling & reigning with Him.

Thanks again Kings for your every effort this past week – we await the great stories that will surely result!

Goff