Fumbling Prayer
Fumbles are frustrating. There is your team marching down the field, getting ready to score and oops, they fumble the ball and the other team recovers. Momentum is lost, opportunity is lost and that fumble may turn the whole game around. Fumbles are costly,
Allow me to use this fumbling analogy and apply it to our Christian life. I am afraid that many of us may have fumbled away our prayer life. We have lost momentum, opportunity, boldness, peace, joy and other spiritual benefits because we’ve lost our prayer life. It’s not that we don’t pray, it’s just that our prayer life has become more like a 911 emergency call, or like placing an order at a fast food drive through, or that we have stopped praying meaningful prayers and we just say the same things over and over again. I’m sure that the son of God wasn’t massacred on the cross to simply become our “go to” person in a crisis.
Maybe King David can give us an insight into true prayer as he writes in Psalm 27:4-6 “The one thing I ask of the Lord— the thing I seek most— is to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, delighting in the Lord’s perfections and meditating in his Temple. For he will conceal me there when troubles come; he will hide me in his sanctuary. He will place me out of reach on a high rock. Then I will hold my head high above my enemies who surround me.”
That is the beauty of prayer. The one thing David asks for and seeks is not money, or a better job, or healing for his aunt Bertha but rather to live in the very presence of God and delight in God’s glory. Prayer is coming into the very throne room and presence of your heavenly father and being physically, emotionally and spiritually changed in that encounter. That is what all of our “on the go” praying has lost; reveling and being saturated in the presence of God in heavenly places. It certainly is a challenge to carve out time to meet God at this level but it is well worth it. Your enemy would like you to fumble this away.
David went on to say in verse 8 “My heart has heard you say, “Come and talk with me.” And my heart responds, “Lord, I am coming.” I wonder if you’ve heard the invitation from your father to spend some time talking to him. Don’t fumble this.
