Human beings have to breathe in order to survive. The body desperately needs oxygen in order to perform its basic functions. When the lungs lack air, suffocation begins. Similarly, prayer is like breathing in the Christian walk. Our faith desperately needs the connection to God that only prayer can bring. Without this source of christian oxygen, intimacy with the Father is suffocated. So, prayer is necessary in order to nourish spiritual life.
With this idea of prayer as a lifeline to God, the question is posed: What should it look like? Like breathing, prayer serves many different functions that all come together to accomplish one goal. These different functions and ways are made clear in Matthew Drever’s Prayer, Self-Examination, and Christian Catechesis in Augustine and Luther. These two saints believed that there were two types of prayer: personal and corporate, broken down into freeform or liturgical styles. Before reading this article, I was under the impression that prayer is whatever I make it out to be, that there is no real order in it. However, “prayer is not simply a free-form, spontaneous response of the soul to God,” but in addition is a “spiritual discipline” that results in building community and missional living (Drever 147). To an extent, my prayer life before coming on the World Race was self-centered. I would petition God for personal requests but never developed a strong corporate prayer life in which I interceded for the world around me. Since being on the World Race, I have been submerged into a life of communal prayer. God has used this to show me the importance and power of intercession. In it, relationships with my brothers and sisters have been strengthened allowing for a fresh connection with God.
While corporate prayer is a great thing, personal prayer is a necessity for spiritual growth and connection to Jesus. According to Augustine, “prayer shapes our relation to and understanding of God,” and it is from my own relationship with the Lord that I am able to join the corporate scene (Drever 152). My prayer must first come from a humble heart, just as Jesus instructs in Matthew 6 when he tells us to “go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret” (Matt. 6.6). This brings back up the idea of prayer being like the breath in our lungs. If I only spend personal prayer time with the Lord in the mornings and evenings, then throughout the entire day I am suffocating the relationship. But, if I am constantly in communion with the Holy Spirit during my day then I am breathing in life. When God revealed this to me, I knew that there was work to be done in my walk. Though still in the process, I am finding that the more I pray throughout my day, the more aware of God’s presence I become. It is a beautiful discipline that the Lord is teaching me. In this I am joyful that there is never a limit on the amount of times I can cry out to God, for just as Hymn 409 reads: “Jesus loves to answer prayer.”
Day by day, I am discovering new things in the Father. I am seeing God move through the prayers of my team and squad when we come together and petition him, I am hearing his voice throughout the day as we converse, and my heart is singing “Praise is due to you, O God…O you who hear prayer” (Ps. 65.1-2).
Works Cited
Drever, Matthew. “Prayer, Self-Examination, and Christian Catechesis in Augustine and Luther.” Dialog, vol. 55, no. 2, 2016, pp. 147–157., doi:10.1111/dial.12241.
“Hymn 409.” Hymns of Grace, Pew ed., The Master’s Seminary Press, 2011.
