Church Family,
“What happens when you pray about that?”
This question was once asked to me by a trusted friend who had just listened to me share about a situation in my life that was occupying my attention and causing me a good bit of distress.
“What happens when you pray about that?”
In that moment I was a little embarrassed as I had invested a lot of time thinking about the issue, parsing my emotions, considering my options and processing the situation with trusted friends and family members; but I had not yet prayed about the matter with any sort of sustained effort.
On Sunday morning we concluded our sermon series “Let Us Pray: A Congregational ExperiLent.” In Colossians 4:2 the Apostle Paul calls the church to “Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful.” If you missed the sermon on Sunday, you can listen to it here. After Paul appeals to the church to be devoted to prayer, he asks the church to pray for him personally.
Paul doesn’t just speak with the church about his life, he asks the church to commit itself to prayer and to pray for him specifically. Often we are in weighty conversations with friends, neighbors or coworkers. A child is struggling, a parent is fighting illness, a friend is still looking for work. In my experience, we are typically pretty good in those weighty conversations about demonstrating empathy. We nod knowingly, we grunt our compassion and shake our heads in understanding. We offer our support and our care for each other.
“Devote yourselves to prayer.”
In other words, don’t let your worries lie articulated but not prayed for, don’t let your blessings become boasts or your trials become grumblings. Devote yourselves, not to empathy, but to prayer.
Prayer is both a discipline and spontaneous. As we conclude our congregational experiment with prayer, I pray that you and I will become accustomed to interrupting our days with prayer and putting into practice what we’ve been learning in this sermon series. We all have so much more to learn about prayer, but the best way to grow is to practice and to continue to study what Jesus has to say to us about the awesome privilege of prayer.
With you in the school of prayer,
Chris Griggs
