Sorry for the silence. Not as much time to just sit and write when I'm at home. Anyway let's do this.
One of the speakers at Urbana was Sunder Krishnan, a Canadian pastor who gave a message on prayer. He said a lot of things that were interesting and a couple things stuck out to me.
First was when he was talking about how people typically pray. He mentioned how sometimes people just mention what God knows, i.e. "God you know that (person) is struggling and you know that he needs help and you know...etc." I understood what he was trying to say with that, but it struck me as odd that he would point that out in particular as something that doesn't really belong in prayer. After all, God is omniscient. What could we possibly pray that He does not know?
Another thing he talked about is how we have the "dignity of causality in prayer" meaning basically that when we pray, things happen. I thought that was pretty cool because for me it sometimes feels like I'm just shooting prayers into the air, hoping some of them will come true or something like that.
The third point he mentioned that stuck with me is that the point of prayer isn't to get an answer. It seems so simple but that was actually really profound to me. So much of what I pray for is just to get an answer. God please do this, God please help me with that and so on and so forth. But it really prayer is so much more. We talk about how prayer is our way to talk to God, and sometimes that makes me forget that it's also an important way that God speaks to us as well.
The message kind of changed my perception of prayer and inspired me to really make an effort to have a better prayer life. It's an awesome thing that we can communicate directly with God and feel that closeness and feel the growth in faith and trust.
After hearing Sunder speak, I kind of thought of prayer compared to a trust fall exercise. The whole point of the trust fall isn't to get caught. If that's all it was about there would be no purpose in falling backwards. No, the exercise it based on fostering trust and faith in the others that you will be caught. In the same way, prayer isn't about the end result, getting an answer, but rather an exercise of our faith in God. In light of that, we shouldn't pray just when we want to ask God something but really as often as possible as it says in 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18.
"16Be joyful always; 17pray continually; 18give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. "
