on the walk

My friend and former pastor, who now pastors a church near Atlanta has a quirky blog that radiates his charm and love for people. A while back he wrote about becoming a praying church. I stumbled on the post tonight while looking through his blog archives. (I am in bed sick so why not.)

He comments on the first four chapters of Acts and notices that as the people confronted the reality of their call they turned to prayer. Here are some snippets.

After I got back, I read the first four chapters of Acts (for the umpteenth time) and it struck me that within the first chapter that the earliest disciples were placed in a spot that I describe as the tension between “the enormity of the call and the inadequacy of the called.”

Later he says,

When confronted with the “enormity of the call and the inadequacy of the called” the church prayed…hard…constantly…together.

I like that phrase and I think it says a lot about how we teach prayer. He need to recognize that as long as approach prayer as an end in itself we are fighting an uphill battle. Prayer is like eating or breathing. While a banquet can be fun and a good deep breath can be joyful, we usually don’t do these things for there own sake but rather because they sustain our bodies.

As we teach prayer it is important to remember that prayer is an essential function of the Christian life but it is a function with purpose.  (Please don’t go write the book Purpose-Driven Prayer) We seek relationship with God, we seek comfort from our grief we seek to submit to God’s will and as Jim Street reminds us we seek to be empowered for the mission of God.

As I seek to grow in prayer and seek to hep others to grow in prayer it may be important for me to stay in that place where I am very aware of the “enormity of the call and the inadequacy of the called.”

on the walk

-Ethan

PS. He has a lot more good stuff to say in the full post which you can read for yourself here.

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