The incense of prayer
I have always had a hard time with prayer. Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that I can come freely to God and hear from him. It’s amazing to think the creator of the universe desires to hear my voice and wants me to hear His. Because of my personality, my little quirks if you will, I tend to get in my own way. I get distracted, I lose track of what I am doing, I basically have squirrel Syndrome. So when I make time to pray by myself, I will usually be doing something different five minutes later on my phone, or checking our budget, meal planning or thinking about what hat to wear with what jacket (Trust me….IT’S IMPORTANT!!!!). I had to change my thought process about prayer; I needed to understand just how important a gift prayer actually was. If your struggling with prayer, fear not, you’re not alone (you have me at least, if that’s any consolation), I want to share some of the things I have learned over time to help with my prayer life and also changed my heart towards prayer.
Prayer is precious
Bear with me here but I am going to dig into a rabbit trail for a minute. Stop for a minute and read Revelation 5:8
And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God’s people.
What I want to focus on is the incense, which represented the prayers of God’s people. In the Old Testament, in Exodus, when God is speaking to Moses about instructions for the Temple, here is what God had to say about incense.
“The LORD said to Moses, ‘Take sweet spices, stacte, and onycha, and galbanum, sweet spices with pure frankincense (of each shall there be an equal part), and make an incense blended as by the perfumer, seasoned with salt, pure and holy. You shall beat some of it very small, and put part of it before the testimony in the tent of meeting where I shall meet with you. It shall be most holy for you. And the incense that you shall make according to its composition, you shall not make for yourselves. It shall be for you holy to the LORD.’” (Exodus 30:34–38)
This incense, pure and sacred, is considered holy (sacred, consecrated, dedicated, set apart) to the Lord, David cried out in Psalm 141, “let my prayer be counted as incense before you, and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.” (141:2) Prayer is sacred; it’s precious in God’s eyes. Our prayers don’t just matter, they are held in the highest regard by God. That means all that we intercede for, all that we ask for, all that we cry out for are not only heard by God, but holds them close and takes in the aroma of those prayers. This revelation brought me to a place of understanding that wherever I pray is considered holy ground, and I strive to treat it as such.
Prayer Aligns
When Jesus taught his disciples how to pray, he taught them what is known as the Lord’s Prayer. In this prayer Jesus says, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.” (Matt 6:10). This isn’t even that our lives run parallel to Gods will. He comes into our life and redirects the whole course so that our will is his will. They are one in the same.
Paul proclaims, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20). This is our hearts cry, but we are still human beings, with fleshly desires, and needs. So every now and then, we find ourselves making our own way through life, and that is where prayer helps to re-calibrate as Sam Abernathy said, and bring our lives back into submission to God, his will for our lives and this earth.
I struggled with this for a long time, because I would think, “If God can bring life back into submission, then why hasn’t he done this yet?” I would walk away from prayer time disappointed, unfulfilled and feeling I was not heard. I was missing a big piece of this puzzle. If through prayer I was aligned with God’s will, then through the Spirit I was empowered to put my flesh into submission and live the life God had called me to.
Prayer empowers
If alignment is God putting our hearts into submission, empowerment is our life through the spirit, dying to our flesh and picking up our cross to follow Jesus (Luke 9:23). Paul writes, “Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do” (Galatians 5:16–17). I missed this part for a long time. I walked around double minded, pushed and pulled by the sin I struggled with.
One day I had a conversation with a friend. He was well versed in the ways of battle and war. I don’t remember the specifics words of the conversation but the important part was God has given us a sword (the Word of God), he has empowered us through the spirit, now we are going to war but we must swing our sword and fight. Through prayer, we ask to be led and empowered by the Spirit. In dealing with my pornography addiction this realization has been very important. There is nothing inside my flesh that wants to stop, and it’s next to impossible to kill that desire on my own. But through prayer I have found refuge from my desires, and the power to say no. It’s not easy and some days its hurts like heck, but I am finding the strength in Christ and the Spirit to walk away from that desire. When that desire comes, I get on my knees and pray for the power to walk away. I cannot say I am perfect every time, but I am growing and learning and believe that soon this monster will be killed.
Prayer is everything.
Prayer is as necessary to the Christian as water is to a fish. We live in an aggressive and violent world. We go through victory, loss, joy and grief. There are an endless amount of circumstances that we will face as humans. But as things change around us, God does not. He is always present and willing to hear our prayers. We go to him and lift up financial woes, cancer, sickness, children, parents, jobs, homes, desires, anger, sadness, grief, the list could go on. He hears our prayers and delights in their aroma.
We cry out because God is our refuge and strength. We do not have the power to manifest miraculous changes; our words don’t have the power to create change. It is the one we cry out to, God, who has the power to do miraculous wonderful works through us and in our lives. In his sovereignty God will do what is best for us in our lives. This may not be the result or answer we want, but we will get the result or answer that is what we need.
In the past this frustrated me greatly, I was wound in prosperity and word of faith teaching, and my prayers weren’t being answered, even to the point where my wife and I lost a pregnancy at 9 weeks. Through the next three months of complications with my wife’s health, I learned a very important and humbling lesson. What I want is not always the end result. Just because I said the prayer, doesn’t mean I deserve the answer I want, or even put God on the hook to perform the way that I want. If he does answer prayer the way we want, it is out of grace and compassion that he did so.
The point of prayer is not that we would see our circumstances change, but that we would be changed in our circumstances. No matter what happens God desires that we would know his Son Jesus Christ, that we would be forgiven and redeemed and that we would live in eternity with him. This is our prize at the end of this race called life and its guaranteed. So take heart, continue to pray in earnest, because God commands us too, our prayers our holy too him, and they align us with His will, His Word, and His desires.
This song by mercy me is one that I hold close when it comes to prayer, and I hope it blesses you.
Love Ben (Luke 9:23–24)
