"I Pray That"

There are several places in Scripture where the writer says “I pray that”. Since, I have just read a modern writer’s encourage people to pray the Scripture, I wonder if these I-pray-that’s should be our starting points?

The first, I-pray-that, that occurs to me, Paul prays for the Holy Spirit to empower our human core. God sends his innate power, that created the world, that raised Jesus from the dead, through his Spirit into our hearts.

Why? So, we can walk on water? Or raise the dead? Not in this particular passage.

Paul prays for the Spirit to transform our inner core, so that Christ may dwell there.

The world is in rebellion toward God. It has an anti-God attitude. We need power to go contrary to the world, to choose to return to God. We need power to re-connect, and live our relationship with him.

So, we can likewise pray for the Spirit to work in our lives, and in the lives of others:

• To pursue our relationship with Father, Son, and Spirit.
• To grow in that relationship – in understanding, and increased connection. (Remember the parable of the grapevine.)
• To give allegiance to Jesus.

But wait! There’s more!

He prays for all God’s family to have power to understand the full extent of God’s love. We have accepted God’s love, and God’s version of life, by giving him our allegiance. We have established our lives in his love. Now, we need to grow in our understanding of it, by our experience of it.

This experience is o huge, that only a fraction of testimonies, and descriptions, of it would swamp the internet. It is seen spanning the miraculous to the mundane. From maternal self-sacrifice, to canine loyalty, otherworldly sunsets, plain old kindness, and miraculous healings. God’s love is present, and expressed, through all those things.

Paul says he prays for God’s power to manifest itself in people, so they could move into relationship with God, and to awaken to God’ ever present, personal, individual, and all powerful love, and its manifold expressions.

Alignment

We recently looked at Jesus’ parable of the grapevine. And, even more recently, I found myself asking a question about it. Why did Jesus spend quite a bit of time encouraging the disciples to keep connected? Because he knew there would be a tendency in people to become unconnected.

Jesus said our connection with him would result in: fruit, an increase in our partnership with him, an increase in our relationship with him, and an increase in joy. Can we say we see these things in abundance in the family of God? Could the reason for their lack be a lack of connection?

I don’t consider this a matter of a person’s eternal destiny. Lack of connection does not mean that God throws these people out of the family. It is a matter of daily, moment by moment, relationship. I have relatives I have not seen, or talked to, in years. Obviously, there is not much connection. I cannot benefit from any relationship with them. In the case of relationship with Jesus, he is saying there is tremendous benefit by remaining connected.

We can become disconnected in several ways. Sin and disobedience is obvious. Letting our schedules rule us is another. We can also let different attitudes block him from areas in our lives. We connect with our church lives, but we act independently with our jobs, our families, or our politics.

God rules all of life. We need to get all of our lives aligned with God’s Word and God’s Spirit.

One person calls this a process of aligning and enforcing. Aligning is allowing God to rule in our lives. When we gave him our allegiance, we gave him permission to rule. But on a practical daily basis, we rebel. Perhaps not with overt sin. Perhaps with a passive resistance, not giving him access to our home life, our entertainment, our vacations, our sex life, or what we allow into our heads – movies, TV, or reading. We may continue to find in our lives that we need to get aligned with God’s heart. Perhaps the same thing will need to get aligned many times. 

Enforcing is proclaiming, or asserting, what is true – that is, according to God’s word – about an area.  You may have a relationship that is broken, with fights and disagreements, mutual disrespect, and mistreatments. What is God’s message to us about that? What does he say about disagreements, taking revenge, forgiveness, and love? What do we say about them? Who is right? 

Probably misalignment generates more disconnection than overt sin. We may need a daily practice of aligning with God. That is, we may need to agree with hm, that he rules all of our lives, and what that rule should look like, according to God’s word.