The Everyday Prayer

Re:Verse passage – Mark 11:22-25 (day five)

Mountains have much significance throughout the Bible. Here, Jesus talks of the incredible task of asking God to throw a mountain into the sea. In a symbolic respect, we all face mountains throughout our lives. These mountains can be named whatever after whatever stands before us, blocking our way with an arduous and difficult climb: cancer, death of a loved one, lost job, difficult relationships, etc. Most of us have asked, firmly believing with all our hearts, that God move that theoretical mountain out of our way. While these requests may not seem selfish or wrongly motivated in our hearts, they may not be in line with the plan that God has in store.

So, the mountain remains, unmoved.

And herein lies our struggle. I had a brother that passed away from leukemia when he was two years old. I know my parents, their friend’s, and their church prayed diligently for Peter to be healed (the mountain moved), but God had a different plan. Looking back now 40 years later, we can see that God worked all things for His glory and our good through that time. Peter was healed and is now with the Lord, my family grew closer to God, and I was born soon after.

Faith is hard sometimes. There are times that God leaves those mountains unmoved so we can climb the mountain and grow closer to Him in the journey. We may want things (for a good or okay purpose), but what God wants is always better. When you pray that your mountains be moved, remember that He is a good God even when your mountains don’t move.

Re:Verse passage – Mark 11:22-25 (day four)

Do you enjoy the greeting time during church on Sunday? Some of us love to walk around the sanctuary shaking hands, while the introverts among us probably wish that we could just skip that part. Other church traditions refer to this time as “passing the peace,” where, just like in our congregation, the intention is that we greet one another with the peace of Christ in our hearts.

This brief moment on Sunday morning feels routine – but it’s an important part of the liturgy that is filled with significance. Before we continue on in worship, before we receive the sermon, before we take the Lord’s Supper, we actively extend peace to the members of the body of Christ that are around us. But this is hard to do when we haven’t made forgiveness a spiritual discipline in our lives.

Forgiveness is one of the hallmarks of the Christian faith, but this radical forgiveness Christ calls us to isn’t easy. It makes no sense by earthly logic, it only makes sense in light of Christ. We can forgive others because we have been forgiven first, and because the Spirit strengthens us to offer that same forgiveness to others. Here, Jesus is asking us to make this a regular occurrence in our prayer life. He’s asking us to include forgiveness in the daily liturgy of our lives.

What if we really lived out this command? What if, when we arrive at church with unforgiveness towards a fellow church member, we seek the Lord in prayer, asking the Spirit to strengthen us, so that we can pass that person genuine peace when the time comes? I believe the effects would reverberate throughout the entire sanctuary.

Re:Verse passage – Mark 11:22-25 (day three)

“All things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted you.”

When a child says, “Don’t go to work,” her words request that you skip going into the office. But is that the heart of what she asks? Or is she rather saying, “Help me feel you close to me so that I know I won’t lose you?” Maybe you can take a day away from your job, maybe you can’t. But either way, you can address the request beneath the request, the heart of her longing: that you help her feel your closeness. Roger Ebert used to say, “A movie is not about what it is about, but about how it is about it.” There’s something underneath your request to God. It’s the heart of your longing. And God always attends to that.

Re:Verse passage – Mark 11:22-25 (day two) And Jesus answered saying to them, “Have faith in God.

Take an opportunity to set your focus before you make your request. The first answer Jesus gives isn’t ask for the moon. It is have faith in God. Set your priorities with where the Lord is leading. Trust his plan before your own. Understand that he has designed you for a purpose, and then make your requests in line with that purpose. The Lord wants to bless you, there is no doubt, but he wants you to be rooted, grounded, unshaken in your faith in the Lord.

Re:Verse passage – John 17:20-26 (day seven)

“I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word.” John 17:20

Jesus was praying for YOU. These were Jesus’ last free minutes on this earth. In less than twelve hours, He would be on the cross, and He spent this time praying for you. Before you read on any further, go back and read  all of John 17 with you and the cross in mind.

Isn’t that amazing?  As you read over those words, they penetrate your soul. The selflessness. The care. The love. Have you ever heard anyone pray for you like that? These are prayers you would hope to hear from a parent, spouse, or very dear friend. Doesn’t it feel good to be so loved? It also challenges you: do your prayers show this type of love? Are your prayers for those you love this selfless? Do you reciprocate that same love in your prayers to Him?

Re:Verse passage – John 17:20-26 (day six)

The High Priestly prayer in John 17 is the longest recorded prayer of Jesus in the Bible and is glorious. His heart is heavy and full as he thinks about what is ahead, along with a deep affection for the men entrusted in his care. It is here that Jesus prays. With the cross ahead of him, he first prays for glory. He then prays for his disciples as they carry his story in a hostile world. Lastly, with a much longer gaze, he prays for his church.

It shouldn’t surprise us that Jesus would cast a vision for his church before she was even born. His very incarnation embodied a vision of what humanity should be. It only makes sense as he ignited a movement of the new creation that he would look beyond the twelve to his church, the fruit of their faithful witness.

And Jesus’ vision for us is glorious; that we would share in his new creation glory with such clarity and unity that the world can’t help but see him.

Now that’s vision.

Re:Verse passage – John 17:20-26 (day five) ”I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me.”

I believe one of our deepest needs is unity. To feel and sense cooperation and agreement. Fractured relationships are unsettling and disruptive to our hearts and minds. The only solution (source) for unity (perfect unity) is God’s love. Unity, when authentic and grounded in God’s love, is a picture of the Gospel. Jesus claims in His Priestly Prayer, that the unity He desires is a picture of God’s Love- sending the Son to repair and reconcile the human race. (Unity seeks to restore and reconcile relationships for the Glory of God). Unity is  also a picture of God’s Love seen in our relationships with each other. Kindness. Forgiveness. Accountability. Faithfulness. Only God’s love gives us the hope and chance for unity that will glorify God. When God’s love is the source and catalyst for unity, people will be able to sense and see God’s holiness, grace, and love on display. They will see and experience the gospel at work (in us and through us).

Re:Verse passage – John 17:20-26 (day four)

“The glory which You have given Me, I have given to them…”

Christ has given us glory. But…I don’t often feel very glorious, do you? Would you describe your day-to-day life as glorious? The majority of our lives are spent doing pretty non-glorious things. Just getting through the day, doing what needs to get done, worrying about what tomorrow will bring, figuring things out.   

But, much of Jesus’ life on earth was filled in the same way as ours. He got hungry, he got tired, he got up, went to work, went home. He had to tend to his body as it aged, he knew what exhaustion felt like. Yet he was still full of glory. He was still full of the glory that is found in his intimate relationship with the Father. Because that’s who he is – he is the Son of the living God, created in glory. So no matter what else was happening to him on any given day, that glory was the most true thing about him.  

When he came and lived his life on earth, he gave that glory to us. He brought us into that fold, that beautiful glory that he enjoys with the Father, we now enjoy with him and the Father, through the Spirit. It’s not glory in spite of the mundane parts of life, it’s glory that reaches into those ordinary parts of life and makes them beautiful, makes them redeemed. Now, even on our worst day, on our most non-glorious day, when we’ve accepted Christ as our savior, that glory that we share with him is the most true thing about us too.

It is through living in this reality that we show the world who our God is.

Re:Verse passage – John 17:20-26 (day three)

“I have made your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which you loved me may be in them, and I in them.”

There’s a deeper source of loneliness and despondency than one’s conclusion that God is unknown, and that is one’s conclusion that God cannot be known. To remain permanently sealed off from even the possibility that inquiry and exploration could lead to an experience of God’s existence would be the kind of life in which atheism would make sense. In such a reality, belief in God or religious inclination would make no practical difference to a human being whatsoever. In his prayer, Jesus reaches through and beyond such a chasm between divine and human. He’s getting a message out from heaven that God is here. All things are now possible.