The Everyday Prayer

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.

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

That they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me. Vs. 21

Jesus’ words in this prayer are not a condition for salvation, but a desire for a blessing beyond imagining. His call for unity is not a call for conformity. We don’t see him saying he wants everyone to look alike, talk alike, and be the same. Paul would later remind us that we are all made uniquely, and that each has a part to play in the symphony of the Lord. Jesus wants us to experience the beauty of unity that can only come from union with the Lord.  Then, all those differences that we see in each other fade in comparison to the light that shines from our being in step with Jesus. He speaks so beautifully about wanting this for all of us. If he had such a desire for this unity, shouldn’t we?