Stratacipleship Grace: Pray 1

Over the summer the boys got into Legos. Legos fall into that same category as my house fixing skills. I am not very good at either of them. I’ll admit I don’t like this part of adulthood, because I would rather just not do it than to learn. Legos, in some small manner, are the same for me. When the boys would ask me to play Legos, I would just tell them that I was not good at building Legos and then I wouldn’t have to do it. (I proved how untalented I was at this the few times I did try to create something with them.) As they got more and more cool sets that I wanted them to enjoy, I finally took the time to slowly learn from the book. Soon I realized that the step-by-step process the instruction books provide allowed me to build the cool little items. As more of the figures got put together, I realized I was actually having fun helping the boys build them.

Legos remind me a lot of prayer. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, but most of the time we would rather claim that prayer is not our strength. It gets us off the hook from praying out loud, just like it got me out of making several Lego sets. Yet, once I realized that I can build a Lego set, with the directions of course, it was different. Sure, there are some great prayer warriors who can pray for a long time, but then there are those who can build a short little prayer. I think too many times we live in the realm of just saying this is not for me because I can’t pray like this or that person. We don’t take time to step back and try it. Doing it step-by-step we may find that it is not so hard after all. I also believe that the church didn’t help us with this in the past. Pastors took the role of “official pray-er” all the time and didn’t encourage others to step up. We are now seeing the results of that kind of passive teaching.

This week of our Stratacipleship Grace series is unique because it is the hardest part of our discipleship model. We know it is challenging to believe and trust that we can pray out loud, but now we need to take the next step by making it a strategy and helping others pray to Jesus too.   A great blessing of Jesus’ death and resurrection is, of course, eternal life, but it is also open communication with Him.  As a church, we want to help people know that they can talk to the God of the universe at any time and in any place. What a great message to share with everyone!