Make Prayer More Than a Request.
“Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us.” — Psalm 62:8
“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”
— Philippians 4:6
I used to work at a Christian camp where our walkie-talkies ran on two kinds of channels, general ones for everyday communication, and restricted channels reserved for emergencies only.
That image has stayed with me because I think it describes how many of us relate to prayer. We treat it like a restricted channel: something we tune in to only when we need to ask or request from God. And then we wonder why our prayer lives feel so thin.
Peter Adam, in his book Prayerfulness, presses against this narrowness. If we use “prayer” only to mean asking, he writes, we’ve left out calling on God, praising him, worshipping him, confessing sin, lamenting evil, begging, pleading, and singing to him.[1] Prayer, in its fullness, is not a request line: it is communion.
This is part of why I’ve continued to lean on the ACTS method of prayer (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication). It keeps me from camping out on the one restricted channel and instead opens me up to the full, rich conversation God invites us into.
Prayer was never meant to be a last resort. It was meant to be the whole relationship.
Reflection
What channels of prayer have you been neglecting, and what would it look like to open them up this week?
[1]Peter Adam, Prayerfulness (Nottingham: IVP, 2013), 11.
Good word Raphael! Prayer is sanity!