Better than Chatting

 Better than Chatting

 

I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the confident hope he has given to those he called — his holy people who are his rich and glorious inheritance. I also pray that you will understand the incredible greatness of God’s power for us who believe him.

EPHESIANS 1:18-19

We keep on praying for you, asking our God to enable you to live a life worthy of his call. May he give you the power to accomplish all the good things your faith prompts you to do.

2 THESSALONIANS 1:11

 

Some social situations call for the skill of “chatting,” or the art of casual conversation. It’s the ability to talk pleasantly with someone you don’t know well about stuff that doesn’t matter all that much.

If we’re not careful, we can find ourselves reducing prayer to “chatting” with God, limiting prayers to superficial topics, surface issues, never getting to the heart of things. Have you ever noticed that when people offer prayer requests, they are usually about physical needs and rarely about spiritual needs? We ask God to heal physical ailments, to provide safe travel, and to “be with us.” It’s not that God doesn’t care about these things. He cares about us, and what matters to us matters to him. But prayer is much more than that. It’s a spiritual process toward a spiritual end. God wants to do a deep work in our inner lives, rubbing off the rough edges and cleaning up our character. So why do we settle for talking to him only about the shallow stuff?

When our prayers move from the superficial to the significant, we find ourselves inviting God to do no less than a deep, transforming, life-changing work in our lives and in the lives of those we’re praying for. We talk to him about our fears, we invite him into our failures, we confess the ways we fall short. We open up our lives for him to do a significant spiritual work.