The God who listens to His people (contd)
Meditation 4 - The God who listens, cares and responds to my complex prayers
Psalm 5:1-3 Give ear to my words, O LORD, consider my sighing. 2 Listen to my cry for help, my King and my God, for to you I pray. 3 In the morning, O LORD, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay (Heb. “make a case” or “arrange a sacrifice on the altar”) my requests before you and wait in expectation.
What is wonderful about this attribute:
David’s prayer progresses from mere sighing, to cries for help, to articulated prayers, to structured, ordered, arranged offerings – a well-thought out case arraigned with beauty and complexity (such as a psalm). There is a place for simple prayers – sighing or simply crying out for help, but there is also a need for more structured, reasoned prayers. Our prayers should not just be heaps of words, like a pile of ingredients thrown together randomly. They should be thoughtfully and carefully laid out before God.
God is a God who is pleased not only by simple prayers but also by complex ones. He listens to them and is especially pleased by them – looking at them as a pleasing sacrifice. What a marvelous truth! Think of the times when you have wanted so desperately for certain people to listen to you, or when you have been aggravated because someone does not care at all about something that is tremendously important to you. What joy is to be had if we could only have greater conscious awareness of God’s listening, interested ear.
Dear Lord, let me have ten times the desire for the enjoyment of having You listen to me than I do to have others listen and care; so that the most hopeful, joy-inducing event coming up in my near future is my next extended time alone with You.
This is hard because we cannot see God listening. And trusting that He is listening is more than just acknowledging that it is true. You can acknowledge that it is true without enjoying it. And if you are not enjoying it you are not really experiencing it, which means nothing is taking place that will increase your delight in God. If God listens to you and you have no enjoyment of it you bring God no glory at all. He is honored when you desire Him by loving this aspect of what He is like.
What effect would it have on your heart if you were to consciously experience God’s delight in complex prayers today?
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Experiencing this attribute:
Learn to enjoy being listened to by a God who delights in complex prayers.
Your prayer should begin well before you say, “Dear Lord.” Let the musings and longings and impulses and stirrings of your inner man be directed upward, that they might be the precursors and foundation of deep prayer, rather than distractions from prayer. If you are going to be moved; if you are going to feel something – whether it be joy or sorrow or zeal or confusion or satisfaction or frustration – let it be feeling directed heavenward so that the feeling is itself a prayer.
One of the best ways to experience this attribute of God is to write out your prayers. The Psalmists didn’t have word processors where they could backspace and delete and spell check and move paragraphs around. For them writing was an expensive and inconvenient, slow, difficult process. But none of that stopped them from writing their prayers and songs. It is impossible to know how many drafts had to be crumpled and thrown away before they came up with the amazing acrostics and grand chiasms they produced, but certainly they were not off the top of their head or scribbled out in the span of ten or twenty minutes.
Think: Do your prayers top out at the bumper sticker level? Why not try writing out a prayer/psalm to God? Put some effort into it over the course of several days and construct an offering for the Lord that is as beautiful as you can make it (beautiful both because of the structure and language as well as because of how it rises up from the deepest and most genuine cries and longings of your heart).
Promise to trust today:
Psalm 5:1-3 Give ear to my words, O LORD, consider my sighing. 2 Listen to my cry for help, my King and my God, for to you I pray. 3 In the morning, O LORD, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation.
Write your own prayer:
