During my lifetime of reading in the Church’s history, I’ve never met a Saint who did not have a devotion to prayer. Prayer is the lifeblood of our relationship with Christ in God. Prayer unites our heart to God’s heart, our will to God’s will, our desires to God’s desires. Jesus taught us to pray through his disciples when he was asked by them “Master, teach us to pray”.
“Pray then like this: “Our Father
in heaven, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (Matthew 6:9-13).
Prayer is the language of
heaven. Jesus’ prayer encapsulates the
entire Gospel. We are not just talking
to God, we are listening to God also. Prayer
is raising our minds and hearts to God in humility because humility is the
foundation of prayer. When we pray, we
come as the Apostle Paul said, “We do not know how to pray as we ought…the
Spirit intercedes for us” (Romans 8:26).
The Catechism of the Church
reminds us: “You would have asked him, and he would have given you living
water.[1]
Paradoxically our prayer of petition is a response to the plea of the living
God: ‘They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn out
cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.’[2]
Prayer is the response of faith to the free promise of salvation and also a
response of love to the thirst of the only Son of God.”[3]
Why do we pray? Because we need to…for our sake, the sake of
others, but in the end, for the glory of God.
I’ll let the 2nd-century great defender of the faith – Saint Tertullian. Tertullian lived during a time of great persecution
of the Christian Church by the Roman Empire.
His people suffered greatly for
being Christians. Tertullian wrote many
letters in defense of the Christian faith, as well as theological treatises in
defense of orthodoxy as heresies arose. Yet, at the heart of his life was his
pastoral role as a Priest to his people in Carthage, North Africa. He wrote this to his people so that they might
be encouraged to pray, even in the face of persecution.
From the treatise On Prayer by Tertullian,
“The spiritual offering of prayer”
Prayer is the offering in spirit
that has done away with the sacrifices of old. What good do I receive from
the multiplicity of your sacrifices? asks God. I have had enough of
burnt offerings of rams, and I do not want the fat of lambs and the blood of
bulls and goats. Who has asked for these from your hands?
What God has asked for we learn
from the Gospel. The hour will come, he says, when true
worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. God is a spirit, and
so he looks for worshipers who are like himself.
We are true worshipers and true
priests. We pray in spirit, and so offer in spirit the sacrifice of prayer.
Prayer is an offering that belongs to God and is acceptable to him: it is the
offering he has asked for, the offering he planned as his own.
We must dedicate this offering
with our whole heart, we must fatten it on faith, tend it by truth, keep it
unblemished through innocence and clean through chastity, and crown it with
love. We must escort it to the altar of God in a procession of good works to
the sound of psalms and hymns. Then it will gain for us all that we ask of God.
Since God asks for prayer offered
in spirit and in truth, how can he deny anything to this kind of prayer? How
great is the evidence of its power, as we read and hear and believe.
Prayer cleanses from sin, drives
away temptations, stamps out persecutions, comforts the fainthearted, gives new
strength to the courageous, brings travelers safely home, calms the waves,
confounds robbers, feeds the poor, overrules the rich, lifts up the fallen,
supports those who are falling, sustains those who stand firm.
What more need be said on the duty
of prayer? Even the Lord himself prayed. To him be honor and power for ever and
ever. Amen.
Peace
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