My brother has a prayer that came straight from God during his prayer time. He has prayed some form of that prayer over and over and over again. It is a beautiful prayer of surrender.
My friend Barbara has a prayer that came to her in her prayer time in a similar way and has profound meaning for her. She prays it, not as a rote discipline or a mantra, but with fresh, original, earnestness and fresh words over and over again. She comes back to it as often as the Spirit leads.
I have another friend who has a similar relationship to Ephesians 6. I’m a little bit of a wanderer. I get bored easily, but I’ve had seasons of this kind of praying over several scriptures.
I call these priestly prayers because I believe they are a calling. I’ll explain why.
When God finds someone who will listen He teaches them something profound, something that changes them and changes the way they look at life and approach the things that cause them fear or anxiety.
Usually this process takes time. Often we don’t know what He’s showing us all at once. But we find ourselves drawn back to the same verse, phrase or idea again and again in different times of prayer, or maybe the same thought crops up in conversation. We hear others pointing us back to what God is doing in our hearts.
When we take what He is showing us and pray into it, we grow. Then He walks us around to another side and shows us the same idea from a different vantage point. We make connections. We pray into it, and our eyes open in wonder!
We have days of being aware of His Voice and Hand, but it’s often years or decades before we really see what a beautiful thing we’ve been walking around. (We are always walking around Jesus, and His love for us! We could walk for a lifetime, and never see it all!)
In the midst of this sometimes a prayer is born, or unwrapped, a gift from God. We find ourselves meditating on it, and returning to pray it often. Most people in this position are eager to teach their prayer to others. They hear someone talking of fear or anxiety and they want to say, “Here’s what God gave me for that!” And that is good! It may well be part of the conversation God is having with that other person, but it rarely has the impact for them that it did for us.
When I tell you my prayer, I want you to experience my walk with God, but that is like handing you a postcard of the Grand Canyon, and expecting you to feel what I felt standing at it’s rim. I can tell you what it means to me, but to really know it, you would have to take the journey. I can’t give you a decade of Love in a sentence or two.
But maybe I can give you the next best thing!
Paul teaches that Christians are one body. We are Christ’s body in the Earth, doing His work till He returns. We all serve one another. When one of us works we all are blessed. When one hurts we all suffer. What if this were a spiritual reality and not just a motivational speech?
In my body, my pancreas makes insulin. It can’t help itself. It is very dedicated and passionate about insulin. (Forgive me all the diabetics out there!) My heart on the other hand never thinks about insulin. It’s distracted with other concerns. It may speed up or slow down depending on the glucose/insulin ratio in my body. It may sometimes feel lethargic or anxious if the balance is off, and it probably doesn’t know why. It just keeps trying to beat even though something seems wrong. But if I don’t eat too bad, and my pancreas does its job, then my heart is free to focus on what it is passionate about.
My pancreas can’t teach my heart to make insulin, but as long as it makes insulin, my heart doesn’t need to. It is protected by the presence of insulin without ever having to turn from it’s own mission to ask, “What is insulin?” Likewise, my pancreas won’t last long if my heart stops pursuing its mission. They need each other, but they need their differences too. Their experiences while linked are very unique to the role they play.
What if my spiritual journey is equipping me to pray for you with a passion and perspective that is unique? What if you can’t do for me all that you were made to do, if I don’t do my part for you? Perhaps my purpose is to take a lifelong journey into Wonder, and pray the experience over you. And your purpose is to take your own journey, and pray that over me. Maybe there is a spiritual reality that you are blessed by the power of my faith working on your behalf, and I am likewise blessed by your faith in ways I can’t see. My prayer may be the insulin the church needs to stabilize blood sugar. Someone else’s prayer could be an endorphin, or an antibody, a neurotransmitter or a dose of adrenaline. I trust that My God who orchestrates all things for our good is guiding just the right individual into just the right vantage point to speak just the right word at just the right time. But we have to take the journey, and we have to do what only we can do, which is speak the prayer that He teaches us.
One of those Scriptures that I have prayed over and over again is from Numbers 6. You’ve probably heard it or seen it somewhere. It is a prayer, a blessing that Aaron the high priest in Moses day was given to pray over the people. At the feasts where all of Israel was to gather to remember and celebrate what God had done for them, Aaron, and later his descendants, would pray this blessing over the people. God Himself wrote this prayer and commanded that it be spoken repeatedly year after year to the people. It is His heart for them to know that He is giving Himself to them, to protect them, provide for them, stay with them and cause peace to surround them. The priest was to make sure they heard God’s heart for them regularly.
What if to be a priest is to take an epic journey through the wilderness with God until He inscribes His heart on you, and then to pray that into the world in the broadest context possible. Until we all know Him!
“Jesus, on the other hand, because He continues forever, holds His priesthood permanently. Therefore He is also able to save forever those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them.” Hebrews 7:24-25
