ACTS now

ACTS Now



After they've prayed for a minute or so, those just beginning to pray sometimes wonder, ''Now what?" They're not quite sure what they should be praying about or how to go about doing it. In this chapter, we'll look at one method.

Everything we pray about falls into one of four categories. And if we give these categories the right name, we can come up with an acronym that can guide our prayers:

A = Adoration
C = Confession
T = Thanksgiving
S = Supplication

Let's take a closer look at each of these actions.


Adoration

To adore God is to praise him, to honor him for his greatness. To "bless the Lord" is a biblical way of putting it.


There is a difference between adoration and thanksgiving. One way to think of it is like this: We praise God for who he is; we thank God for what he has done for us. Admittedly, the line can get fine: When we praise God for being our Redeemer, we're thanking him for redeeming us. Still, the emphasis in adoration is on God's greatness.

Another take on the difference can be put like this: We praise God for the big picture (creating the world, redeeming people, watching over history) and we thank him for his special gifts to us (giving us wisdom to handle a problem, keeping us in good health). Again, the emphasis in adoration is on God's greatness.

For me, this has always been the hardest part of prayer. It takes a poet's sensibilities to call forth words that can even begin to express praise and adoration. And a poet I am not.


But the poetry of prayer I know, and I make use of it to help me praise God. Let me give one example from each of the three sources I rely on. First, there are the Psalms, which are littered with praise. Psalm 145 begins like this:

I will praise you, my God and King,
and bless your name forever and ever.
I will bless you every day,
and I will praise you forever.
Great is the Lord! He is most worthy of praise!
His greatness is beyond discovery!


And then the Psalmist goes on to praise God for his "mighty acts" and "wonderful goodness" and so on.

Another place I find great words of praise is in a hymnal. Again, let me pick something out almost at random (whose title is in the first line):

Sing praise to God who reigns above,
The God of all creation,
The God of power, the God of love,
The God of our salvation;
With healing balm my soul he fills,
And every faithless murmur stills:
To God all praise and glory. Johann J. Schultz

The great prayers in the Christian tradition are another source of praise. A classic example comes from Francis of Assisi.

You are holy, Lord, the only God,
and your deeds are wonderful.
You are strong.You are great.
You are the most high.
You are almighty.
You, holy Father, are
King of heaven and earth.
You are three and one,
Lord God, all good.
You are good, all good, supreme good,
Lord God, living and true.
You are love,
You are wisdom,
You are humility,
You are endurance.

You are rest,
You are peace.
You are joy and gladness.
You are justice and moderation.
You are all our riches,
And you suffice for us.
You are beauty.
You are gentleness.
You are our protector,
You are our guardian and defender.
You are courage.
You are our haven and our hope.
You are our faith,
Our great consolation.
You are our eternal life,
Great and wonderful Lord,
God almighty,
Merciful Savior.

Such prayers are enthusiastic with praise, overflowing with joy. This is not me at least, not a lot of mornings. So, the question naturally arises: "Isn't it hypocritical to use such a prayer when I'm not feeling the way the Psalmist, or whoever, did?"


Yes and no. Some prayers of praise are really not me, and so I don't use them. But I would be foolish if I waited until I felt like praising God before I praised him. After all, I'm a pretty self-centered individual, and it might be a few years before I got around to it. But God is worthy of praise day in and day out.


I use prayers of praise not only to praise God but also to help me praise. I want to learn how to praise. I want to feel more "praiseful." Such praise prayers help me become the person I'd like to become, a person who is more aware of God's greatness.

One preacher put it like this: "You don't learn to praise in a day, especially since you may have been complaining for years! New habits take time to develop. But you can begin today and practice tomorrow, and the next day, until it becomes a part of you."

Confession

There is a certain logic to putting confession next. After reflecting on the absolute goodness of God, we become keenly aware that we are not all that good, that we fall far short of who he has created us to be, that we've failed him and failed ourselves. It's an easy step to move into prayers of confession.

Some people wonder why we should even dwell on our shortcomings. Won't that just drag us down? Shouldn't we just focus on the positive and what we've done right to help us move forward?


The problem is that thinking positive thoughts does not change reality, and part of reality is that we just don't live, act, or think as we ought. Another part of reality is that we feel badly about that. Yet another part of reality is that God is in the midst of reality and offers forgiveness and hope.

Besides, confession is not plaintive breast-beating, where we wallow in self-induced misery. There will be times when we are miserable, to be sure. We are capable of some terrible deeds. But when we confess to God, it is never with the question, "Will God forgive?" Instead, it is always with a sure hope: We have the courage to confess because we know we'll

One line from the Bible puts it succinctly: "If we confess our sins . . . God is faithful and just, to forgive us and to cleanse us from every wrong" (1 John 1:9).


It is always good to be specific when it comes to confession. It is much better to pray, "Lord, I shouldn't have yelled at my kids yesterday," than to say, "Lord, I've not acted like I wanted to act yesterday." A vague confession will only lead to a vague sense of forgiveness.

This doesn't mean that generic prayers of confession aren't useful. I mentioned in Chapter 8, "Prayer Options," how meaningful I find one prayer of confession in the Book of Common Prayer, which begins like this:

Most merciful God,We confess that we have sinned against youin thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and left undone.We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.

But I use such prayers as a guide to elicit specific thoughts. I try to pause over each word or phrase and do a quick self-inventory: " . . .sinned against you in thought . . . word . . . and deed . . ., by what we have done . . . and by what we have left undone. . . ." And so on. This prayer, in particular, has an amazing ability to help me do an honest and full self-inventory.

As you incorporate confession into your regular prayer routine, you'll find yourself acknowledging the same shortcomings: It may be pride, lust, temper, self-centeredness, or whatever. This can get discouraging, and you may wonder if God will continue to forgive this sort of thing and whether it does any good to continue mentioning such stuff.

Yes, and yes. God's capacity to forgive is actually bigger than our capacity to sin, as hard as that is to believe some days.

And to acknowledge our habitual sins is simply a bit of housecleaning. For example, I try to keep my desk in order, but it regularly succumbs to chaos. I don't beat myself up when this happens, but I do acknowledge it. Then I set about straightening it up. I don't refuse to straighten it simply because odds are that it will become a mess again.

The same is true with confession: It's merely an acknowledgement that my soul is in a mess again and that it needs attention.

Thanksgiving

Confession, in turn, naturally moves into thanksgiving because we tend to be thankful when we recall that God sticks with us even when we don't stick with him. This then leads us to think of other things God has done for us, and that usually leads into thanksgiving.


But that's not always the case. In fact, sometimes we get amnesia about our blessings and move right into pestering God for this and that. This easily can open us up to the spirit of ungratefulness, which is a close cousin of bitterness.

We've all met such people. They manage to find a cloud within every silver lining. Even when life grants them blessing after blessing, they manage to spend all their energy thinking about their handful of problems. They are not only a burden to themselves, but they're also annoying to others around them.

On the other hand, there are people like Ben, who used to work in the mail room at my office. Every day he was upbeat. He gave everyone a smile and a warm greeting. He never complained about his job, as menial as it could be. He not only asked about how others were doing, but he remembered what they said and followed up in later conversations. He was a grateful man often mentioning his many blessings and he lifted everyone around him.

I used to think it pretty corny and superficial when people would say, "Count your blessings." But when I was a pastor, I met people who had just endured some human disaster (the loss of a job, or even the loss of a spouse or child to sudden death), who pretty soon would start talking about their blessings and what they were still thankful for. They didn't deny their grief or loss, but it simply wasn't the total picture. Widows, for example, would lament their loss and then start talking about how thankful they were that they were able to have their husband as long as they did.

I discovered that "Count your blessings," is not an act of denial or a superficial response to suffering; it's a realistic appraisal of the situation. Life deals us blows, but never so many as to completely wipe out the blessing. Thanksgiving in prayer is a key discipline to remembering the blessing.

I don't want to be glib about this. Life sometimes can be truly horrific famine, genocide, unspeakable acts of personal violence. Some people who have endured such things have found that, indeed, gratefulness is the immediate way out of despair even many sufferers of the Holocaust have taken this approach. But others find it impossible to count their blessings because their blessings seem so paltry next to the disaster they've just endured. For them, any advice is probably inappropriate. Sometimes we need to honor the suffering of others by suffering with them in silence, letting God heal them how and when he would be accepted.


But aside from extraordinary circumstances, it's not bad advice to focus on those things for which we are grateful in our day-to-day life and it's certainly better than counting your disasters.

This is one reason thanksgiving precedes petition in this and most prayer methods. So important is thanksgiving that it is often put before and after petition. Some would argue that gratefulness is the attribute of Christians: "Rejoice in the Lord always," wrote the apostle Pauland then, to make sure his readers got it, he continued, "Again, I say, rejoice!" (Philippians 4:4, Revised Standard Version).


Supplication:
Petition

Supplication is a long-winded word for asking God for help. Classically, these pleas for help fall into two categories: Requests for oneself, which are called "petitions," and requests for others, called "intercessions." Let's take them one at a time.

Let me try to clear up a noble but dumb idea that the spiritually mature don't ask God anything for themselves. Two reasons are usually given.

First, we incorrectly assume that God isn't interested in our mundane concerns. I refer you back to the Lord's Prayer and that little petition, "Give us this day our daily bread." There are few things more mundane than eating, and yet Jesus thinks it is a topic worthy of prayer.

Furthermore, the Bible is littered with comments that suggest God is, in fact, concerned about the little things. He is said to count the hairs on our heads. He is said to care for us as a shepherd cares for lost sheep. He is said to be a heavenly Father who values us as children.

Parents care about the little things. My 9-year-old worries whether she'll do well on her science test. My high school son is bored on a Friday night. My high school freshman just played badly in a basketball loss. In the cosmic sweep of things, these are indeed But aside from extraordinary circumstances, it's not bad advice to focus on those things for which we are grateful in our day-to-day life and it's certainly better than counting your disasters.

This is one reason thanksgiving precedes petition in this and most prayer methods. So important is thanksgiving that it is often put before and after petition. Some would argue that gratefulness is the attribute of Christians: "Rejoice in the Lord always," wrote the apostle Pauland then, to make sure his readers got it, he continued, "Again, I say, rejoice!" (Philippians 4:4, Revised Standard Version).


Supplication:
Petition

Supplication is a long-winded word for asking God for help. Classically, these pleas for help fall into two categories: Requests for oneself, which are called "petitions," and requests for others, called "intercessions." Let's take them one at a time.

Let me try to clear up a noble but dumb idea that the spiritually mature don't ask God anything for themselves. Two reasons are usually given.

First, we incorrectly assume that God isn't interested in our mundane concerns. I refer you back to the Lord's Prayer and that little petition, "Give us this day our daily bread." There are few things more mundane than eating, and yet Jesus thinks it is a topic worthy of prayer.

Furthermore, the Bible is littered with comments that suggest God is, in fact, concerned about the little things. He is said to count the hairs on our heads. He is said to care for us as a shepherd cares for lost sheep. He is said to be a heavenly Father who values us as children.

Parents care about the little things. My 9-year-old worries whether she'll do well on her science test. My high school son is bored on a Friday night. My high school freshman just played badly in a basketball loss. In the cosmic sweep of things, these are indeed petty issues, but I'm the father of these children, and I'm concerned about things they are concerned about. I can't help it.

God can't help it, either.


Second, it's not always selfish to pray for yourself. Something can concern the self and yet not be selfish. Selfishness, on the other hand, occurs when we're inordinately concerned about ourselves. We've been created as individuals with yearnings, hopes, desires, dreams, wants, and needs spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical. To seek these at the expense of others is selfish; to seek them, however, is not.

And to pretend that we don't have desires, or to say that we shouldn't have them, is sub-human. It is also sub-Christian. The Bible is a very human book, and it accepts people as they really are. For sure, people really are beings with desires. We want nicer homes. We want to be better people. We want attractive spouses. We want to be healthy. We want to grow spiritually. We want to be proud of our children. We want to eat well. And so on.

Jesus also speaks about this part of us nearly every time he speaks about prayer:

"Ask and you shall receive." (Matthew 7:7, RSV)"You can ask for anything in my name, and I will do it." (John 14:13)"Listen to me! You can pray for anything, and if you believe, you will have it." (Mark 11:24)

Jesus assumes that prayer will very much be concerned about asking all sorts of things from God.

This doesn't mean that God will honor every request, of course, and neither does it mean that every request is equally valid. A vacation home in the Bahamas or a new Lexus is not quite on par with wanting more patience with your children.

But that also doesn't mean that there are some restrictions about what we pray for. Prayer is a process by which we discover which of our desires are truly selfish and which are not, and it's about learning to curb those selfish desires. We pray for this or that, unsure of our motives, and wait for God's response in prayer, in Scripture, in life, in circumstances. In this give and take of prayer, we discover what we're supposed to have and what we're not supposed to have.

Those who are suspicious of petition are partly right: Prayer is first and foremost about aligning our wills to God's will. But the way that happens is not by denying that we have a will; it's by expressing our will to God and letting him affirm or shape that will as is necessary.


Let's be clear: Selfish desires come in all sorts of disguises. The yearning for a 6,000-square-foot home may be selfish, but the prayer to be a good example to everyone around you can also be a form of selfishness. This prayer may arise out of spiritual pride: You may simply be wanting everyone to look up to you and praise you for your goodness.


The human heart is deceitful, and its motives are often difficult to fathom. But prayers of petition telling God honestly what it is we're wanting is about the best way to begin to discern what's really going on.

Supplication:
Intercession

To intercede is to pray for others, and this is one of the most significant ways we can help others.

God has constructed reality so that there are a variety of ways to help others. For instance, let's say that my friend Tom comes down with a sore back and, after seeing the doctor, is ordered to stay in bed for a week. I'll naturally respond to this bit of news with words of encouragement. Perhaps I'll prepare some meals for Tom. Maybe I'll go to the video store to rent him some movies, or maybe I'll go to the library to check out some books. I'll take notes at a meeting he was supposed to attend. And so on.

I can also help Tom by praying for him. If he knows I'm praying for him, that will encourage him because he'll be aware at another level that I care about him. That is one of the psychological aspects of prayer. Here's another: My praying for Tom will help me reflect on how I can help Tom even more.

But prayer works at another level still. It unleashes a spiritual power that can do extraordinary things, everything from keeping Tom from frustration to actually healing his back. How exactly this all works remains a mystery, but it is the clear teaching of the Bible and the common experience of prayers through the centuries.


Some people like to systematically cover their bases when they pray. To make sure they regularly pray for everyone they're concerned about, they create a list and either pray through it every day or assign certain days for each part of the list. Here is one way to organize a prayer list:

Sunday: Immediate family

Monday: Extended family

Tuesday: Neighbors and friends

Wednesday: Coworkers

Thursday: People in groups you belong to (church, running club, online chat room)

Friday: The poor and needy

Saturday: Your community, the nation

Again, you don't want to become legalistic or get stuck in a rut. There is value, for instance, in regularly including all these parts of prayer in a certain order. Such discipline can, in the long run, help one grow deeper in prayer. But I, for one, find that I have to break out of routines every so often change the order, eliminate parts, focus on only one aspect, etc. Then when I come back to my routine later, I come ready to appreciate its value afresh.