I Should Pray When I See #prayforparis

I confess to suffering from a hefty measure of discouragement in my prayer life. Seeing, and then using the hashtag #prayforparis and also #prayforlebanon seems like it ought to be a usefully helpful reminder to actually pray. Surely having it appear under my thumb every time I scroll through Twitter and Facebook will cause me, or someone, to lob a couple of vaguely articulate requests towards the heavens, where God is sitting on some throne or other and that’s the best I can do, right? Or something? The ‘or something’ option is to send good thoughts. Which doesn’t mean anything at all.

The reality is, we must pray. I must pray. We must not be overcome by discouragement and apathy. We must not succumb to the helplessness of being a single person who has no say in how these present principalities and powers order our common world. They are, each one, only one, and God sees us all. Nothing, not a single prayer or piece of shrapnel escapes his notice.

Prayer is the place where my helplessness meets and communes with God’s gracious and perfect will. It isn’t something I do as a last resort, it isn’t a moment of utter helplessness–although it is both those things–it is the means by which God has already purposed to carry out his will in the world. He causes me to pray, I pray, he uses my prayers to do what he is doing. That it is the moment of my abundant helplessness, that it is what I think of doing last, only makes his power and his action all the more glorious. I have come to nothing, and finally pray, he uses that point of utter helplessness to bring about his glory and his power, chiefly in saving the lost and in rescuing the sinner.

And I think, more than anything, that praying for portions of the world, including this fair land, that have gone well out of their way to reject the only God who can hear and respond, should mitigate against discouragement. France, long long ago, embraced secularism as its ultimate rallying good. It is being overrun and attacked by those who utterly reject that worldview. Neither are right. Neither have sought the saving love of the only God. Praying for them all should be the Christian’s highest priority.

Truly, most of the world is engaged in prayer of some kind, the kind that is as useful as volleying good thoughts hither and thither. It is the useless kind that might actually make you feel better–the kind where you go to some particular location and wave incense or something in the air, or bow yourself to the ground. Whereas the kind that doesn’t make you feel anything, that let’s you sit and stew, is effective not because of how or where you’re doing it, but because of who you’re talking to.

And who is that? Jesus. Jesus hears you because 1. his sacrifice on the cross paid the penalty for sin and removed the wall of separation between you and God created by that sin; 2. he rose again, destroying death forever and 3. he ascended into heaven and sat down on the right hand of the Father. The sitting down indicated that he had completed his work. The wasn’t anything left to do. And he sits next to the Father, all the work done, and brings our requests and petitions before the Father, bringing us into the very presence of the most Holy God. Everything we say to him, he hears. Everything.

So it doesn’t matter what I feel. It doesn’t matter if I continue to be discouraged and sad. It matters that I say to my Lord Christ, “help.” Help me, help the perishing, help the world, help the one who loves you and the one who has rejected you. Help. And I can say this, I can cry it silently, wherever I am, doing whatever I was already doing. His location and work is what matters, not mine.

#prayforparis #prayforeverything #becausehehears