The List (Prayer, Part 2)
From time to time Korie will send me a text message with a list of items she needs me to pick up from the grocery store. Now two things you should know about me: One is I’m incredibly impatient, and the other is I hate feeling incompetent. These two things make going to a grocery store extremely nerve wracking because I have no clue where things are (even with the signs), and I want to hurry up and get out of there with all the items on the list fulfilled. So as impatient as I am, I’ve learned to just give the store employee the whole list. And because they are so familiar with where things are, the list gets handled quickly. When it’s all done, I thank the person who helped me, check out and leave, never to see them again.
That’s kind of how prayer can be for a lot of us, isn’t it? We all know what it’s like to hand God our list, hoping he’ll check each item off, and quickly. And when the items on our agenda are handled, we tend to “take off,” not in a hurry to visit with God again, until we need help with new items on the list.
Someone once said prayer is not so much a matter about getting what we want, but encountering who we want. Jesus understood this, which is why in what has been called the, “Lord’s Prayer,” he not only postures prayer relationally as an encounter between us and our “Father,” but he shows us we need to begin our encounter with God not with our lists, but with adoring God’s character. This is what Jesus means when he says, “hallowed be your name.” To hallow is to declare as holy, or to adore; and the idea of name is character. In antiquity, a child’s name was a hopeful declaration of who they would become in their character. Names are character.
The point Jesus is making is there’s a direct relationship between what we know of God’s character (names), and the intensity of our worship.
Imagine you’re at a dinner party seated randomly next to an older gentleman. You’re polite with him and ask him his name and he tells you it’s Louis. You then ask what he does for fun, and he says not much since he’s in his nineties now, but back in the day he loved to run. You ask him what were some of the events he ran in and he tells you he ran in the 1936 Olympics where he got to know Jesse Owens, and even shook Hitler’s hand (before he knew how awful he was). Later you discover he served in WWII, crashed in the Pacific Ocean where after several weeks he was picked up by the Japanese, placed in a concentration camp and tortured. Miraculously he survived, came home and was addicted to alcohol, wandered into a tent in downtown Los Angeles where a guy named Billy Graham was preaching. He gives his life to Christ, goes back to Japan and forgives those who tortured him, and now they’ve just written a best selling book about him, along with a movie called, Unbroken. The guys name is Louis Zamperini and all of this is true. Now, at the end of this conversation I’m going to guess you’ve gone from exchanging polite pleasantries to being in awe. What changed? You got to know him and his character.
If we struggle to really adore God it could be because we don’t really know God. God is saying in so many words, “Google me. Get to know me. And it will impact your worship of me.” You may want to begin by meditating on his name Yahweh- the personal God who provides for us. Or think on his name God, or Elohim, the strong God who is transcendent. Or contemplate his name Adonai which speaks of his role as Master, one who is in control. When we really get to know God it will impact our worship and adoration of God.
