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Define The New Prayer For Your Soul
(Excerpt from Life After Resurrection, Pt 2)
And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight,
Philippians 1:9 (NIV)
This is Paul’s prayer…what is your prayer?
At the end of many counseling sessions, I try to make use of our momentum by pointing even further to Father through prayer. But not just any prayer per se. When we’ve waded through the hardships of life, and we can finally see glimmers of hope taking shape where the future is not as gloomy as it initially seemed, a new prayer for the soul begins to emerge.
When our friends are engaged in true soul care, our prayers ought to be different than when we started. They are different because the Spirit who was at work in our friend to lift us up in our need causes us to see Christ anew.
Rather than seeing Christ’s resurrection as a mere theological truth we confess, it becomes renewed invigoration for life, purpose, meaning and hope.
When we see the risen Christ as he is meant to be seen, no amount of suffering can infiltrate our joy.
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With joy stirring in us like never before, we formulate new ways of thinking about our pain and hardship. We consider them differently. We’re able to regard them as merely sitting in the shadow of the Cross and then completely engulfed by the power of a resurrected Savior.
Suddenly, a more refined prayer emerges from the purifying and sanctifying work of the Spirit. In these moments we see anew both our sin and God’s grace. The greater our awareness of God’s grace inevitably proves our awareness of our sin, brokenness and the myriad of weaknesses inherent in the flesh.
When this occurs, we can’t help but pray for more of this. When this occurs we learn to pray less and less, God take away my pain but more and more, God thank you, help me worship you no matter the pain.
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