It’s now cliché to point out that the great revivals of the Christian faith that swept across the country in the past few centuries began with the prayers of a few. So if New Wine’s conference this fall involves rethinking the concept of evangelism in light of scripture, then the best place to start may be to rethink how we pray. I would like to write a few pieces on prayer that looks at prayer (especially petitionary prayer, i.e. requests for God’s action or provision) in the light of God’s redemptive work in Christ.
Discussions of prayer usually begin with what is referred to as the Lord’s Prayer, and not without good reason. But if sharing in the sufferings of Christ is central to the spirituality of the New Testament, then I believe the prayers of Jesus from the cross should be the starting point for any discussion of Christian prayer.
“With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.” Mark 15:37
The last prayer of Jesus recorded in Mark’s gospel does not have words. It is an unintelligible cry of abandonment, pain, and desperation. It echoes the prayers of those under oppression, the prayer that God is seemingly most likely to act on (Gen 18:20, Ex 3:7, etc.). In Christ, God shares in our humanity and experiences the pain of His creatures who have chosen to turn their backs on Him. In Christ, God becomes one with us, experiencing both abandonment from the Father and death for us, and cries out to the Father from the depths of that suffering. In short, Jesus’ prayer is a crying out to God both for us and with us.
The prayer that Jesus models, then, is a cry on behalf of and in solidarity with those who are suffering. Though we cannot experience the suffering of others in a literal sense as Jesus did, we can, however, empathize with them in prayer, petitioning God not just by reading off a list of requests, but by allowing our hearts to break for them, and as much as possible, with them. Even though Everett’s prayer in the previous post is theologically flawed in some fairly obvious ways (the characters are kids, after all), he gets at this truth in a poignant way. The prayer that would best provide the foundation for “lifestyle evangelism,” the proclamation of the gospel in word and deed to neighbors and neighborhoods, is the prayer that imitates Jesus by seeking to be on behalf of and in solidarity with others.
A very thoughtful pos.