Monday - Pray without gaps

Submitted by westend_admin on Mon, 2011-02-14 12:32

When I was a kid there was a nursery rhyme that my parents and I would do together. It went like this:

Here is the church; here is the steeple

Open the doors and see all the people

Close the doors and hear them pray

Open the doors and they all walk away.

By reciting this rhyme (complete with hand motions) I was indirectly learning that church people prayed. There has been an evolutionary process of how I understand prayer and why we pray. I used to think that the only place you could pray was in a church building but that certainly isn’t true! 1 Thessalonians 5:17 invites us to pray without ceasing. In the Greek it reads, adialeptos poroseuchomai, which literally means “pray without gaps”. If the only place you could pray was in a church building then how could we pray without ceasing? This verse suggests that there is something more to prayer then just bowing your head, closing your eyes, and sitting in silence in a designated building. If one is to pray without gaps then maybe our entire life has the potential to be prayer. Maybe the world is thick with God’s presence and the mere act of breathing can be a prayer to commune with God.

Prayer is mentioned hundreds of times in the Bible. We’ve got a lot to explore before the Sermon this Sunday!

I want to invite you to leave comments this week about your understanding of prayer, stories you have with prayer or even questions about prayer that have been stirring in your mind.

-Jes Kast-Keat