My Anglican brothers and sisters are probably familiar with the form of prayer called the Collect. But it’s something new to me and I’ve been trying to add it to my devotions.
A Collect is a Christian literary form. It’s a brief prayer with a structured format.
Invocation: Usually addressed to God the Father.
Ground of Prayer: This is some attribute about God that serves as the basis for why we are praying to him.
Main Prayer: A single and focused request.
Secondary Prayer: A single supporting idea.
Doxology: A word of praise and thanks to God.
A Collect for Independence Day
Gracious and Almighty God. You alone set the captives free and break the chains of slavery to sin.
As we celebrate our independence as a nation let us remember that true freedom is found in Christ alone and give us the grace to celebrate and live in that freedom every moment.
May our freedom make us salt and light to those still bound by sin.
For the glory and honor and praise of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one who suffered, died, and rose again that we may walk in newness of life.
The deer in Psalm 42 feels desperate and afraid and alone. His soul is “downcast” and “in turmoil” (v. 5). He is being taunted by his enemies (v. 10) and is reminding himself to hope in God (v. 11). He desperately wants to be in God’s presence because he feels forgotten by him (v.9). We often pull the first two verses out of the context of the rest of the Psalm, and imagine a nice little deer who is thirsty and finally getting to a take deep drink from a river or lake. I feel like the author’s have made that mistake here, but I also think the question itself is valid and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
When was the last time I felt truly DESPERATE for God? For HIM. Not for what he can do for me or give me or change for me, but just for him.
Like many/most Christians my personal prayer life is filled with requests for myself and others.
Lord please do… Lord please give… Lord please heal… Lord please provide…
There is nothing wrong with that. As Spurgeon said, “Whether we like it or not, asking is the rule of the kingdom.”
We are not God and we are utterly dependent on God. We do not take a breath without his allowing it to be taken. We must humble ourselves before him in prayer and ask for what we need and want and trust him to do what is best in answer to those prayers.
But is that all our prayer life is? Asking for things?
Exodus 33:11 is a beautiful verse and I love it.
Thus the LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. When Moses turned again into the camp, his assistant Joshua the son of Nun, a young man, would not depart from the tent. (emphasis mine)
Joshua did not have the incredible pleasure of God speaking to him “face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” but even after Moses left the tent of meeting, Joshua wouldn’t leave. He wanted to stay right there where God had been speaking to Moses. He just wanted to be with God. God didn’t even have to speak to him, Joshua just desperately wanted to be in God’s presence. He didn’t ask for anything. He just stayed.
I also think about Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus, hanging on his every word (Luke 10:38-42). She didn’t ask for anything. She just wanted to be in the presence of the Lord she loved.
What would this look like in our lives, I wonder? What would it look like to pray just to be with God? Without asking for anything at all?
I think it looks a lot like worship.
The Psalms are filled with prayers of supplication and intercession. There are also Psalms where the writer doesn’t ask for anything. He just writes a Psalm of worship. Many of these are the Psalms of Ascent, which were the songs the people of Israel would sing on their way to worship in Jerusalem. There are Psalms that are proclamations of God’s goodness and holiness and kindness and steadfast love. We can read these Psalms and meditate on who God is and all that is beautiful and wonderful about him.
When we go to church on Sundays and sing songs of worship and praise, we can enjoy God’s presence with our brothers and sisters in Christ just for the joy of being with God together.
Another verse I love is Mathew 13:1. “That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea.” Full stop. The next verse has great crowds gathering around him but the whole thing begins so simply and quietly. Jesus just went out of the house and sat by the sea. I wonder how long he sat there before people found him and wanted something from him. How long did he just sit by the sea in the presence of his Father?
We can go out of the house and sit in nature, quiet and still in the presence of God. I doubt great crowds will be looking for us, so we can just be in God’s presence in worship and fellowship.
There is nothing wrong with asking God for things. In fact there is something very RIGHT about that. But we have an anemic prayer life if that’s all we do.
God is incredible and worthy of worship because of who he is. He doesn’t have to do anything other than just exist. There is no end to God. There will be no point in all of eternity where we will stop being astonished by him. We can get a taste of that now.
Sometimes it is good to simply “be still and know that [he] is God.” (Psalm 46:10)
The world says, ‘If you are not making good use of your time, you are useless.’ Jesus says: ‘Come and spend some useless time with me.” If we think about prayer in terms of its usefulness to us–what prayer will do for us, what spiritual benefits we will gain, what insights we will gain, what divine presence we may feel–God cannot easily speak to us. But if we can detach ourselves from the idea of the usefulness of prayer and the results of prayer, we become free to ‘waste’ as precious hour with God in prayer. Gradually, we may find our ‘useless’ time will transform us, and everything around us will be different.
Prayer is being unbusy with God instead of being busy with other things. Prayer is primarily to do nothing useful or productive in the presence of God. To not be useful is to remind myself that if anything important or fruitful happens through prayer, it is God who achieves the result. So when I go into the day, I go with the conviction that God is the one who brings forth fruit i my work, and I do not have to act as though I am in control of things. I have to work hard; I have to do my task; I have to offer my best. But I can let go of the illusion of control and be detached from the result. At the end of each day I can prayerfully say that if something good has happened, God be praised.
Little children, keep yourselves from idols. – 1 John 5:21
Yesterday I was struggling to find peace. I was torn up in my heart about something and the anxiety was building and with that, shame and anger.
As I usually do when things feel overwhelming, I took my journal and started to write about it.
Journaling helps bring clarity.
This time I couldn’t get clarity on why I felt so torn up in my heart, though. Of course, that just added to my frustration. I wanted the stress and anxiety to go away!
I stopped for a moment and asked myself, “What’s REALLY going on here?”
Then I wrote down…
“I don’t trust God. I don’t believe he can be trusted with this.”
Then I begin to write out a prayer about how wrong that was and that God was sovereign and good and loving and kind and that he would always do what was best for his glory and my good.
I repented for my sinful thoughts about him and confessed his goodness and grace.
And all my anxiety vanished. There was peace.
My circumstances have not changed at all. I am still exactly where I was. But my heart is different. The real issue was not my circumstances, it was my lack of faith and trust.
It was my idolatry.
We all want a god we can control, one that bows to our whims, our own personal genie that behaves exactly the way we want. And we build up that god in our minds and hearts and give that idol God’s name.
Then, when that idol let’s us down, and it ALWAYS will, we think we cannot trust the one true God.
And that brings anger and frustration and fear. But God is not the problem. It’s our wrong understanding of who he is. It is our idolatry that is the real issue.
And until we confess that and repent, we cannot know peace.
Thankfully, God is kind and his kindness and his patience lead us to repentance (Romans 2:4).
In his love, God also reproves and disciplines us to bring us to repentance as well (Revelation 3:19) but the goal is always to bring us back to himself.
It is an invitation to come home to him and to know him as he truly is, which is infinitely better than our self-made idols.
Joseph McBee 