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The Music Exchange

The prayerful musician

It’s customary for a writer to say how much of a fraud he or she feels when talking about prayer, so here’s my bit: I’m feeble and faithless.

I’ve wanted to write this article ever since reading Christopher Ash’s in The Briefing (Issue 331). This article (particularly the words of Samuel, ‘Far be it from me that I should sin against the LORD by ceasing to pray for you’, 1 Samuel 12.23, ESV) convicted me again of the central place that prayer has in every sphere of Christian ministry, alongside the preaching of the Word.

Prayer’s demise

Prayer is something I was very excited about when I was a young Christian, because of the buzz that the experience of a new relationship brings. For the first time I knew what it was to be a dearly loved child of a loving heavenly Father, an heir of God and a co-heir of Christ, with the privilege of being able to cry by the Spirit, ‘Abba, Father’. Similarly, when I started my present job, I resolved to take time during each day to pray for those with whom I was working, and for the various projects that I became involved with. However, it wasn’t long before the natural way in which I spoke to God turned into formulaic phrases and long yawns. Worse still, I wasn’t able to get enough people to catch me in the act of praying in secret.

The solution was not to pray at all. This helped me feel good that I was no longer just praying for the sake of it, and anyway, praying is what you do when you’re young and keen. I’m much older and wiser now.

Getting away with it

Music is an area in which you can seemingly get away without praying once you get to an acceptable standard of ability. When I played my first hymn at school on an organ, it took me two or three hours of practice and about the same amount of time praying as I lay unable to sleep the night before. Now I know I can just rock up and make an all right go of it, I hardly pray at all about my own playing. In those early days, I also used to thank God for every compliment I received from people. One of my favourite compliments was from a visiting American at the school where I was practising my hymn. He said, ‘Hey, that’s pretty good. For a kid.’

In those days I praised God, because I knew that I was dependent on him for every note I played. Now, I don’t need to thank God, because I can do it without his help. Forgive me for making this a personal testimony, but I’m sure this is pretty common among musicians, and one of the main reasons for our pride and ungodliness. If you play well, then people may tell you that God really blessed them through you. Those comments then send signals to our proud brains that it’s our skill which God needs to achieve his purposes. The quality of our playing then masks the emptiness of our prayer life. Moreover, the fact that we can produce a ‘spiritual’ response by our chords or notes becomes the essence of our personal engagement with God, rather than having to speak to him in words that seem to bounce off a brick wall. Music is dynamic and its effect on our spirits is immediate. We can feel results. Prayer is unspectacular if no one sees us or hears us, and we may have to wait years for an answer that we might not even want to hear.

Prayer and ministry

I know that God has many things to teach me about prayer. It sounds like a paradox, but my prayer life needs to grow to the maturity it had when I was only a child in Christ. I’m assuming that all of us need to grow in this maturity too, and dependence on God in this way will be essential in maintaining a ministry among the people we serve. We need to pray, not only to be able to play the right notes, but because without prayer, we have no place as ministers of God’s Word, sung or spoken.

Personal thanks

One last word. Thank you for all the messages of support and prayer that Philly and I have received on behalf of Ollie, our seven-month old son who has a liver tumour. We have experienced miraculous answers to prayer that have caused even his doctors and nurses to wonder at the God who cares for his children. We are deeply grateful to Jesus, too, for answering prayers that we haven’t even prayed. He is listening, he does hear, he does answer.

Richard Simpkin