Perverted prayer?

Raised in non-conformity, I have never been comfortable with liturgical prayers.

While no one would deny the beauty and the elegance of the Book of Common Prayer, it seems too stilted and too formal to address the Lord with words written hundreds of years ago.

Yet, sadly, evangelical churches today sometimes veer to the opposite extreme. Orders of service can be thin on content. There might be little if anything in the way of a pastoral prayer. It is unusual to hear intercession for rulers and authorities and matters of national interest, or prayers for believers who are persecuted, or even prayers for the Kingdom to come in every corner of the globe. So, in some circles, there is a return to some form of read prayers. At least if the prayer is pre-prepared we can hope for good structure and well-ordered intercession.

The ultimate question, of course, is not my personal preference, nor anyone else’s. It is to the Lord that our prayers are directed, and we desire our prayers to be pleasing to Him.

We are therefore encouraged to read in Romans 8:26 that “the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” Not all agree on the nature of the groans; most likely they are Spirit-inspired groans as He works in us, but the sense is clear. In our physical and spiritual frailty we are profoundly aware of the weakness of our prayers. Sometimes we might even feel that we are incapable of prayer, or if we pray we do not know what to pray for or how to pray it. But it is at this point of weakness that the Spirit meets with us and takes our inept and inadequate prayer and translates and represents our requests before the throne of the Father according to His will.

There is an extraordinary section in Calvin’s Institutes entitled: “Hearkening to Perverted Prayer” (not the sort of thing you might expect from Calvin!). He makes the point that though believers might pray with all manner of mixed or even ungodly motives (he cites the final prayer of Samson as an example), yet the Lord is gracious and can hear and answer even such prayers in a remarkable way. This is a great encouragement to all of us. The efficacy of our prayers depends not on the beauty of the expression or even the perfect orthodoxy of the doctrine, but the grace of God who hears and answers. Our prayers are taken up by the Spirit, and received through our great high priest, the Lord Jesus Christ.

This does not mean that all prepared or eloquent prayers are condemned (unless we delight in their beauty as a means of impressing others). Nor does it excuse sloth, so that we can be content with minimal or perfunctory prayers which neglect prayer in areas that the Lord has commanded, especially when we lead corporate prayer.

But the matter of first importance is that our prayers are heartfelt. This is the model of prayer we find in Scripture, whether in joyful praise, in painful longing, or in desperate pleading with the Lord. These are the prayers the Lord delights to hear and answer.