The Lord confides in those who fear him; he makes his covenant known to them. (Psalm 25:14)
I sometimes feel, when coming to the end of a prayer time, as if Jesus is tapping me on the shoulder and saying, ‘I’m not finished with you yet. I want you to linger longer in my presence.’ Such lingering can be hard, can’t it? It doesn’t always come naturally to us, and we’re often all too eager to get on with what we think of as ‘the real work’ of the day (forgetting that prayer is also a ‘real work’ in itself).
All of us can find prayer hard at times. That’s why Jesus told his disciples the parable of the persistent widow ‘to show them that they should always pray and not give up’ (Luke 18:1). He knows our weakness, our struggles, our resolutions to get up earlier and spend more time in prayer (which rarely last!); yet he never becomes disillusioned with us, for he never had any illusions about us in the first place! But Jesus doesn’t want us to see prayer as something we ‘have to do’, or to see a lack of it as leading to ‘points being knocked off’. He wants us to pray so he can confide in us!
Jesus said to his disciples, ‘I no longer call you servants, because a master doesn’t confide in his servants. Now you are my friends, since I have told you everything the Father told me’ (John 15:15, NLT). That’s how he wants us to see prayer! As a time when we don’t just go through our ‘wish-list’, but when we let him confide in us. He wants to reveal what is on the Father’s heart, to share his secrets with us, to give us keys for the day from his divine perspective (which is so much more accurate than ours!). He wants the relationship of prayer to be part of our life, not something added on to it.
Today, each of us has this amazing relationship with the Lord in which he wants to confide in us. What a privilege! Let’s not take it for granted, but stop and ask what he wants to confide in us today, and then live in the light of it.
The Lord detests a perverse man but takes the upright into his confidence. (Proverbs 3:32)
© Copyright 2017 Martin Manser and Mike Beaumont
