We are on Day 11 of the walking out of worry journey. If you’d like to finish the last few days with us or if you want to keep a guide for a future season of life, you can download it here.
Reminder: a Communion Service associated with our journey will be hosted at GracePoint Church on Thursday November 6th, 6:30pm. All are welcome.
Today’s post is centered, again, on the topic of prayer and worry.
Prayer is a category with a wide bandwidth within the Christian tradition. As I see it there are two main “operating softwares” for how people have believed prayer works within Christianity.
First, prayer is the means by which all that God had planned from before the foundation of the world is “uncovered” by the believer and/or praying community. Prayer is not creating anything, but allowing what is “unseen” to be witnessed in material reality. This is a shorthand (perhaps reductionist) way of talking about theological topics of providence/sovereignty.
Next, prayer is the evidence of God’s dynamic relationship to the world. God moves through the prayers of people and creates outcomes within the situation. John Wesley was even bold enough (and perhaps exaggerated a bit) when he said, “God does nothing but through believing prayer.” This is a shorthand way of talking about a tradition called open/relational theology.
In either scenario, God is directly involved in the prayers of the people of God, whether as One whose divine intentions from the beginning are being made known or the One who actively participates through the yearnings of God’s people.
With this in mind, I share one of my favorite Martin Luther quotations, for it deals with prayer and worry:
“Pray and let God worry.”
That is a fantastic idea and gets to the heart of our need for prayer when we are anxious. As we pray, we hand over to God the things that only God can do, and we are free to then see what it is we need to do as we allow God to take care of what only God can do.
So, today let’s be reminded of the big worry that we named on Day 1 and give that worry over to God in prayer and let God worry about it. I pray that freedom would fill our hearts today because of it.
Joe Skillen 