Minutes of Meetings with God
and with Myself

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Listen to My Prayer, O God ...

The Scripture Lesson: Psalms 55

Organizing Sentence: The power of prayer is not in our goodness, but in that God loves us, listens to us, and acts on our behalf to overcome evil.

A great deal has happened in the recent past to make a good many people wonder to just what end the world is coming. The threat of eminent of war in the Persian Gulf, the onslaught of snow and ice around the country, high winds and the horrible flooding that have afflicted parts of Europe, the typhoons that have ripped the Pacific islands and nations, tidal waves, the ongoing wars and civil strife that tear apart nations, and the acts of terrorism and violence both here and around the world. The list of disasters could go on and on. It makes a person wonder what it is that holds the world together in the face of such tumult and chaos.

It can help us to understand things in our day if we look back to the experience of Christians of the distant past. During the Second Century, just 100 years after the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the Church came under a terrible, malicious, almost continuous attack from the government of the Roman Empire. This attack led to the martyrdom of thousands as Rome attempted to completely wipe out the Church.

The Romans used a threefold justification for their persecution of Christians.

First, Christians were persecuted purely on religious grounds; the Roman authorities considered Christians to be atheists. Can you imagine, Christians accused of atheism? Yet, because Christians refused to worship the Roman Emperor, and because Christians refused to recognize that the numerous Roman gods were real and, so, would not worship them, Christians were actually condemned to die as atheists.

The second reason for persecuting Christians, closely related to the first one, had to do with politics. Because Christians were considered to be atheists, Roman authorities considered Christians to be political anarchists; that is, people with no respect for Roman law and order, a law and order that was built upon the religious veneration of the Roman Emperor and the Roman gods. In Rome's way of thinking, all anarchists had to be eradicated.

Third, the Roman authorities attacked Christianity on a purely philosophical basis. In short, the Roman philosophers, especially the physician, Celsus, wrote off Christianity as fanatical, disorderly, irrational, un-philosophical non-sense. Many of Celsus' attacks are still used against the Church today.

Thankfully, despite the dangers, the tumult and chaos of those days when many thought the end of all things was near, Christians arose to defend the faith and the Church against the Roman menace. These defenders are called, "The Apologists."

One of the Apologists, Justin Martyr, defended the faith and the Church with words we would do well to remember today. Justin defended the Church against the Roman death threat by saying: "The world lives from the prayers of the Christians."

The Christians preserve the world by their petitions for God's mercy, and on the other hand, for their sake, God listens and spares the world from its ultimate end.

In one of the Church's darkest hours, a saint could say: "The world lives from the prayers of the Christians." In these, our dark hours of world turmoil, and of social and political and economic uncertainty, we like Justin Martyr need to recognize the power of prayer in our defense today.

I) What is Prayer?:

a) Clearly, Justin Martyr believed prayer to be vitally important to Christian life, so important that he called prayer the life-blood of the world. But, what is prayer?

b) The Psalmist describes prayer beautifully as calling on the Lord ... that can mean "visiting" with God, having a conversation with God.

c) There are all kinds of levels of conversations, some light, casual or humorous, some heavy, serious and intellectual, and some highly charged, rushing like a river rapids, some deeply emotional.

d) In another place, the Psalmist describes prayer in another way, as making noise.

e) Whatever its form, prayer is humankind reaching out to touch God. And more importantly, prayer is God reaching back to touch us.

f) Prayer is always a two way street ... always a conversation. Sadly, too often, we only bother with our side of the conversation and screen out God's side of what is being said or done.

II) Pictures of Prayer ...

a) One of my favorite pictures of prayer is from Genesis: Abraham has extended hospitality to the Lord and they begin to chat about the fate of Sodom. And Abraham bargains for the life of the city. Wasn't Abraham's conversation also Abraham's prayer for the salvation of Lot's life?

b) Another powerful picture of prayer is that of the Prophet Elijah, standing before the alter on Mt. Carmel. It was an alter drenched in water. The prophet simply said to God:

"Hear me, O Lord, hear me that this people may know that you are the Lord God and that you have turned their heart back again!"

the fire of the Lord fell! (Talk about an undeniable answer to prayer)

c) There is yet another powerful picture of prayer. A woman, so weak that she could hardly walk, stumbled through a crowd to be near Jesus. She may have had to crawl the last few feet. Finally, she reached out and touched the hem of Jesus' robe ... and she was healed. The ravages of more than a decade of disease simply disappeared.

Every prayer that we pray will be answered, but it may not be answered just the way we want it to be, the way we expect it to be, or as fast as we want it to be. The Epistle of James tells us quite clearly that sometimes we ask amiss ... we just plain want the wrong thing. We are only human, so our vision is limited. God does know what is best.

However, we have a great responsibility! You see, the world lives from the prayers of Christians. Evil may drain the very life out of God's wonderful creation and ravage God's beautiful creatures.

But the prayers of Believers pump the life-blood of Love, goodness, truth, compassion, peace, joy and justice back in to keep everything going.

When we pray, we are Abraham, sitting under the tree, talking with the Lord, pleading for justice, pleading for life, pleading for the dear ones for whom we care ... not just for some few in our family, or in a city, but in the whole world.

If God were sitting here, what would we say????

Let us pray ... that all the world might live and taste the blessedness of the Kingdom!

Amen.