This past week, I was the happy recipient of a prayer in the form of a chain email.I was so grateful to get said e-prayer in the first place, that I received it again later on that day.
And this prayer didn't travel by its lonesome in either email, as you might expect. Its traveling companion was a poorly written email (maybe as poorly written as this post will be), the sole purpose of which was to perpetuate the sending of the prayer to as many people as possible. More simply put, it was a half-hearted effort at laying down an e-guilt trip.
What did the prayer say, you might ask? Well, at the cost of perpetuating the life of the prayer itself, here it is:
"God our Father, walk through my house and take away all my worries and illnesses and please watch over and heal my family in Jesus name, Amen."
A prayer like that has the invariable effect of making me echo the words of the Church Lady, "Well, isn't that special."
To be fair, the prayer contains no heresy and actually gives a shout out to God the Father and Jesus, and you may be able to draw some connections from "take away all my worries" to something like "cast your cares on Me".
Praying for healing isn't a bad thing either, last I checked. Growing up, we had a little old lady in our church who always seemed to be praying for healing in bizarre family health situations, so much so that the joke in our family became, "My great-grand nephew Eddie was born without a face. Pray for healing."
The main thing that rubs me the wrong way about this prayer is that it's lacking something--something big, in fact. How about the first petition of the Lord's Prayer: "hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."
So often, I find myself trudging through prayer with no sense of God's glory, no sense of the reality of God's kingdom (into which we are welcomed by the blood of Christ), and minimal acknowledgement of the sole purpose of the universe: God showing himself to be great.
But then it hit me last night, like I honestly don't remember it ever hitting me before. God means to fill the whole earth with His inexpressible glory and that is all that matters in the universe and my re-realization of that was enough to wake me up all through the night with that one overwhelming thought.
"Blessed by his glorious name forever; may the whole earth be filled with his glory! Amen and Amen!"
It's almost comical to contrast this prayer with the e-prayer that permeated my inbox twice this week. I mean, even as the piddly e-prayer ends with one Amen, the psalmist ends his prayer with two calls for Amen.
Here's the psalmist, in this case Solomon, as he takes the throne of his father David. He, like his daddy, was a fore-runner of the great King that would one day come to govern and care for Israel, and his prayer starts in verse 1 with a cry for God to make him a just and righteous ruler.
Throughout the prayer, he asks God again and again to make him a king that cares for the oppressed, the poor and needy, one in whose sight even the blood of the oppressed is precious.
He also asks for length of days--which our bashful e-prayer is evidently not bold enough to try--and he asks something else that our e-prayer left out: "May people be blessed in him, all nations call him blessed!"
Does he sound like anyone you know? Heir to the throne of David. Righteous and just King. Merciful ruler who cares for and rescues the downcast. The One in whom all nations are blessed.
And it's this one, the Son of David and true rescuer of Israel, who has made sense of the lofty goal to fill the whole earth with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord.
Even if it costs me sleep all night every night, I pray that God would keep waking me up to the reality of his glory, the greatness of his name and the greatness of his love toward us in Christ.
