Abiding Prayer - The Route to Knowing God - Audio

The Gathering Place Church - main

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law? Jesus replied: 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments”. Matt 22:36-40 Jesus summed up life as 2 relationships; 1. God and the individual (vertical) 2. the individual and others (horizontal). If we spend the majority of our attention and focus on the horizontal –even when our prayers to God are about our horizontal relationships – we are sadly out of balance. So how do we have this vertical relationship with an unseen person? How do we "love God with all our heart"? The answer is prayer, but of a certain type of prayer – a prayer that is all about a relationship. It is a type of prayer that focuses on “being” with God not for the sake of getting something done but for the sake of the relationship itself. This kind of prayer runs contrary to our nature. The World tells us that our worth and identity comes from what we do. When we greet a stranger, we usually ask “What is your name?” The second question we ask is “what do you do?” In human affairs our identity is a function of what we do and how well we do it. In other words, we have a performance orientation towards life. The problem is this orientation affects our prayer. Most of the content of our prayers is about getting things done. Most of our prayer is concerned with the horizontal relationships and the circumstances of our lives. Jesus on the other hand starts His definition of what matters most with our relationship of love with the Father. With regard to prayer this means that the vertical should come first if for no other reason that you can’t give away what you aren’t receiving. In God’s world doing comes from being, therefore being with God comes first.