Does Prayer Change Things? by R.C. Sproul

Author:R.C. Sproul
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Reformation Trust Publishing
Published: 2010-02-16T14:28:00+00:00

Adoration

As in the pattern of the Lord's Prayer, the most appropriate way to begin prayer is with adoration. Sadly, we are most often moved to prayer by our desires and needs. We go to God when we want something from Him. We are in such a hurry to mention our requests and articulate our needs (which God already knows) that we omit adoration altogether or skip over it quickly in a perfunctory manner.

To omit adoration is to cut the heart out of prayer. It is one thing to be fervent in supplication, particularly while praying in a foxhole; it is another thing to be fervent in adoration. The prayers of the great saints, the prayer warriors of church history, are marked by their fervent adoration of God.

God forbid that we should ever second-guess the teaching of Christ, but I must confess to being at least mildly surprised by Jesus' response to the disciples' request about prayer. When they said, "Teach us to pray," I would have anticipated a different response from His lips than the one He gave by way of the Lord's Prayer. I would have anticipated a response something like this: "Do you want to learn how to pray? Read the Psalms."

I'm surprised Jesus didn't refer the disciples to the Psalms. There we find not only the heart of David exposed, but also a divinely inspired treasury of adoration filled with models for us to follow.

Our hesitancy and weakness in expressing adoration may have two root causes. The first is our simple lack of suitable vocabulary. We tend to be inarticulate when it comes to adoration. It was Edgar Allan Poe who said that prose is a more fitting vehicle to communicate instruction than poetry. The aim of poetry is to lift the soul to lofty heights. It is no wonder the Psalms were written in poetic form. Here the loftiest heights of verbal expression are reached in the service of the soul's praise for God.

Many people in the charismatic movement have declared that one of the chief reasons for their pursuit of the gift of tongues is a keen desire to overcome or bypass the deficiency of an impoverished vocabulary by way of a special prayer language. People often feel their own language is inadequate to express adoration. This sense of inadequacy from having to use the same tired, haggard words yields frustration. A similar view is expressed by Charles Wesley in his hymn "0 for a Thousand Tongues to Sing." The hymn complains that the restriction to one tongue is a lamentable hindrance to praise, to be relieved only by the addition of nine hundred and ninety-nine other tongues.

The Psalms were written in simple but powerful vocabulary through which the hearts of several writers expressed reverence for God without bypassing the mind. Opening their mouths, the psalmists uttered praise. That praise was given under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to be sure, but by men whose minds were steeped in the things of God.

Another great barrier to articulate praise is ignorance.

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