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Let's Pray
2025-4-15 | Kate Cogswell
We are a few days into the holiest and most important week of the Christian faith. It is a time to reflect on Jesus’ final days and crucifixion, leading up to Resurrection Sunday. The events of Holy Week can help us focus and remember just how much God loves the world. Including us. You. And me.
In our journey together as apprentices of Jesus, we began 2025 by attempting to grasp how wide and long and high and deep the love of Christ is, which enables, empowers, and motivates us to pursue lives of transformation. In fact, pursuing a life of transformation isn’t even possible without beginning to grasp how much we are loved by God. It’s essential.
Experiencing the depth of God’s love and spending time in prayer are key to this transformational journey.
In his book, Opening to God, David Benner calls prayer “the soul’s native language”. The image of Adam and Eve daily encountering God in “extraordinary” ways is the foundation of all prayer. This kind of communion and attention to the Spirit of God, this kind of intimacy with God is what we were made for, and though we don’t always know it, it is what we most long for and need.
And this kind of relationship with God is what we pray for and want for each of us at The Grove. The original intimacy Adam and Eve shared with God in the garden of Eden can be ours through the Holy Spirit today. To get there, we must start where we are, not where we aren’t, and allow the Holy Spirit to help us rediscover our own soul’s native language.
Believing our part in this discovery includes growing in our personal and corporate prayer life, we have been focusing on prayer by providing prayer tools and resources each week and through a sermon series on prayer during Lent.
During the series, we chose to use an acronym, P.R.A.Y., from How to Pray by Pete Grieg, as a pattern of prayer to explore the nature of prayer and provide some practical teaching on how to pray. Here is a brief recap of this tool:
PAUSE:
We pause to quiet our minds and hearts and seek to become aware of God’s presence with us.
We don’t pause for God (or because we are required to) – we pause for us. We don’t have to pause to pray, yet it is beneficial to prepare our hearts.
REJOICE:
We rejoice by recognizing and naming the ways we see God at work in the world and in our lives.
When we rejoice, we remember what God has done and what He is doing. We shift our focus from our limited situation to our unlimited God. Not denying realities, but remembering the Lord is near and choosing to be aware of His presence.
ASK:
We ask for God to work in our lives and in the lives of others and world situations.
We are invited to ask, seek, and knock. This implies we don’t always get an answer immediately and each step requires a bit more of the asker. When God seems to be silent, our response can be persistence, lament, or surrender – trusting God is present and at work.
YIELD:
We yield to God as our response in prayer. Following Peter’s example, to yield to God in prayer is to listen, to see, and perhaps, even to wrestle with God.
To be yielded to God is to be available to God. It is to be open and engaged. It is to listen and to do. It is to confess and repent. It is to be willing to be challenged and changed. We respond to God.
Remember, this is a tool. It is one way to pray, but it is not the only way to pray. Whether you use this model as a whole or not, all four components are helpful for us when we pray.
Prayer is a posture. It is an intentionality to connect our hearts with God’s, to spend time with Him. God intends for us, and invites us, to have this kind of intimacy with him. Through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God made a way for us to be so in communion with Him, so in sync with God, that, on some level, every second of every moment of every day can become prayer.
We re-extend the invitation, especially during Holy Week, to practice the “Jesus prayer” – the breath prayer Pastor Stacey shared in the final sermon of the sermon series.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, or Lord Jesus Christ,
Have mercy on me, a sinner. Have mercy on me.
Make time each day this week, whenever possible, to practice it (or a version of the Jesus prayer) saying the first phrase as you inhale, the second as you exhale. You could pray it when you wake up, when you’re walking, driving, doing something that doesn’t require too much thought. Allow this prayer to help you fix your mind on Christ, fix your heart on the God who is always present, the God who loves you enough to send his Son for you.