Regular prayer is not an optional discipline for those seeking to follow Jesus; rather it is central to the life of faith. If Christ found it necessary to find time to pray while saving humanity, why would his followers think they could be without a personal practice of prayer? St. Paul says we are to “pray without ceasing,” (1 Thess. 5:17) while Jesus tells his disciples “a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” (Luke 18:1)
Though there are other forms of prayer, many Christians associate prayer exclusively with the verbal or mental recitation of words so we will focus on this practice. Such prayer remains but words without the proper mindset. What makes a prayer “prayerful” is one’s reflection on how the words prayed describe “the reality of life lived in and through the living God as known in scripture.”(1) God calls us to reflect deeply on the meaning of the words we recite and integrate what we learn into our daily lives. This strenuous contemplative work is reflected in the word “liturgy,” which means “the people’s work.”
Because I suspect most of us are guilty of reciting liturgies without much reflection from time to time considering two ways one might interact with one of our Moravian liturgies may help clarify the difference between heaping up empty phrases (Matt. 6:7) and worshipping God in spirit and truth. (John 4:24)
Like most Moravian liturgies the Liturgy of Adoration is comprised primarily of passages of scripture. If we do not trouble ourselves with understanding or contemplating what we are reading or saying and whether we are incorporating the text’s lessons into our lives as we read then a liturgy will have little spiritual effect. Our familiarity with the words of the liturgy may be either comforting or boring depending on our disposition and history.
On the other hand, when prayed mindfully liturgy can open a conversation with God and with thousands of generations of faithful believers stretching all the way back to the ancient Israelites whose psalm (#118) opens the Liturgy of Adoration. Condensed into eight brief pages is a concise summary of how to live a life centered on Christ both as an individual and as part of a Christian community (MBW, page 18-25.) Once our eyes are opened we see that most of the life of faith is set out for us in the liturgy – our need to praise God; God’s gracious initiative in Jesus Christ which frees us from the power of sin and death; the fact that we are saved by God’s grace and not by our own efforts or strength; our need to confess our sins; a statement of the Church’s faith (Nicene Creed); our responsibility to exercise stewardship over what God has given to us, to pray for the world, and work righteously for justice on behalf of “the poor, the homeless, the imprisoned, the afflicted, the persecuted, the abused…”
The difference in experience lies in the mind/heart of the worshipper. This coming Lent find some prayers which speak to you. Come up with your own prayers or develop a deeper appreciation for the liturgical prayers of the Moravian Book of Worship. Pray them. Reflect on them. Live them. Pray until the life you live matches the life you pray.
1 . Conrad Hoover in “No Choice But to Pray,” Sojourners, June, 1977.
– Pastor Derek French