Prayer Praise and Intimacy

This has been weighing on me for a few weeks now, so I just had to write out my thoughts. Your input of the idea would be greatly appreciated, or any experiences or ideas you have yourself.

Where has the intimacy gone?

            For some reason, prayer has been coming up a lot lately. It has been in church, at home, and it was a major part in a Christian fiction series I was reading.  It all started from those books actually, the Freelandia series by Kent Larson. There is a blind girl named Maria that has a special place to go to with God as her only audience, she prays and praises him there and it is the most joyful, worshipful experience. I can feel her joy through the words. It got me thinking about how personal prayer and praise with our God seems to be so lacking in my life, and in the church as a whole. That kind of worship isn’t only in the fiction books, it is all throughout the Bible, so where is it now?

            Let us look in the New Testament, what kind of worship life did the disciples have? Paul praises God for the thorn in his flesh that he had even though God won’t take it away, he praises God so the power of Christ will rest upon him. In Paul’s weakness, Christ can be made strong. (2 Corinthians 12:7-10) In James, it also talks about praying in all circumstances: cheerfulness, sickness, suffering, etc. This example we are seeing is living and breathing God in all we do. God is the source of all good, praise Him for it! Do we do that today? In my opinion, we don’t.  What are we missing?

            Before I start on that, let’s look at the Old Testament. Much of the NT is based on traditions and practices of the OT. In the OT, the Israelites had their connection to God through sacrifices and the temple priests. They still prayed to God of course, the whole book of Psalms are prayers to God, and they are very beautiful. But God dwelled in the temple among His people, not in them, and forgiveness was done through sacrifices given to the priests. In the NT, Jesus was the final sacrifice, and we are wiped clean of all sins. We don’t have to do sacrifices anymore, all we need to do is accept the gift of forgiveness and life through Jesus. Praise God! So where is the Spirit of God? The Spirit of God is now inside of us, we became the temple!  1 Corinthians 6:19-20, “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God with your body.”  This is where I believe we start to go off track. We don’t think about what treating our body as the temple of God means. In the OT, the Israelites had practices of how they would dress, act, and treat the temple of God. Do we think about how we treat our temple? What do we let the temple see, hear, be dressed in? What do we feed it, let it engage in, and go to? Think about that. Does God approve of how you have treated His temple? I know He doesn’t approve of mine, thank you Jesus for wiping my slate clean! The whole problem with this is that while the Lord knows we mess up, we should still try and treat His temple with respect, honor, and love in all that we do. We could feel so much closer to Him if we would learn to be more conscious of that! Our prayer and praise life could become so much more intimate and joyous.

            As I stated earlier concerning the Psalms, they are very beautiful. While we don’t pray like that usually, do they sound that passionate? Are they that heartfelt? Do we pray like we are speaking to a loving father who cares about us more than we can fathom? Or do our prayers sound like we are praying just because God told us to? God loves hearing from you no matter what, but don’t you yearn for the closeness the Bible portrays? I do. I know God is listening when I pray, but sometimes I feel He is on a distant throne in Heaven. My preconceived notion is one of distance. Don’t we learn though that our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, a dwelling place of God? Why am I thinking of Him way up there? He is up in heaven, but He is also in me. Why can’t I talk to Him where He dwells in me? I can go to His dwelling place and praise Him and only Him there. No one else is there to distract our special time together.

            Ultimately, I think it begins with how we live our life. We can’t go to church every Sunday, and expect that only an hour can fulfill our spiritual needs. We live in a world that constantly battles God and says that He isn’t there, and that He doesn’t care about your life. We need to fight back with studying the scripture, and with constant worship and praise!  We need to learn to surrender all to Him, it’s scary, but that is faith. It grows when hardships come and you let God fight the battle. So praise Him in all you do, immediately pray when hardships strike, constantly search for His will. He will always be by us, remember to talk to Him, as Jesus says in Matthew, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.”