Pray All The Prayers

What if He were actually your friend?

We haven’t connected since last year, so Happy New Year!!!

There’s a well-known quote by the famous theologian A.W. Tozer that I’ve heard many times in different situations recently, so I felt like I should pay attention to it.

“Whatever comes into our minds when we think about God is the single most important thing about us.”

I've noticed that my perception of God significantly shapes my interactions with Him, whether I approach Him at all, and the nature of our conversations. If this insight holds true, it underscores the critical importance of maintaining an accurate and profound image of God. In the stage play of life, where we navigate many situations without a script, our beliefs about God and our understanding of His nature will influence how we engage with Him and integrate Him into our lives. Our beliefs about God will always fill in any gaps that are missing in any situation that we have not yet encountered.

For the bulk of my life, I have been settled on my image of God as “Heavenly Father” and “All-Powerful”, that is to say “Creator”, “Provider of Big Things”, and “Protector from Big Dangers”. Recently, however, I have strongly desired to complement that image of God with “Friend”. Why? Because when you are friends with God, you do “friend things” with God.

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What a friend we have in Jesus
All our sins and griefs to bear
What a privilege to carry
Everything to God in prayer

O what peace we often forfeit
O what needless pain we bear
All because we do not carry
Everything to God in prayer

"What a Friend we have in Jesus" by Joseph Scriven (bold emphasis my own)

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Think of the best friendships that you have. You spend time with each other with no agenda. You play games with one another and tell jokes to one another on lazy days because you can. You are willing to let your friend change your plans. You talk about anything and everything. Now, imagine THAT with God.

Like the lyrics of the song above mention, I believe there is a lot of peace and pleasure we leave on the table because we have been unwilling to do “friend things” with God. As I have been focusing my intentions and attention towards God in this way these past few weeks, they have been unexplainably peaceful in spite of any chaotic or unwelcome circumstance. For me, the most practical key to maintaining this renewed image of God was talking to Him throughout the day about anything and everything. You would be surprised (well, at least I was) all the things that God has an opinion on if you were to just ask Him.

“God, I really don’t feel like having this meeting right now. They are annoying to me and I don’t know what to say…”

“God, I think it’s funny how…”

“God, what should I wear today because I really want to wear these specific shoes?”

“God, what do you want to do today?”

“God, I don’t want to watch TV or scroll TikTok, what are you saying that I might have missed earlier?”

“God, I get so frustrated when FSU loses anything, maybe even irrationally so, why is that?”

This is prayer. As simple and unceasing as it may seem, this is communion with God. For too long, I had relegated prayer to just the “big stuff”. The few times, when I didn’t have any “big” items to pray to God about, I would assume that it was closer to a waste of God’s time and attention (even if I would never say that out loud). The mistake that I would make is that I would try to “size” things for God. I have learned that we often don’t agree on the size of things that we talk about. What I thought was HUGE was small to God, and what I thought was small, God proved to be significant.

Like any friend, if you only ever come to them when there are problems eventually they’ll get tired of you. Perhaps God doesn’t get tired of us in the same way, but there is something that dampens our friendship with Him when we only seek an audience with Him when we want to discuss our BIG things. There is a formality and distance in our relationship with God when we only seek for Him to be our Problem-Solver and “Make a way out of no way-er”. It’s not that He won’t do it or fix it, but the relationship could be so much more.

If you talk to God about the really small stuff, you’ll find that He has a lot to say about the really big stuff.

If there is one thing that I would encourage us to do from here is to simply pray “all the prayers, all the time”. Big ones, small ones, funny ones, angry ones, deep ones, simple ones, short ones, long ones, and even the ones that were interrupted from earlier. Build a friendship with God and He will build a life for you.

P.S. Unrelated but related, It is a righteous thing to often get your hopes up…in God. I’ll write more about that another day soon, but I wanted to get the thought out today.

Since you’re here, try checking these out as well…