Happy birthday, beautiful daugher who is now fifteen! I treasure you….
I don’t really have anything else to add to the Symphony post. Except… I interpret Matthew’s Greek word to mean that God will hear our requests (or the desires of our hearts which is how I would translate aitesotai which can also mean “crave”) when we make them after having worked out how we will present them. This makes me think of how we rehearse for worship — we would never just pick an anthem up and go sing it cold, even though I think our choir is pretty darn good and could probably make a very decent presentation of a cold reading. No, we stop and go over parts that are difficult and fine tune parts where dynamics are needed and we concentrate on diction and we remember to breathe and then we stand before God in the sanctuary and sing.
I think our corporate prayers should be this well thought prior to bringing them to God as well. I don’t mean to suggest that spontaneous prayers are verboten — hardly. But I think when believers know they need to bring something to God they work it out among themselves before they approach the throne of grace so that God will hear voices in harmony and not a discordant mess.
This idea of praying in agreement fits with the Proverbs 6 passage for today:
16 There are six things the Lord hates—
no, seven things he detests:
17 haughty eyes,
a lying tongue,
hands that kill the innocent,
18 a heart that plots evil,
feet that race to do wrong,
19 a false witness who pours out lies,
a person who sows discord in a family.
I can see how any of those things that the Lord detests can derail an earnest request and how being prepared in the request will go a long way toward eliminating those ugly and displeasing elements of a prayer. Heh. Nice to finally get a comment about Proverbs in there….!
