A "How to" on prayer

Our midweek, New Community church service was a continuation of the “Mastering the Art of Living” series that is currently being taught. Corey Mann stepped up to the plate and hit it out of the park with an incredible message on how God wants us to pray last night as described in Matthew 6.

Corey began with a discussion of the things that we don’t think we can do well.
Unfortunately I cannot remember anything from his list (honesty can be brutal). But I do know that I’m not a big risk taker. I like the ‘sure’ thing. There are so many things that I know probably I shy away from because I feel ill-equipped to do them. Corey's litany of ‘incapable things’ ended with prayer. His premise being that we don’t pray because we don’t know how or we don’t have the time.

Corey broke the up the scripture in Matthew 6:5-15, where God instructs us how to pray, in to consumable nuggets. He illustrated each verse with applicable life situations that allowed us to digest what we were being taught. His overall theme for the evening was “go to your room and close the door…’ from verse 6.

In the next segment of his message, Corey reaffirmed verse 7 ‘And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words,’ with Hollywood and real life applications.

In a movie clip from “Meet the Parents” the epitome of babbling on is found in the scene in which the boyfriend is asked to bless the meal at the dinner table. It’s a very funny clip and really nailed Corey’s statement about not knowing how to pray. The guy just goes on an on trying to be impressive in his words, but really not knowing what or how to say his prayer. Then, from a story from his own personal life Corey recounted how at one point in his life he determined that following a prayer with ‘yesssss!!!’ or a gutteral sound would confirm the importance of his prayer. Each of these examples proving that many words or impressive sounds a good prayer does not make.

Throughout his allotted message time, Corey made reference after reference to verse 6, ‘But when you pray, go into your room and close the door.’ At one point he even had everyone repeating that outloud in the auditorium. However ‘go to your room’ wasn’t to be translated literally but figuratively. It means to escape all of the distractions that would take your full attention away from God. We need to disengage from our cell phones, our tv, our computer, our family, our Blackberry….etc. and focus totally on God.

One of the hardest things we have facing us today is time. Time management is a top priority everyday, not only in work but personal life as well. At work we have deadlines to meet, meetings to attend, and calls to make among the abundance of other responsibilities. At home we have family time, mowing the lawn, doing the laundry, cleaning the house, and the list goes on. When do we possibly have time to ‘go to our rooms?’

The next portion of his message was two-fold. He expounded on an illustration on being intentional in our lives and using that in connection with 'going to our rooms...'

In January Corey set some exercise goals for himself in which he incorporated a daily regimen of walking. He had a goal to walk so many miles by a certain date and he was intentional about his goal. He faithfully rose early in the morning, sometimes as early as 5am to fulfill his goal. His premise being that we have to be intentional about the things we want to accomplish in life. We have to be intentional about making time to pray.

Not only was Corey’s walking illustration about being intentional, it was about ‘going to our room.’ Earlier I mentioned that we need to take this ‘going to your room’ statement figuratively. While Corey was walking early in the morning, he discovered that there were no distractions. No cell phone, no TV, no other people, he was virtually alone with God. He had gone to his room and shut the door without even realizing it. He was alone with God without lifes distractions and he seized the opportunity. We don’t have to literally go to our room to be alone with God. We can create situations in which we put ourselves in a place where there are no distractions, such as walking early in the morning, and we have basically gone to our rooms and closed the door.

So there you have my synopsis of an outstanding message on how God wants us to pray.

Thursday night New Community. WOW! So life enriching! Why would you want to miss it?