Hope And Prayer

Thanks to Mark for today’s post:

“At a recent gathering of workers from the part of the world in which I serve I opened the sessions with a prayer for the group that we would experience community, joy, and hope. Hope, the great center point of the Gospel, is a reality of our pilgrimage with the Master Jesus, but is amazingly one of the least considered elements of prayer we Christians pause to consider.

When you think about it, hope is why we pray. At a minimum it will be difficult to pray if we do not believe, by hope, that God not only hears us (which is only the start of hope), but that he also responds to the cries of his people (the middle of hope), and finally draws together all our yearnings for him in the grand finale of our eternal life to come (in a sense the end of hope, for we will no longer need hope, since all will be revealed in the new heavens and the new earth). But to pray without hope is worse than difficult, it is impossible.

In chapter 24 of his book A Praying Life author Paul E. Miller reflects on hope in the context of family life and he strikes this same chord on the relationship between hope and prayer. “As we wait and pray, God weaves his story and creates a wonder. Instead of drifting between comedy (denial) and tragedy (reality), we have a relationship with the living God…”

Together with you and with our literary companion Paul Miller I want to say “yes!” The dynamic of the relationship between the Lord Almighty and us provides the terrain for hope to grow wild in our bodies, souls, minds, and spirits. And with hope we come again and again, daily, in our prayers to our God and we affirm: our hope is built on nothing less than you, Oh God!”