1 Chronicles 29:10-13
Introduction
Prayer is the most natural activity for the Christian. There is nothing that can take away our access to prayer. Even if every church building was locked up and every Bible was confiscated, we could still pray. Even if there was a ban on public prayer, we could always pray. But what is prayer?
Most often people assume that prayer is asking for things. When someone asks us to pray for them, we know exactly what they mean. They are asking us to pray that God would help them in some way. Most likely in your regular prayer time, much of it is taken up with praying for specific needs. And that is of course very appropriate.
But prayer is so much more than asking for things. Without giving up that very important role, there is a need for a deeper understanding of prayer. One way I look at pray, something that I have shared in the past is the ACTS guide to prayer. This is not about the book of Acts but rather Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. While these are not new concepts, they are worth going over once again to enrich our prayer life.
The first part of ACTS, the adoration, is probably the least intuitive of the four parts. We instinctively reach out to God with our needs. It makes sense that we would thank God when we are blessed by God and our prayers are answered. Even the idea of confession is pretty natural, as we often are all too aware of when we miss the mark. But adoring God? We know that we are supposed to love God, Jesus told us that was the first and greatest commandment. But what does adoration have to do with prayer? And it gets even more complicated when we look at some of the language that the Bible uses for adoring God. There are plenty of questions for us to dive into.
David and Adoration
One of the best places for us to look when it comes to adoration is David. David is definitely a complicated person and he did somethings that were inexcusable. Having said that, there is no doubt that David adored God. We find that throughout the Psalms, as well as the historical references to David.
The passage that we are looking at comes near the end of David’s reign as king of Israel. David had hoped to build a temple for God but God informed him that was not going to happen. It would be David’s son that would build the temple. While David could accept that, he still desired to contribute to this project even if he would never see the final product. So David gathered all of the materials that he wanted to put aside for the future temple and dedicated them to God.
Of course, David was not the kind of person who could just fill a warehouse and that was it. So David offered a nice long prayer as he dedicated these construction materials.
There are a couple of things interesting in this prayer. One is that he does not ask for anything for himself, his family, or even for Israel. Can you imagine praying and not once asking for anything? It totally goes against the way we have learned to pray. And yet that is what David does.
The other thing is that this prayer is a blessing of God. A blessing of God? What in the world is that? I can understand how we can bless God and I can understand how people can bless people. Those things make sense and it takes no effort to come up with examples of those kinds of blessings. So how can a human being bless God? That is a very good question.
When I looked into this question, I found some interesting ideas. One well known thinker responded by saying the truth is that we cannot bless God. According to this pastor and theologian, God is by definition already in a state of maximum blessedness. So why does the Bible tell us to bless God? According to him, when the Bible tells us to bless God, what it really means is that we are to acknowledge that God is already fully blessed. I am not convinced.
The way this blessing language is used here and elsewhere in the Bible, it seems to assume there is an actual blessing possible. I think the confusion comes with how we understand a blessing. So if God blesses us, we think of something tangible that God gives us, such as a good house or a steady source of income. When we speak of blessing another person, we think of giving them something, something they were lacking. Money for the poor, food for the hungry, that sort of thing. Obviously God is not lacking anything and so how can we bless God? There is a way that we can really bless God without seeing God as lacking something. This blessing language is used in the context of adoration. What does adoration do? Think about it in human relationships. When we use our words to demonstrate adoration, we are deepening the relationship with the other person. The same thing happens when we adore God. It deepens our relationship with God. But what if this adoration not only deepened the relationship on our end but also deepened the relationship on God’s end? God would be truly receiving something, even though God does not lack anything. This seems to make more sense of how we bless God.
Adoration in Prayer
I do not think that I need to convince people that adoration of God by Christians is an important activity. But I want to focus more specifically on adoration in prayer. Why adore God during prayer? After all, we sing songs of adoration, is that not enough? Part of the issue is that we divide up worship services into little boxes. The singing time is for this purpose. The Bible reading time is for this purpose. The sermon time is for this purpose. The prayer time is for this purpose. Each is their own thing and while they are linked, they each have their own separate goal. Or do they? I am not suggesting that singing and preaching are exactly the same thing. But I am suggesting that they are not quite as separate as we tend to think. Adoration can and should be found throughout the different aspects of a service.
But this is not just about what happens on a Sunday morning. I want to think about your regular prayer life. Everyone prays differently and I do not want to suggest that one way is best. Some people pray at the same time and in the same way each day. Other people pray more spontaneously. You may use written prayers or make it up as you go along. They can be silent or they can be out loud. But when you pray, what is the basic content? How much of it is adoration? This is not meant to make any of us feel guilty but rather to make us reflect. We may skip this part because we know God does not have low self-esteem and does not need a pep talk. But that is not the purpose of adoration. Adoration blesses God. Does that make any different to us when we understand that we have the opportunity to actually bless God? And by blessing God, we deepen our relationship with God. This in turn blesses us.
Conclusion
There is so much that we can look at when it comes to prayer. We could look at prayer every week for this year and still not come close to understanding everything about it. I believe the ACTS model of prayer is a helpful start. And the beginning of ACTS is adoration.
Adoration is not about empty words used to fill up the need of a religious ritual. It is about expressing how we feel to God because we value that relationship.
I think of the couple that had been married thirty years. The wife complained that her husband never tells her he loves her. His response was that he told her he loved her on their wedding day and he would let her know if anything changes. Let that not be the way with our relationship with God. When we spend time in adoration through prayer, we are blessing God. Even if that seems too incredible to believe, it is true. We can bless God.
Your homework is at some point this week, please have one time of prayer where you are only expressing adoration. No prayer requests allowed for that one time only. Try it even if it feels uncomfortable. Deepen your relationship with God.
