Prayer, the Pattern of Perfect Partnership

Luke 6:12 (ESV)

12 In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God.

It boggles the mind to think of the Eternal Son praying to the Father with Whom He is one. Absent any revelation of how personality and perfect unity actually work we would remain baffled. We are fallen creatures and we still want to stack thoughts, concepts and ideas up against our own warped version of reality. We are from our birth so selfish, so utterly divorced from any true connection with others that we make our own self-centredness the standard by which even God is to be judged.

Every thing and every one (including mothers, fathers, brothers, friends, husbands, wives) is exterior to us. We sometimes use "modest" and self-effacing language to express the power of our feelings about our relationship to others. We think ourselves selflessly devoted, self-sacrificing, self-less and caring. But there it is again - it is our feelings and our thoughts that are the real subject, and not someone who is "other" than us. Is it any wonder that Jean-Paul Sartre and, later, Colin Wilson characterized the utter isolation of the human soul in a formalized philosophy called "existentialism." Apart from God and His self-revelation we are all existentialists. We are also all nihilists by nature. We just invent ways not to admit it.

But God... O how I love the "but Gods" of scripture! God has revealed the true meaning of existence. He is the meaning. And He has revealed the true mode of existence in Him in numerous ways.

The first is in the creation itself. Not what He made, but the mere fact that He made it. God is true self-existence. But He is so in the midst of relationship. The Persons of the Godhead need no other beings in order to be complete and fulfilled. Yet when God acted in creation, He necessarily expressed His Own character. He is Truth. The act of creation was relational. It expressed God’s relational nature by it actually being a blueprint of what He is like, for His creatures themselves to read. God’s Self-revelation in nature.

Then there is the revelation of God in human relationships - the pinnacle of which is the intimacy of marriage. Two persons becoming one flesh. A corporal picture of the spirital reality that is firstly and above all a disclosure of the nature of God. The sacrament of marriage is not primarily for the consumption of the individual participants. It is to show the nature of the Creator Himself. As man and woman are (re)joined by becoming one flesh - so God is eternally Three Persons joined in one Spirit. All the other stuff in marriage the outworking, the rubbing off of the irritating edges, the daily dying, the cherishing by the man and the loving support of the woman - these are there mainly there so that we may progressively understand God’s self-revelation and worship Him. The gift of marriage is about God, not about us. But, because of God’s nature being expressed in the gift, it is a gift of infinite value to the recipients. It is God Who makes the gift valuable by revealing Himself in and through it. God’s self-revelation in marriage.

Finally, just as a man and a woman are (re)joined in the body, so God and man are (re)joined in Christ through the Spirit as revealed whenever a person is regenerated. By this I mean that fellowship with God is reestablished. But it is a fellowship that is in Christ. And because it is in Him each saint now has a relationship with God that is infinitely more wonderful and precious than that of Adam - even before the fall. This relationship is characterized as so intimate, that the believer is, by the Spirit of God, made to be one with God in Christ while never ceasing to be himself - a mere creature. We shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. The full revelation of this truth began the moment we first believed. God’s self-revealtion in salvation.

So when we see Christ the God/man praying to the Father here and elsewhere what are we looking at? Did Jesus need to pray at all? If so why, when He is very God of very God Himself? The answer is wrapped up in what was written above. Christ is a man. He is man forever. He also is, was and ever will be God manifested in the Person of the eternal Son. He is man (what will have been preserved out of Adam’s race) eternally joined in the Spirit to God in Him. It is so stupendous a thought that we cannot embrace it. It borders on sacrilege to us to even contemplate such an idea. God in us and we in Him - just as the Father is in the Son and the Son in the Father? We want to rend our religious robes and cry "Blasphemy! It cannot be!"

The pathway to such unimaginable glory, which pathway is Christ, is shown to us as men by Christ, Who took humanity upon Himself. In His earthly ministry He demonstrated perfectly what walking that pathway looks like. It includes prayer to God. Prayer is the means by which we fellowship with God. Prayer is also the means by which we demonstrate our own dependent creaturehood. In His humanity, Jesus made Himself dependent upon the Father and then walked in that dependency perfectly in order to show us what it looks like. It is important that we see that we are creatures, and Jesus became a man partly in order to show us that very thing. We shall never be God. But God has nevertheless made a way in Christ for us to be united to Him in a blissful intimacy that makes even the most ideal earthly marriage look like all out war by comparison.

When I pray, do I come with even the vaguest sense of all this? Or do I take the mechanical view - "There is Jesus praying, so I must pray." Or worse, "Prayer is the thing I must do to make sure I stay saved." God in heaven deliver me from such dry and and faithless apery! Let me come as creature to Creator, in humble dependency upon Him for everything, yet fully convinced that in Christ I am already an heir to all things - whether in heaven or upon earth, and for all eternity. This is what Christ's prayers are demonstrating for us. He shows us what He already knows, what He is authoring (and has now finished) and what God is like. How can we help but worship?