27th March 2025

A phrase has been popping up in many of the devotionals I read. On one app in particular, the authors like to say we should invite God into our time of prayer. I can’t help but cringe, as it seems backwards from what I’ve always understood, and indeed, what we find in Psalm 27:8 (NLT), ‘My heart has heard you say, “Come and talk with me.” And my heart responds, “Lord, I am coming.”’ He is the one who moves our hearts to pray, to love, to serve and to do anything for him. 

C.S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, put it beautifully in this description of a man praying: ‘What I mean is this. An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a Christian, he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God – that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying – the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on – the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.’ 

We are not the ones who invite God into our prayers – In fact, we don’t invite him into anything. He is the great Initiator of everything good in our lives. We can do nothing but humbly respond, yes Lord, to the call to pray and the call to lay down our lives for Jesus as he did for us.

First published on 4 March 2025, at www.gemsofgodsgrace.wordpress.com a personal blog which is not sponsored by Grace Communion International.

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