Listen from your home in heaven and…….

Our God is a great big God.

There’s no doubt about that.

The valleys are His. The mountains are His. The stars are His handiwork too.

He is God of the whole earth. God of the whole universe. God of the whole cosmos.

Can it be that God will actually move into our neighbourhood? Why, the cosmos itself isn’t large enough to give you breathing room, let alone this Temple I’ve built. Even so, I’m bold to ask: Pay attention to these my prayers, both intercessory and personal, O God, my God. Listen to my prayers, energetic and devout, that I’m setting before you right now. Keep your eyes open to this Temple day and night, this place you promised to dignify with your Name. And listen to the prayers that I pray in this place. And listen to your people Israel when they pray at this place.  2 Chronicles 6:18-21

And yet He is a personal God. He wants us to get to know Him. He wants us to come before Him. He wants us to pray.

We can be bold. We can come with confidence. Because He invites us to. He wants to know us and us to know Him.

Today we’re talking about prayer. Solomon mentions two sorts of prayer – intercessory and personal. This prayer that he prays in 2 Chronicles 6 is largely intercessory.

Intercessory: Entreaty in favour of another, especially a prayer or petition to God in behalf of another.

This is the kind of prayer we usually enter into together as a group in church. We have a time of intercession where we bring before God the needs of the church and of the world. Personal prayer is more of an informal ‘getting to know you’ conversation – sometimes with words, sometimes just breathing and being aware of the presence of God (in my experience).

A temple, a church building, can become a place of focus for the presence of God. It can be a place of worship, where we deliberately go to worship and spend time in God’s presence. That’s not to say God is not everywhere and can be found anywhere, as we saw yesterday, but maybe it is helpful for us to go out of our way, which takes deliberate effort, to enter a specific place at a specific time to come before God expecting Him to meet with us and hear us and speak to us.

God doesn’t need this framework and structure and physical building. He cannot be contained in time and space. But maybe we do.

Eight times in this prayer of Solomon’s, he uses this phrase –

Listen from your home in heaven and…..

And forgive.

And act.

And judge.

And free.

And start over with them.

And train them.

And reward them.

And do what is right for them.

And do what is best for them.

He’s praying for the whole people of Israel. He’s praying for the individual who hurts his neighbour, the offender and the offended, for hearts penetrated by disaster, and the foreigner – never forget the foreigner.

He’s praying for specific situations but without prescribing to God how and when He should answer – that’s the kind of prayer I am more comfortable with – asking that God’s will should be done in any given situation, that God would do what is right, that God would do what is best.

What a privilege it is to come before the God of the universe in prayer! We should never forget that. We covered this in our house group this week – about how easy it is to get into a rut and routine, in our personal and intercessory prayer, to not even think about what we are saying, about who we are talking to. We come to God in the same place at the same time every day. We sit in the same position. We start every prayer the same. The same phrases roll off our tongue. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with routine (I love this early morning routine of getting up and reading the Bible and writing this blog that I have right now) and there’s nothing wrong with liturgy (the familiarity of these prayers can transport us to new levels every single time we pray them). But there is a lot wrong with going through the motions, meaningless words, unthinking rituals.

Every time we pray, we need to stop and think who it is that we are approaching, who it is that we are talking to.

That, right there, would revolutionise how we pray.