[Shepherding the sheep with one heart] Pray with desperation

  • 2017.12.28 10:51


Some people take ages to get to the point of what they are saying.  They start their stories with a long list of totally irrelevant things.  For example, such a person tells a story about a seed of wheat, saying, “As for this wheat, I planted this in the ground of Chungcheong-do Buyeo in 1997 and a farmer sowed it and fertilized it in this way…”.  He includes endless irrelevant details like this.  He could just start his story by saying, “this is a seed of wheat”, but instead he fills the story with useless facts.  When I listen to him, he lists everything he has done to the wheat over the course of a year.  Because I feel that he is wasting previous time, I ask such a person to be excused, saying, “I am sorry, but it would be better to get straight to the point”. 

 

Likewise, when we move towards God and pray to him, we must avoid praying in such a way that we say nothing about the subject that we need God to answer. We must state the necessary points by faith without hesitating to receive an answer from God who knows everything and wants to satisfy my needs.

 

Someone who is hungry for righteousness cannot afford to hesitate when he prays, nor to be a hypocrite, nor to embellish his prayers with flowery words. Just as a hungry man desperately seeks a meal, you should only ask God for things that are urgently necessary. A person who is hungry and thirsty for righteousness and always wants to live his faith life well longs to pray, praise, give thanks, express devotion and evangelise.

 

When we see how a person lives out their faith, we can easily recognize whether he is a spiritual or a secular person. That is because, compared to a secular person, a spiritual one yearns for everything with great hunger and thirst.  A spiritual person prays like a hungry man, expresses his devotion as if he were a thirsty man looking for water and takes the life that the Lord gives him, full of grace, sitting in the front row in worship and saying“Amen” to every word.

 


Pastor Seok-Jeon Yoon
Extracted from Yonsei Newspaper #555 (December 09, 2017)