THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF PRAYER

 

Tuesday, first Week of Lent/2024
Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP

Theme: The Nature and Purpose of Prayer

Prayer is the very core operation of faith in God. The origin of prayer is the very centre of our spiritual birth, the union between the human spirit and the Holy Spirit. The instance of our birth in spirit is the moment of our justification when the Holy Spirit unites with our spirit to cry Abba Father. Thus, true prayer originates from the very depth of our spiritual being. One who is not born from heaven has not this operation within him, for it has no human origin. A carnally minded person can mimic the art of prayer, but it ends only in mimicry and has no reality, because the foundation of prayer is spiritual, and its first cause is God and not human. God through his word and Spirit initiates whatever is true prayer in each us. The human spirit only receives the operation of prayer through the Holy Spirit and cooperates with him. So, prayer, as a received divine operation, is a gift from God. If it is a gift, then it contains its very answer. “As the rain and the snow come down from the heavens and do not return without watering the earth, making it yield and giving growth to provide seed for the sower and bread for the eating, so the word that goes from my mouth does not return to me empty, without carrying out my will and succeeding in what it was sent to do.”


The purpose of prayer flows from the nature or essence of prayer as given above. Every operation of God intends the fulfilment of his divine will. The same goes for prayer. We have cleared the fact that prayer is the most essential or vital activity of our new birth in Spirit, it is therefore geared towards the flourishing of the spiritual life. Our heavenly birth is in the image of Jesus Christ the Son of God, and the Son exists to do the Father’s will. Hence, the flourishing of our spiritual life is in doing the will of the Father. This is the purpose of every prayer. We do not pray to inform God what we desire, since he is the origin of prayer, but to bring ourselves to cooperate with him for the fulfilment of his will in our lives. “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. So you should pray like this: ‘Our Father in heaven, may your name be held holy, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven…’” Every petition in our Lord’s prayer is expressly the will of the Father, and the purpose of which he gave us his Son. The purpose of prayer is therefore to ready our human spirit more and more to live and cooperate with the Holy Spirit resident in every Christian heart. Prayer is a deep spiritual reconfiguration of the human spirit, soul, and body into the image of the Son of God, the teacher of prayer.

Let us pray: Grant us, Lord, the grace to eat our spiritual food daily that we may be completely configured into Jesus Christ.         


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