Beginning To Pray

By Kyle Gebhart

The labor of prayer is new to me, however, Dorothy Day’s cry resonates deeply within me. Much of my life my heart has yearned for a place where I could devote myself to the "one thing" that is needful in the life of the human being ... to rest at Jesus’ feet and listen to His word (Luke 10:38–42). Or as another author puts it,

We were created to become what we behold, and God’s intention is that we gaze on the beauty of His Son, Jesus Christ, and become like Him in the process. Then, in the context of intimacy with Jesus, filled with His Spirit of compassionate power, we will begin to accompany Him as He visits the cities of earth and brings the restoration of all things to the will of the Father, one person at a time.

— Gary Wiens, Bridal Intercession

I do not want to calculate, for shame, the number of hours my eyes have gazed upon things other than Jesus. How many of us do not shrink away in horror when we hear the statistics about the hours each week our children will watch television? How many years of life are spent gazing upon the meaningless, the narcissistic, this "turkish delight" which never satisfies our spirits and always leaves us hungry for more? God, in His mercy, created within us a hunger only the body and blood of His Son can fill. If our lives are but a breath, then let us have that breath be filled with the One who can fill us with life.

So how then can we breathe? The machinery of our lives seems monumental in its girth, its momentum, in its impersonal weight. How can we shake off systems of materialism and an egocentric society? The good news, the Gospel, is that we don’t have to do it. We merely need to look up at the compassionate King seated on the throne and say, “You are beautiful.” We throw off the hindrances and fix our eyes on Jesus. We accept that everything which hinders His love from being fully made perfect in us was crucified and that we, with Him, are even now seated in heavenly places.

I am laboring in prayer because I need, desperately, to learn how to do this. My "job" as an intercessory missionary offers a bubble of grace and mercy for my soul to be prepared for the pilgrimage of walking my way through this life and into the home that Jesus has prepared for all of us. After many years of ministry I’m becoming a beginner again. I’m spending every possible moment crying out for a deeper hunger for Him personally; and I’m praying that His Church would awaken to the fullness of love He has stored up for them. I am choosing that the whole of my life would be defined not by what I do in ministry or who human beings esteem me to be. Or, to put it more simply: I am learning to breathe eternal.

The word to describe this call is forerunner. The Bible refers to John the Baptist who was reduced, by God’s grace, to nothing more than a "voice in the wilderness" crying out to prepare the way for the coming of Jesus. As we witness the final generation of human history, the message we’ve been given is clear: WATCH! As crisis unfolds the Lord has called us not to be a people concerned with many things, bustling about and concerning ourselves primarily with the many and the multitude; no, instead, as confusion grows our focus becomes increasingly narrow. We are called to watch and to pray. The Gospel provides us with the result of failure in this simple task. In Our Lord’s hour of need we see His disciples failing to watch with Him. Our generation is being given the chance to corporately repent of this failure. We are offered the opportunity to remember Jesus and remain awake with Him in the final hour of human history.

This is the simple essence of the life of prayer: to remain in His presence when others are either busied with other concerns (as Martha was), or resting in their own complacency and ignorance of the hour of their visitation (as our beloved brothers in Gethsemane). We’ve been afforded a rare grace, to be with Jesus where He is as He prepares to make His home again upon this earth. My hope and prayer is that I would be found worthy; and I pray that those who labor with me each night here would be found with Him as well.