A five-part series on building a life of prayer by by Father Francis Martin, S.S.D.
The most precious thing that we Christians have, because the Holy Spirit lives in us, is the capacity to communicate with God. This is what we’re going to do forever. When God made us, He had in His mind an eternity with Himself. When He made us, He wanted us to be with Him, to talk with Him, to interact with Him, to communicate with Him, to know Him and love Him and adore Him, to be in awe of Him and worship Him forever. God knows that this is our happiness. He knows that in knowing Him and adoring Him, that in loving Him and in finding our joy in Him, that we will reach the fulfillment of everything we were ever made to be.
This communication with God is called prayer. It is different than thinking about God. It is different than talking about God. I can think about someone, I can talk about someone and still never really know that person. When we pray we are not thinking about God or talking about God, but actually communicating with God.
Prayer is a gift from the Holy Spirit. We don’t make prayer. From the tiniest steps we take to enter into some communication with God, to the greatest union with God that the saints have known in this world, every step of that is the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. God wants to communicate with us. He wants us to know the plan that He has for our lives. And more than this, He wants us to know Him—to really know Him, to know His Son Jesus Christ, and to find our joy in knowing the reality and the majesty of Jesus Christ our Savior. This is why we pray.
Did you ever think what a privilege it is to pray? Suppose you were having trouble with your tax forms and you thought, “I’ll just give the President a call and explain myself.” Well, you probably wouldn’t get through. But any time you want to turn to God and talk to Him, you can. Do you realize what a privilege that is, that we can talk to God, that we can have access to God, that we can really be in communication with the maker of the whole universe, the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
The reason why we can pray is because Jesus poured out his blood for us. As the letter to the Hebrews says, we have access to God because of the blood of Jesus Christ:
Brothers, since the blood of Jesus assures our entrance into the sanctuary by the new and living path he has opened for us through the veil (the ‘veil’ meaning his flesh), and since we have a great High Priest who is over the house of God, let us draw near in utter sincerity and absolute confidence, our hearts sprinkled clean from the evil which lay on our consciences and our bodies washed in pure water. (Hebrews 10:19–22)
We can have access to God. What does this mean? It means that because of the blood of Jesus Christ, when I talk to God I know I’m talking to someone and I know I’m in communication with Him. I know there is someone there. I know that I’m just not thinking God, I know that I’m in touch with God and I know that this is the fruit of the death and resurrection of my Lord Jesus Christ. Otherwise, there would no access to God. I would live alienated from God. I would have nothing but my own resources to live by. I would be like some man in a hut with no windows and no doors, all alone in this dark place, and once in a while I would hear a tap or a sound outside and say, “maybe that’s God,” and that is all I would know. But because of the death of Jesus Christ the Son of God, the walls of this darkened hut are broken down and I can have access to God. I can speak with God.
When God made us, He made us with a capacity to know Him and to have Him dwell in us. That is why God made us, but what has happened? At the very dawn of human history, man rebelled against God and that whole capacity that we have for God was clouded over, was covered over. It lay dormant. There was no way that it could be activated. God in His mercy did not leave us in this condition but promised to send us a Redeemer. And so, the Son of God, the very Word of God, became flesh and took upon himself the whole human condition.
St. Paul tells us that the death Christ died he died to sin, and the life he lives he lives to God, so that we, too, should count ourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus (see Romans 6). The blood of Christ has cleansed our conscience so that we could live a life free from dead works and able to serve the living God. This is what prayer is—it is a capacity to communicate with God brought about by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and given to us when the Holy Spirit dwells in us. From that moment on, that capacity we had for God is freed up once again so we can really enter into communion with God.
But as we all know, prayer is a struggle. The struggle actually begins when the Holy Spirit comes to dwell in our minds. Sometimes we think, “Oh, if the Spirit comes, then everything will be so smooth and easy, and since I experience struggle, I guess that hasn’t happened to me yet.” But in Romans 8, as St. Paul describes our life in the Holy Spirit, the gift of having the Holy Spirit be the very principal of our activity, what does he start to talk about—struggle! Dead men have no struggles. When we’re dead in our sins we have no struggle. Oh, we worry about the bills, we worry about our health, we worry about our jobs and relationships, but we have no real struggle. Struggle happens with life. When the Spirit of God begins to dwell in our minds, now we have a struggle. Because as the Spirit dwells in our minds, the rest of our personality is still dominated by the things that made for darkness, and therefore prayer is a struggle. Prayer is work. Now Jesus, who knew this, encouraged us to persevere in prayer over and over again in images that are so strong, so daring, that nobody else would have ever dared to talk like this. But our Lord wanted us to know, more than anything else, how much God, His Father, wants us to pray.
Father Francis Martin lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland. He is Professor of Biblical Studies at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C.
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