Praying for yourself

"Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; 

knock and it will be opened to you."

Matthew 7:7, ESV

We recently had a worship night for young people in our church, one which we hold every couple of months. A group of six people (including myself) lead the times of praise at these events, and the usual procedure is that we meet up two or three times before each event to have a run over some songs. Before this most recent event we had three meetings, and at each one we had a short time of prayer to open up the time together. The idea was to pray for three different elements of the event, one at each practise, as follows:

1. Praying for the hearts and attitudes of the young people coming along, for an openness among them to let God work freely.
2. Praying for Ruth Cooke and Jonny Elliot, leading the talk based on the work of IJM.
3. Praying for ourselves and for each other, for personal focus in the week leading up to the event.

I have genuinely never found anything in my prayer life as challenging as the ten or fifteen minutes I spent at our third practise praying for myself. 

Over the years I've been involved in worship groups, outreach teams and youth groups, all of which have involved an active prayer element, and I've always been a fan of it. I get a real kick out of a time of prayer, there's something very reassuring and exciting about calling upon God to involve Himself in what we're doing. But in this moment I became very aware of how rarely I pray for myself. I had no idea where to begin. Ask me to pray for a team that's about to begin, for a friend in need or a situation on the other side of the world and I will have no problem at all, but when I tried to turn the focus on myself, I really struggled.

Don't get me wrong, I've prayed many prayers over the years for exams coming up and for steady nerves before I speak at something and all that kind of thing, but that's always been in relation to a specific thing. This was new, the idea of just praying that I might be who God needs me to be in order that His Spirit might use me. I've been leading worship in various ways for about five years and this was the first time I'd realised this. I had to be honest with God, accept that He knows all my flaws and that I must acknowledge them before Him if I am to ask for His help in overcoming them. I felt so exposed before God, terrified that if I let my walls come down by mentioning my inner issues in prayer that He would see me for the struggling sinner I really am.

That verse from Matthew is such a widely-known one, a sentence many of us have been able to speak from memory ever since Sunday school. Yet how many of you are like me and have no idea how to take it for what it really is? Am I really the only one who has no problem praying for the healing of the physically sick because I believe God is that powerful, yet can't fully convince myself deep down that he can help me overcome some personal weaknesses?

Ask and it shall be given. Simple as that. Lust stopping you from being who God wants you to be? Ask God to take away your lust. Struggling to maintain a devotional life with God? Ask Him for the determination to keep it up. Job done, case closed. As long as we ask God with the faith that He requires of us, it really is as simple as that.

So let's strive for that faith. The results of those times of prayer we had at our practises was clear. Young folks responded to the movement of God through their worship in ways I hadn't sen in them before. Ruth and Jonny spoke a powerful and challenging message about the world and what Christians need to be doing within it. So if God responded to these prayers so clearly what reason have I to doubt that He will respond to my most personal and desperate prayers? With the assurance God has blessed me with through this last event I am making a conscious decision to pray for myself openly and honestly with God, and if anything here has sounded familiar to you I hope you can do the same :)

Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is the

daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer

to have a heart without words than words without heart.

Mahatma Gandhi

Musings on Musical Content

Last year I put up a post about the debate over what Christians should and shouldn't watch on TV or in films, and a similar chat recently emerged between a friend and myself. Essentially this friend was flicking through my iPod and started to laugh when they found music on it by a band who call themselves Holy F**k. (Breathtaking electronica, well worth a listen!) They then said that they would never have such a thing listed in their music library and made a 'what-if-your-minister-found-that-on-there?' kind of joke. So we mulled over this for a while, debating what a Christian should be listening to.

For the record, there is a lot of stuff on my iPod that I wouldn't play at my gran's 80th birthday party. There's some Eminem (I'm somewhat ashamed to say), a lot of Bill Hicks stand-up material (covering all manner of subject matter) and the Team America soundtrack (enough said). Not to mention a wealth of classic bands who ever now and then let a dodgy word slip in there (John Lennon, Pink Floyd, Dave Matthews etc etc etc...).

Now, people are always quick to relate to the passage in the Bible where Peter denies Christ, how he curses to try and convince people he isn't a follower.

He began to call down curses, and he swore to them, “I don’t know this man 

you’re talking about.” Mark 14:71

People then say that from this that to swear is to distance yourself from Christ, and following on from that they say that it is no better to put this stuff into you head through what you watch and what you listen to. While I don't entirely agree with this viewpoint I can understand the reasoning and I have an awful lot of admiration for the restraint of people who discipline themselves this way. My problem, however, is that many people take the idea of 'swear words' too seriously, letting this cloud their judgement.

My view on swearing in a nutshell is that there are no bad words, there are only bad intentions. Now I don't use bad language, but I don't believe God set certain words aside as naughty words that we're not to use. I believe that man has always used words to hurt, and over time this use has stuck with certain words. So for me, intent and nature mean more to me that specific language where listening is concerned. If I were a parent, I like to think that I'd be happier with my children listening to Manic Street Preachers who have the odd curse word, than Katy Perry or Rihanna, wherein the soul purpose of the music is to glorify and glamourize a lifestyle which God finds totally abhorrent. Some of the music on Cool FM genuinely disgusts me and it might not contain a single word which you couldn't say on daytime TV. Therefore I find it difficult when a Christian won't listen to a particular song or watch a particular film because of the verbal content, but they happily pick up the latest compilation of radio chart-toppers.

Food for thought...