Lord, Teach Us to Breathe
“Yet have regard to the prayer of Your servant and to his supplication, O LORD my God, to listen to the cry and to the prayer which Your servant prays before You today.” I Kings 8:28
Lord, Teach Us to Breathe
Prayer – According to Jewish scholarship, the root meaning behind palal is “to judge, to differentiate, to clarify and to decide”. You can see this meaning is Exodus 21:22. Jewish scholars believe that prayer is “the soul’s yearning to define what truly matters and to ignore the trivialities that often masquerade as essential.” What does this mean?
The first thing we see is that prayer is longing. We discovered that prayer is as important as breathing. Try holding your breath for three minutes. Very quickly your body begins to long for the flow of air. The strain mounts until it is all you can do to keep from gulping oxygen. In fact, if you pass out, your body automatically begins breathing again. It is the natural and essential rhythm of life. Prayer is exactly this longing for spiritual well being. When you stop praying, your soul goes into suffocation. The pressure mounts to return to the natural rhythm of soul-breath. The longer you ignore the signs, the sicker you get until finally you can literally die from lack of prayer. Just like breathing, God designed us to participate in a constant flow of prayerful communication with Him. That’s why Paul can say, “Pray without ceasing”. To ignore this would be just as damaging as trying to live without breathing.
So, if prayer is soul-breathing, what is its purpose? Hebrew makes it clear. The purpose of prayer is to judge what is the will of the Father, to differentiate between what is His desire and mine, to clarify what He wishes for me and to receive the power to carry out my decision. Judge what’s true. Avoid what isn’t. Surrender my will. Carry out His will. All the steps are captured in the most important prayer ever uttered, “Not my will but Yours be done.”
Is there anything in life that does not require judging, discerning, clarifying and deciding? Of course not! Without these characteristics, men become nothing more than animals, driven by instinct rather than choice. If prayer is the soul-breath of choice, then prayer is essential to every choice in life. Prayer is not limited to the “spiritual” things. It is not emergency calls to heaven. It is not reserved for the righteous. Prayer is the life force of choice. Oh, I can make choices without prayer, just like I can still move around without breathing. But not for long. My storage capacity for air is limited. So is my storage capacity for soul-breath.
Praying is the soul longing to breathe the oxygen of godly choices. Breathe or die.
