Making Room for God
There are loads of people who have written brilliant things about the significance of prayer. I won’t add anything profound to them; what I have to say is rather simple… Prayer is simply making room for God. Making room for God to speak, to act, to be known. When we never learn to pray, or when we forget to pray, our soul begins to shrink, like our lungs when the oxygen is sucked from the room. Teresa of Avila wrote, “Souls without prayer are like bodies, palsied and lame, having hands and feet they cannot use.” Without prayer, we are limited, small, working like a machine. With prayer, we become large, full, a heart alive.
The scriptures are full of people making room for God. Adam and Eve met with God in a garden. The Israelites met God under a huge tent. The priests met God in the Temple. These were all special places where God showed up in special ways. But of course God isn’t confined to rooms. Jacob met God in a dream, Elijah met God in a cave, and Jesus met God on a mountain. And the Apostle Paul taught that Jesus’ followers are themselves a meeting room—when they are gathered together, God’s presence fills them like a Temple. At the end of the scriptures, in the book of Revelation, we see that the whole world, indeed the entire cosmos, is God’s great big meeting room.
I’m not sure about you, but very often I feel like I get crowded out of God’s life. So many things are pushing me away from God. I often start to wonder where God has gone, but then I realize it isn’t God who has gone, but me who has gone! What we need is to make room for God by elbowing away all of the busy thoughts and activities that keep us from his presence. It is my prayer that Vineyard Amsterdam will be a community that makes room for God. When we give God a place to meet with us as individuals and as a community, I believe we will start to see his miraculous work in our lives and in our city!
Here is what I propose… let’s take the season of Lent and make room for God in our lives. Lent is the forty-day season between Ash Wednesday and Easter that Christians have used to learn how to pray. Each week at Meeting Point, we will look at what the Bible teaches about how to make room for God through prayer. We will also offer several practical ways that we can grow together in prayer. This Lent, I invite us to go on a prayer journey together. Let’s make room for God, and see our lives and our church grow larger and richer in God’s love.
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