I boarded the plane to Ethiopia feeling anxious and afraid. That summer, I was leading a small team of women to serve alongside a missionary in a remote Muslim city, and nothing seemed to be going as planned. I could see the concern on the faces of those who organised the trip as they dropped us off at the airport.
We had been unable to reach the missionary for some time, and our travel plans had changed. This was before smartphones - WhatsApp didn’t exist - so we had no idea what we were flying into. I felt helpless and feared making foolish decisions that would put these women at risk. So, I prayed, desperately asking God for help.
Isn’t that how God often works in our lives? We reach the end of our rope, unable to control the circumstances around us, and cry out to him. In those moments, he is at work doing far more than “all that we ask or think” (Eph 3:20), revealing truths about himself that anchor our anxious hearts in him. In the same way, God mercifully heard my cry on that plane and answered my prayer in ways that sustained me through the hardships of that summer.
I learned many things in Ethiopia, but above all, I learned about prayer.
Prayer humbles our self-reliant hearts and teaches us to depend on God. The world around us places a high value on self-sufficiency, as if all we need to conquer any challenge is found within ourselves. But Scripture tells a very different story of our helplessness. We were lost in our sin, and Christ came to save us from ourselves. When we pray, we rest in that reality and express our dependence on God. Prayer teaches us to rely on the promises of God's all-sufficient grace to supply every need of ours in Christ Jesus (Phil 4.19).
Prayer must be grounded in God’s Word. In his book on prayer, Tim Keller writes of the tragedy of untethered prayer. “Without immersion in God’s Word, our prayers may not be merely limited and shallow, but also untethered from reality. We may be responding not to the real God but to what we wish God and life to be like.” What we believe about God shapes the way we pray. Immersing ourselves in the greatness and glory of God in Scripture tethers our prayers to soul-steadying truth.
Prayer is the great privilege of the children of God. One staggering reality of our new life in Christ is that we have been adopted into the family of God (Eph 1.5). As children of God, we can approach our heavenly Father with confidence and bring every cry of our heart to him, because he loves and cares for us. “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (1 John 3.1).
In times of uncertainty, when we reach the end of ourselves, we can run into the arms of our heavenly Father in prayer, knowing that he delights to do us good with all of his heart and soul (Jer 32.41) and to quiet our fearful hearts with his unshakable love (Zeph 3.17).
These articles are written without the use of generative AI.