Praying In The Wrong Direction
The Daily Mail reports that worshipers at a mosque in Turkey have been praying in the wrong direction for 37 YEARS! According to one news outlet, the mosque was built facing the wrong direction in 1981.
To make matters worse, it is believed that this was the result of it being built based on the original mosque, which would mean that these worshipers have not been praying in the direction of Mecca, as prescribed, even longer than previously thought.
As Christians, we understand that it doesn't really matter what direction we face when we pray. God is everywhere. Rather, it's our earnest determination to seek God and to know His will that Jesus promised to bless when He said, "Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you" (Matthew 7:7).
We pray in the wrong direction when we pray for the wrong things, or when we pray for the right things but with the wrong motives. We pray in the wrong direction whenever we seek our will instead of God's.
"This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us" (1 John 5:14).
A Sincere Prayer
A Chasidic story:
"A poor man, lost in the woods, found himself at nightfall without his prayer book, so he addressed this petition to the Almighty: “Dear God I have done a stupid thing: I do not have my prayer book. And I have such a poor memory that I cannot recite the prayers by heart. But you know all the prayers, Lord, so I'll just recite the letters of the alphabet, and You put them together in the right way.”
And the Almighty regarded that prayer, because of its sincerity, more worthy than any of the others He heard that day."
I like that story! It reminds us that when we pray we can say anything. It doesn't even have to make sense. The Lord will put our words together. All we have to do is to pray "from the heart." The Lord will know that we love him simply because we are spending time with him.
"In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans" (Romans 8:26).
At A Loss For Words
Laura McPherson writes:
BEFORE THE TURN of the next century, more than half of India’s 780 languages may die out. In this respect, India can be seen as a microcosm of the world, with experts warning that thousands of little-spoken languages are at risk for extinction within the century.
These reports might act as a call to keep teaching these languages to new users and ensure they are passed on to the next generation. But we have to be realistic, too. Without an unlikely transformation in political, socioeconomic, and ethnic conditions, it is naïve to think we can stem the tide of language death.
Yet, for obvious reasons, none of the research touches on the extinction of perhaps the most important language of all—prayer.
As our societies become more and more secularized, the proliferation of the global language of secular humanism threatens to swallow up the spiritual dynamic of prayer, as it sweeps across the globe.
Yet those who desire to commune with God need never fear the death of the language required. God hears our hearts. He knows our needs before we can even express them (Matthew 6:8). And when we don’t even know how to pray, “The Spirit of God Himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express” (Romans 8:26)