Introduction and Ice Breaker
What can you mourn or celebrate this week?
Describe your favorite prayer practices / habits.
Themes to Consider
Prayer as way to see things differently
Learn how to pray and you will know how to live
Pray so that we may endure
Prayer as the road to transformation
Discussion Questions
What do you see in or believe about the world that leads you to doubt God’s goodness?
What in your life has the power to change your perspective?
What things in your life need more than human effort to change?
In this psalm, Asaph describes how being with God changes him. He gains WISDOM as he senses what seemed unfair as things that are shallow. He comes to understanding the real condition of his heart in HUMILITY and becomes aware of God’s nearness and receives COMFORT through that.
Do you feel like you can have experiences of prayer like that?
What makes you doubt that you can?
Guided Prayer
Silence / Remove distractions as much as you can and spend two minutes (time it, if helpful) in silence, noticing your body, your emotions and thoughts. Perhaps use a simple phrase to pray silently so that you stay focused. “You are good and your love endures.”
Read / Psalm 100:4 “Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name.”
Thanksgiving / Use some time in prayers of gratitude before God. Thank him for the good and the difficult things in your life that lead you to him.
Adoration / praise God for who he is--powerful, preexisting, one, etc.
Confession / confess where your perspectives don’t align with his, where they have been formed by culture more than prayer.
Supplication / pray for god to meet you in those doubts and misperceptions. Pray for us to be a church that is shaped in the presence of God through prayer so that we can go act on his behalf in our world.
quotes
Prayer is the broadening of our attention on the world around us, looking for the arrival of God, who announces himself by speaking to us and calling us to pray for others in and through the actions of ministry. Jesus is the minister because he prays for us. God is so fully a speaking God of ministry that he is the never-ending discourse of the Father and Son through the Spirit in prayer.
To teach people to pray is to call them into ministry; it is to pray together in and through the acts of ministry. Prayers of thanksgiving and praise are for the arrival of God as minister. Prayer is never abstract, even in the form of praise. We praise God not as a metaphysical force, heralding attributes disconnected from God’s arriving action in the world. Rather, in prayer we praise God for his faithfulness as minister, for the ways he’s acted for us by ministering to us. In prayer we praise God not as a disconnected deity but as the God who freed Israel from Egypt and resurrected Jesus from the dead—and who is acting among us.
Andrew Root
The Psalms model ways of talking to God that are honest, yet not obvious – at least, they are not obvious to modern Christians. They may guide our first steps toward deeper involvement with God because the Psalms give us a new possibility for prayer; they invite full disclosure. They enable us to bring into our conversation with God feelings and thoughts that most of us think we need to get rid of before God will be interested in hearing from us. The point of the shocking psalms is not to sanctify what is shameful (for example, the desire for sweet revenge) or to make us feel better about parts of ourselves that stand in need of change. Rather, the Psalms teach us that profound change happens always in the presence of God. Over and over they attest to the reality that when we open our minds and hearts fully to God who made them, then we open ourselves, whether we know it or not to the possibility of being transformed beyond our imagining.
Ellen F. Davis Getting Involved with God
