May 21 - Acts 12: Who am I Praying to?

This scene of Peter's rescue from prison while the church "prayed for him most strenuously" triggers questions for me.  I love reading about God's deliverance of Peter through an angel removing his shackles and leading him past numerous guards who have no idea what's happening right under their noses.  A question keeps coming back to my mind - what did it look like when the church was praying so strenuously?

Were they praying for deliverance?  Were they praying for blessings and good results?  Were they praising God for who He is or thanking Him for what He'd done and would do?  Were they confessing silently or verbally?  Did they use a specific format?  Would they still have gone "wild" (v. 16) if Peter hadn't been freed but had met the same end as Stephen and they endured more persecution?  How did they picture God while they were praying?

I ask this because God has been challenging me about how I define prayer - more specifically, how I define Him, the One I pray to and converse with.  I want to share the passage from Larry Crabb's book, The Papa Prayer, that God has used to prompt this questioning.

"How do you picture God when you pray?  Whatever idea of God is in your mind as you talk with Him will influence the way you pray.  It's possible that millions of Christians across the world who think they're praying in Jesus's name are in fact praying in the name of someone else, to a God that the Bible knows nothing of.

 "I've identified ten common images of God that are in people's minds when they pray.  See if one (or a blend of several) of these describes the God you pray to:

"1. Smiling Buddy  2. Backroom Watchmaker  3. Preoccupied King  4. Vending Machine  5. Stern Patriarch  6. Kindly Grandfather  7. Impersonal Force  8. Cruel Tyrant  9. Moral Crusader 10. Romantic Lover  [for Crabb's full definitions, please refer to the book]

"The Bible won't let us pin God down to one image that we can get comfortable with.  The God we meet from Genesis to Revelation, including the God we see up close in the four Gospels, is hard to classify.  The more we read, the deeper the mystery becomes.  He is at once endearing, furious, sensitive, aloof, playful, holy, welcoming, terrifying, responsive, and unpredictable - not the sort of God we can easily call Papa....

"How do you picture God when you pray?  Think about it.  Attend to it.  Next time you talk to God, step back for a minute and ask yourself, 'Who do I think I'm talking to?'"

Examining my prayer life and my picture of God has led me to disturbingly identify that I functionally picture God as a combination of  Watchmaker, Preoccupied King and Impersonal Force.  In other words, I view Him as somewhat detached.  I would never verbalize this as my God concept, but when pressed to my functional definition, I think it lies somewhere in that grouping.  At least that's what I operate from at my less intimate moments with God.

I want to enter the mystery, fully enter it in my prayer life and in all of my life.  So that when I pray as the early church did, I'm not praying merely for a result, for rescue, for the alleviation of pain, but I'm praying to enter into relationship with this undefinable, uncontainable, beautiful, furious God who loves me.

How do you picture God when you pray?