Praying When Nothing Is Wrong

He is a good man and he prays like a man ringing for an ambulance.

He is not proud of the phrase. His wife said it once, mildly, not as a criticism, and it has been in him ever since like a stone in a shoe.

The pattern is easy to describe. Something goes wrong. Something real: the test results in the autumn, the thing with his son's job, the night he sat in the car outside the house for forty minutes because he could not go in and say what he had to say. And in those hours he prays, and he means it, and it is not a performance, and he would tell you honestly that God has been present in those hours in a way he could not explain to anyone.

Then it passes. And two weeks later, three at the most, he notices that he has not said a word to God since, and he does not feel guilty exactly, because he is not the guilty sort, he just feels a bit exposed. Like a man who only calls his father when the car has broken down.

He has tried to fix this several times. He always tries to fix it by resolving to pray more, which lasts as long as resolutions last.

What is quietly eating him is not the frequency. It is this: he has begun to wonder whether God has become, in his life, a service. Something you contact. Something that responds well in an emergency and is otherwise not thought about, like the man who does the boiler.

He would never say that out loud. But he thought it once, in the car, and he has not been able to unthink it.

Today is Thursday and nothing whatever is wrong.

Two men going up at three in the afternoon

Come and walk with me a minute, because there is a verse that fixes this and almost nobody notices it, because it is only there to set the scene for the famous bit that follows.

Now Peter and John went up together into the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour.Acts 3:1

Read that again and take out the miracle that comes next.

Two men, walking up a hill, at three in the afternoon, because it is three in the afternoon. Not because something happened. Not because a crisis was on. Because there was an hour of prayer and it had come round and that is where they went, the way you go to a thing you go to.

These are men who had seen the resurrection with their own eyes. They were not short of spiritual experience. And their ordinary Thursday looked like this: an appointment, kept.

Hear this on your own hill. You are not a man with a broken relationship, and the written word is what settles it, not sentiment. Scripture shows the two most experienced men in the church keeping an ordinary hour on an ordinary day, and the Holy Spirit met them in that ordinariness, and He is standing in this Thursday of yours with nothing wrong in it at all.

Now the thing you thought in the car. Let us take it out and look at it, because it is not as damning as it felt.

You have not turned God into a service. Nothing written in Scripture reads your life that way, and the Holy Spirit has not been keeping that account. You have inherited a way of praying, from a culture that mostly prays when something breaks, and you have never been shown any other kind, and a man cannot practice a thing nobody handed him.

That is not a character defect. That is a gap in what you were given, and the written word fills it in one line, and the Holy Spirit does the rest in about eleven seconds a day.

Look at what the fixed hour does that resolving to pray more never will. Resolving to pray more puts the whole weight on the moment of remembering, which is exactly the faculty that goes first when life is fine. An hour needs no remembering. It arrives.

And here is the thing that will actually shift the stone in your shoe. What is written says the Holy Spirit is given, not lent, and He does not withdraw and reissue Himself according to your consumption, so the intimacy you have felt in the crisis hours was never being metered. You have not been running an account. You have been coming home to a house where the light was already on.

Now the good part, which is the part in the verse.

When they walked up to that gate on an ordinary afternoon, keeping an ordinary appointment, a man who had never walked in his life was healed. Neither of them planned it. They were not on a mission. They were going to the three o'clock, and the whole thing happened on the way.

That is the argument for an ordinary hour, and it is the best one there is. The emergencies will always find you. What the fixed hour gives you is a standing place to be found in.