Yancey on Prayer

Yancey on Prayer: Adjusting our Point of Reference

“We must stop setting our sights by the light of each passing ship; 

instead we must set our course by the stars.” (George Marshall)

“Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God's point of view.”

Prayer adjusts our point of reference. With David we ask: “When I consider the heavens, the work of your hands, what is man that you are mindful of him?” Our approach to prayer is our approach to God, and approaching Him requires a massive adjustment of scale. Why would He even know we are here, much less be mindful.

“How odd that prayer seems foolish to some people who base their lives on media trends, superstition, instinct, hormones, social propriety, or even astrology," Yancey observes. Indeed, in our sophistication we reject the unknown of prayer and embrace countless other unknowns all the same. Forgetting God, we create Him elsewhere.

In prayer, Yancey says, we usually get the direction wrong. We start with out own concerns and bring them to God. We inform God as if He did not already know. Instead, we should start 'upstream' – start with God Himself.

The world obscures the view from above. Prayer and only prayer helps us see things as God see them.

• “Prayer allows me to admit my failures, weaknesses, and limitations to One who responds to human vulnerability with infinite mercy.”

• Prayer helps us “un-create the world we have fashioned” with out own ends in mind; it helps us quit playing God.

• Prayer has become “a realignment of everything. I pray to restore the truth...to gain a glimpse of the world, of me, through the eyes of God.”

• “Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God's point of view.”