Prayer with Purpose

Throughout life there come moments and instances when we throw up our hands in defeat and cry for relief.  It is these moments, when we feel the overwhelming flood and weight of life, that we need to bow down to the Lord in prayer.  It is prayer that helps us make it through any and all of life's struggles.  Additionally, prayer helps us to encounter life with the vision and wisdom of the Holy Spirit.  However, an attitude of prayer, like every aspect of the Christian life, does not happen passively.


Throughout the Gospels, particularly in Luke, Jesus often leaves His disciples to be alone in prayer.  Why would Jesus, the very Son of God, need to pray or need to be alone to pray?  The truth is, two things are occurring when Jesus seeks solitude for prayer.  The first is teach.  Jesus is sure to teach His disciples and future believers that prayer is about solemn and secret communication, intimate relationship with the heavenly Father.


Secondly, and more importantly, when Jesus seeks the desolate places to pray alone, He is communing in perfect unity with the heavenly Father.  It is important to always note that Jesus is simultaneously fully-man and fully-God.  This being true, both of these natures are limited by the other.  For instance, Jesus was not able to exercise the infinite measure of His omnipotence or omniscience while housed in a single physical form.  Similarly, although sin is engrained into the very makeup of man, because He was God, He never sinned.


Being alone meant that Jesus could be unencumbered by His physical nature and so enter into the divine relationship that is between Himself, the Father, and the Holy Spirit.  In so doing, Jesus was exercising His divinity in supreme ways.  An example of this is the Transfiguration (Matt. 17:1-9; Mark 9:2-8; Luke 9:28-36).


At the Transfiguration, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up an unnamed mountain, presumably for the purpose of solitude and prayer.  When the group reaches their destination Jesus is transfigured from His earthly form into a semblance of His heavenly form and glorified state.  The three accompanying disciples are stunned and awed but are also bystanders.  James, John, and Peter are witnesses to Jesus in His glorified heavenly form, not active participants. 

Although this is the only instance that is recorded of Jesus inviting others to witness His solitary prayer time, it is not unreasonable to consider that this glimpse into Jesus' prayer time reveals the intimate and divine nature of prayer: it unleashes the divine into our lives.  Although we will not be transfigured in the same sense as Jesus, when we come to Him in devout prayer, He imparts and imputes His divine nature into us.  In this way, prayer is a definite and necessary part of sanctification as it is through prayer that God purifies us into a glorified state by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Let us then seek earnestly to come to God in prayer understanding that He uses prayer time to reveal to us who we truly are in Him!