2008 Letter No 09

Each month Bill writes a pastor's letter for our monthly church magazine called 'The Messenger'. Here is the letter for September 2008:

A great Christian thinker of the early twentieth century was a Congregationalist minister called Peter Taylor Forsyth. I like his writings because they open up the truths of the gospel in helpful, exciting and challenging ways. He is not an easy read, but then neither is the Apostle Paul, but it is still worth grappling with what each of them wrote.

One of Forsyth’s books is called ‘The Soul of Prayer’. I was struck and challenged by a statement he makes on the very first page. Forsyth says, “The worst sin is prayerlessness,” and maybe he is right! After all, the essence of sin is the choice to live our lives on our own terms without reference to God, out of relationship with Him. And prayer is about bringing our lives into relationship with God, offering to Him our concerns, our joys, our pains, our decisions, our failures, our hopes and our fears. Prayer is about receiving from God and offering our lives back to Him. Prayer is about being transformed by the presence of God. Forsyth tells us that to neglect that is the greatest of all sins.

There have certainly been times when I have neglected prayer, and I know that I am not alone in this. I have not given enough of my time or my attention to God in prayer. This is not what God wants for me. It is not what God wants for any of us, and it something of which we need to repent. A few weeks ago I decided to take a day away at an Anglican Franciscan monastery in Worcestershire in order to spend more time in prayer and to meet with one of the monks to talk about my life of prayer. In fact I have arranged to go there once every three months and to meet with him to talk about my walk with God. There is a long history in the Church of people meeting on a regular basis with a mature Christian, who is outside their normal circle of friends and acquaintances, to discuss their relationship with God. This is sometimes called Spiritual Direction and it is sometimes called having a Soul Friend. Whatever name we give it, it can be helpful in keeping us accountable to someone else for our spiritual life. It can bring to light things which we have never realised about our relationship with God, and it can highlight areas for growth.

Many years ago someone asked me if it was possible to be a Christian without praying. It is an odd question. The Christian life is all about coming into relationship with the living God through Christ, who opens up a new and living way to the Father (Hebrews 10:19-22). Relationship with God is at the heart of what it means to be a Christian. In fact Jesus told us that the greatest commandment is to love God with our whole being – heart, soul, mind and strength (Mark 12:28-30).

At the moment I am being reminded of the centrality of prayer. Not prayer as an accessory or an aid to normal life, but prayer as the process by which we place all of our life – our whole being – into the hands of God.

Let me end with another quotation from Peter Taylor Forsyth’s ‘The Soul of Prayer’:

"Prayer is often represented as the great means of the Christian life. But it is no mere means, it is the great end of that life. It is, of course, not untrue to call it a means. It is so, especially at first. But at last it is truer to say that we live the Christian life in order to pray than that we pray in order to live the Christian life."

May we find that to be true.