Recharge: Prayers of purpose

The Full Monty:

Daniel 6:1-28, Matthew 6:6 To read if you have time to take in a full exploration of what it means to seek God’s will for the places we live.

The Continental Option:

Daniel 6:10-12 Read this if you only have time for one significant passage.

One Shot Espresso:

Daniel 6:10 ‘But when Daniel learned that the law had been signed, he went home and knelt down as usual in his upstairs room, with its windows open toward Jerusalem. He prayed three times a day, just as he had always done, giving thanks to his God.’

There is a beautiful prayer by Clement of Rome, written around AD 100. He prayed: ‘We beg you Lord to help and defend us. Deliver the oppressed, pity the insignificant, raise the fallen, show yourself to the needy, heal the sick, bring back those who have gone astray, feed the hungry, lift up the weak, take off the prisoners’ chains. May every nation come to know that you alone are God, that Jesus Christ is your child, that we are your people, the sheep that you pasture’.

The significance of this prayer is that it comes from the very heart of the Roman Empire. At the time of its praying, these actions that Clement describes were not what most people were experiencing as the dominant flavour of Rome. For ordinary people, Rome was more about decadence, slavery, military arrogance and a searing chasm between the prosperity of a few and the poverty of many. The goal of Rome was not for every nation to know who God is, but for every nation to know how great Rome was! Clement is not describing what he has been reading in his daily newspaper: he is reaching out for the purposes of God. Walking the corridors of the Death Star itself, Clement prays for the coming of another world. The actions he describes - deliverance and mercy, healing and renewal, love and liberation - are the characteristics of the purposes of God, and they remain his purposes even in a city moving with great power and pomp in a different direction altogether.

For the exiles in Babylon, personified in the story of Daniel, this is a very real and potent challenge. In an empire explicitly committed to erasing the Hebrew religion, can they still believe in the purposes of God? Daniel’s extraordinary life of prayer shows that they can. He takes two actions that enable him to connect with God’s purposes, even in the place of struggle - he shuts a door and he opens a window.

Doors

The door he shuts is that of privacy, of personal prayer. Centuries later Jesus would urge his followers, when they pray, to ‘go away by yourself, shut the door behind you, and pray to your Father in private.’  (Matthew 6:6). Daniel understood this need. To lean into the purposes of God, he needed to shut the door on the empire - on its threats and false promises, on its arrogance and anger, on the noise of its ambitions. He had to make a space, a secret place, where he was free to be with God. Only then could he open a window.

Windows

The window Daniel opens is ‘towards Jerusalem’. This doesn’t mean that Daniel can see his old home from where he prays. Far from it, he can only ‘see’ Babylon, the place of his captivity. In prayer, though, he looks beyond this reality. He looks to the promises and purposes of God, to the things God is doing, has always been doing and always will be doing. In prayer, Daniel’s exile becomes a passing inconvenience. It is the purposes of God that are permanent. His heart is fixed on a far horizon. No matter how dark his days in Babylon become, the plans of God are bigger. He is free because he is a citizen of the unchanging promises of God, not of his captivity.

Shut the door, open a window, and pray. What does this mean for us as we seek to live-out in our own age the faith of Daniel and of Clement?

It means that prayer is a choice we make. One of the most significant threads of scripture is the understanding that we are always, in some sense, in exile. There are things in our environment that help us to know God, and things that hide him from us. There is noise, clamour. False promises are made to us a thousand times a day to trigger our desire, as well as false threats that trigger our fears. No matter where we live, there will always be a ‘turning aside’ in prayer. We have to be intentional about making time and creating space for prayer, so that the voice of God is not continually drowned out by the clamour of the empire.

It means that prayer is a pattern we live by. Daniel not only has a place of prayer – his room with its open window - he also has a rhythm. Three times a day he turns to God. So fixed is this habit, so regular, that his enemies can set their watches by it. There is discipline here, holy habits pursued in the face of every pressure to abandon them. Daniel gains God’s perspective on a difficult situation because being attentive to God has become his habit. It’s never too late to pray but it’s never too soon to build a habit of prayer.

It means that private prayer will shape public action. The clear message of Daniel chapter six is that the prophet’s secret place of prayer and the rhythm and discipline of his daily engagement with God contribute significantly to his confidence in facing the king and his lions. Daniel shows wisdom in his dealings with the king, and faith in his encounter with the beasts, that flow from his inner life of prayer. There is no open window in the lion’s den, but having looked toward Jerusalem every day when he was free, Daniel is able, in captivity, to hold the habit.

The actions of Daniel, to shut the door and open a window, speak directly to our age of activism and outward-ness. It seems strange to us to shut ourselves away in order to be open. Surely we will better understand and engage with our culture by immersing ourselves in it? Surely it is out there, on the streets, in action and involvement, that the purposes of God are to be found? Isn’t it a waste of potential mission time for a group of young people to set aside a room as a place of prayer for a day, or a week, or a year?

The Bible’s picture of prayer is unusual in this regard. It suggests that we can turn away from activity in order to more fully engage, that by being closed off in a prayer room we can be more open to the world. ‘Meet with your father in secret’, Jesus says, ‘then move out into kingdom actions - forgiveness and service and holiness and engagement.’ Why? Because it is in the secret place, alone with God our father, that we will more fully glimpse his purposes; that we will come to know his character; that we will begin to want what he wants. In The Irresistible Revolution, Shane Claiborne describes the Church that prays and works for this kingdom, and it resonates with the prayer of Clement in longago Rome:

‘Some of us have worked on Wall Street, and some of us have slept on Wall Street. We are a community of struggle. Some of us are rich people trying to escape our loneliness. Some of us are poor folks trying to escape the cold. Some of us are addicted to drugs and others are addicted to money. We are a broken people who need each other and God, for we have come to recognise the mess that we have created of our world and how deeply we suffer from the mess. Now we are working to give birth to a new society within the shell of the old. Another world is possible. Another world is necessary. Another world is already here.’

A kingdom is on its way that will, as Daniel saw, demolish every empire. Tune-in to this kingdom. Let this be your reality. Find the door that God is urging you to shut, and let prayer be the window he opens.