Each week as we look at the means of Grace I want to begin with my short summary: the Means of Grace are those "routes" by which we encounter the grace of God and by which the grace of God encounters us. Grace is not a commodity that can be packaged and dispensed by human beings. Grace is the mysterious and wondrous love of God which is made real in our lives; forgiving and freeing us to become the persons God has designed us to be. One of God's gifts is that we have been given opportunities to participate in activities which position us to experience and be enriched by that grace. One of the most powerful Means of Grace is prayer, even if people do not refer to it as such.
What is prayer? While there are multiple definitions I believe the simplest description is that it is conversation with God. I realize that the church has often made prayer seem very complicated and sometimes even unapproachable. Yet just as each of us can carry on conversations with others around us we can carry on conversations with God. In some ways this makes prayer the most personal of all of the Means of Grace. Each of us is allowed to encounter God either individually (personal prayer) or corporately (communal prayer…such as in church). By so doing we make a direct connection to the one, true, living God and this facilitates us being able to experience and bask in God's grace.
With so much having been written about prayer I do not want to write an extended treatise about it, but instead would like to offer a prayer pattern through which we can see prayer as a Means of Grace. The acronym I will use is ACTS.
Adoration – this is perhaps the most difficult part of prayer…adoring or praising God. While we may be used to heaping praises on others it is sometimes awkward to try and praise God…the vocabulary may not be there. Yet adoration is an essential element of prayer because it acknowledges that God is the only one who is worthy of absolute praise and worship. Adoration places us in the appropriate vertical relationship…creator to creature…that then allows the grace of God to begin to flow toward us even as it opens us to receive it.
Confession – over the years many churches and individuals have ceased the practice of using a prayer of confession. They have done so because they believe it might harm a person's self-esteem or because they don't like the whole idea of "sins". However, without confession we are blocked from receiving the complete grace of God. What I mean by this is that God desires us to become more and more Christ-like with each passing day. Unless we are willing to confess where we have fallen short of living like Christ then God cannot really work on us. We will be stuck in self-destructive patterns which block the love and grace of God from being fully effective in our lives. Confession then opens us up to the work of God's grace in our lives.
Thanksgiving – this is the moment when we allow ourselves to admit that we are recipients of God's good gifts. When we fail to give God thanks because we think that we have either earned or deserved all that we have, we once again close ourselves off to God's grace…which remember is a free gift. By thanking God for all that we are and all that we have been given we become more and more aware of God's love for us. We begin to see those moments in our lives when God mysteriously stepped in offering us unearned grace and love.
Supplication – supplication is not a word we use very often. A better word might be intercession (but then we could not use ACTS). This is our act of becoming a channel for the grace of God to flow through us to others. Again, grace is not a commodity, but when we turn our hearts toward the needs of others it is amazing how God's grace seems to be applied into the lives of those for whom we pray.
In the end, the "how" of how prayer works is a mystery. None the less, millions of Jesus' followers have discovered it to be their most important Means of Grace.
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