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Prayer, we noted last week, is not our attempt to get God to give us what we want. There is much more to it than that. As we saw, it is more about aligning our will with God's purposes than getting him to align with ours (p. 148).
But how can prayer help "align us with God's purposes?" It does so, Gordon MacDonald suggests, when we think of it firstly as worship. Our first act in prayer, he says, ought not [usually] be asking for things. Rather, we should begin with worshipping God. We should start "by reflecting upon who God is and thanking him for the things he has revealed about himself. To worship in prayer is to allow our spirits to feast upon what God has revealed concerning his acts in the distant and recent past, and what he has told us about himself" (p. 152).
As we do so, he says, "we sense our spirits beginning to expand, to take in the broader reality of God's presence and being" (p. 152). And the effect of this is to make us aware of how great he is and of how important his purposes are. At the same time, it makes us see how relatively insignificant our own desires and wishes are.
It goes further still and makes us aware of how out of harmony our lives and thoughts are with God. This in turn leads us to a state of humbleness and brokenness before him. No longer are we intent on getting what we want. We distrust even our purest motives and choose instead to seek his will above our own. That's what aligns our hearts and wills with his.
Worship, then, must be the foundation of prayer if it is to serve as a source of inner strength. Secondly, it must also have a focus on intercession. While it is right to request things to meet our own needs, an exclusive focus on ourselves is unhealthy. It doesn't produce inner strength in the same way that a selfless interest in the lives of others does.
This is what makes intercession so very important. In Gordon MacDonald's view, it is "the greatest single ministry… that the Christian is privileged to have… The greater the spiritual authority and responsibility a person has, the more important it is that he develop intercessory capacities" (pp. 154-5). He goes on to speak of the need to intercede for our families, for our circle of close friends, and for "those for whom God has made us responsible, the men and women with whom we work, and those in our congregations and neighborhoods whose personal needs are known to us" (p. 156). Our need to take the Great Commission seriously means that ultimately the whole world should find a place in our prayers.
Prayer as worship and intercession, then, complete MacDonald's disciplines for cultivating the inner spiritual garden of our lives. Now all we have to do is to put all four of these disciplines - silence and solitude, listening to God, meditation and reflection, and prayer as worship and intercession - into practice. Simply knowing about them won't help us. And Gordon MacDonald is surely right when he says, "The garden within our private world cannot remain uncultivated long before it becomes infested with the sort of growth that makes it uninviting, both to the indwelling Lord and to us ourselves. When neglected for long, it becomes more like a dump than a garden" (p. 157).