"Call unto me..."

This is kinda ripped off from Charles Spurgeon but, as prayer, real prayer, is the topic on the horizon, it is not only fitting but powerful as well.

I was reading Spurgeon earlier tonight, one of his sermons on prayer (he wrote over 3000 of them). The sermon is titled "The Golden Key of Prayer." The Scripture reference is Jeremiah 33:3:

Call unto Me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not. (KJV, by the way)

Jeremiah wrote this from a "cold, damp prison floor." But in this verse is a command, "call unto Me," and a promise, "I will answer thee." Jeremiah found out, as many of us have and we all eventually will, that, "God's people have always in their worst condition found out the best of their God. He is good at all times; but He seems to be at His best when they are at their worst."

Spurgeon goes on to write about what things we take to God and how Satan will try to convince us that our issues are trivial and of no importance. He writes:

"(says the devil), If you were in any other position you might rest upon the mighty arm of God; but here your prayer will not avail you. Either it is too trivial a matter, or it is too connected with temporals, or else it is a matter in which you have sinned too much, or else it is too high, too hard, too complicated a piece of business, you have no right to take that before God! So suggests the foul fiend of hell."

I confess that I fall for this all the time. I sometimes see my concerns in light of eternity and think, "That really doesn't matter much. God has bigger things going on." But God loves me and when I take my cares to Him and "cast them upon Him," He hears and will answer.

"Call unto Me - call unto Me. Are you sick? Would you be healed? Cry unto Me, for I am a Great Physician. Does providence trouble you? Are you fearful that you shall not provide things honest in the sight of man? Call unto Me! Are your griefs little yet painful, like small points and pricks of thorns? Call unto Me! Is your burden heavy as though it would make your back break beneath its load? Call unto Me!"

Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and He shall sustain thee; He shall never suffer the righteous to be moved.

It saddens me that we have simplified prayer to a mere wish-list, but complicated it to a rigid, outlined, ritualistic chant . We either doubt our life-altering issues are important enough for His time, or we think He should stop the progress of history to attend solely to our concerns. Pride and/or selfishness, it always comes down to that.

What if we just stopped praying because we want to be comfortable and started praying because He wants us to? What if we made it about Him once and for all? What if our time spent alone with God became more important than our time spent with the things that make us feel okay about ourselves?

"Hours for the world, and moments for Christ! We give our strength and freshness to the ways of mammon, and our fatigue and languor to the ways of God."

The more I think about our "new, fresh way" of doing things, it appears that we haven't found a "new, fresh way." We've re-discovered the way that works because it has always worked. Spurgeon died 120 years ago. And, believe it or not, we've begun to think just like he did. Only the language is different.

Happy hump-day.