BridgeWay has launched into the deep of a 40-Day Prayer Adventure. Each day we’ll provide a variety of devotionals, verses, and prayer prompts to encourage you in your pursuit of the Lord. Dive in! The water’s warm, deep and inviting!
“Now Moses used to take a tent and pitch it outside the camp, far from the camp, and call it the ‘tent of meeting’. And everyone who sought the Lord would go out to the tent of meeting which was outside the camp. Whenever Moses went out to the tent, all the people would rise up, and each would stand at his tent door, and watch Moses until he had gone into the tent.” – Exodus 33:7-8
How do we learn to pray, or go deeper into the practice of prayer? One way is to spend some time watching people in the Bible whom we might call prayer warriors. Moses is just such a model. These verses from Exodus 33 give us a moving picture of the example Moses set for Israel on the importance of spending regular time with God.
Without a doubt, there was something special about Moses’s relationship with God, which caused the people to stand in rapt attention whenever he went to pray. But notice, this wasn’t just for Moses to do. Anyone could do it. “Everyone who sought the Lord would go out to the tent of meeting…”. The invitation to meet with God was open to anyone.
Then notice in the sentence what it was they were doing. It’s one of the most common, and beautiful, descriptors of prayer in the Bible. “Everyone who sought the Lord…”.
Too many people think of things like prayer or Bible reading like a dull religious ritual to check off a list. They know it’s somehow supposed to be good for them, but like exercising or eating vegetables, they just can’t get excited about it. The summons to a 40-Days Prayer experiment sounds as thrilling as 40-Days-Of-Flossing.
If that’s your take on prayer, then let Moses teach you to make a little switch in your thinking. Think of prayer not so much as ritual (and yes, there are ritualistic aspects to it), but more as relational. This tent Moses and his people went to was called the Tent of Meeting. Meeting who? Meeting God, that’s who. And when you walked inside that tent, and knelt down, what you were doing in your praying was quite literally seeking God Himself.
To “seek God” is one of the most common concepts in the Bible. Just Google it, and your screen will fill up with verses. In fact, right now, click here and just scroll through these 30 verses, and see what it ignites in your heart.
Why Does God Make Seeking Him Difficult?
But why did Moses pitch the tent “far from the camp”? Is God playing some kind of hide and seek game with us? Shouldn’t He make it easy to seek Him? Why do I have to seek Him “with all my heart” before I find him? (Jeremiah 29:13).
Because this is how we show God the seriousness of our hearts. God wants a relationship with each one of us. But there are lots of people who only want to play religion with God. How can you tell the difference? By looking at the commitment they’ll make to seek Him.
Thousands of people followed Jesus at first, riding the wave of his popularity. Jesus would withdraw – a few would stop following, but the others would come and find him. He’d walk across (not around) a lake; a smaller group would jump in their boats and follow.
He’d say things to put them off his scent. A Canaanite woman sought him once, seeking healing for her sick daughter (Matthew 15:22-28). Jesus said to her, “Woman, I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. It’s not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” Why’d he do this? It sounds cruel. But he was probing her heart, trying to draw out her faith.
So when the Canaanite woman cried out to him, “Yes Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table”, he knew that here was a woman that would seek God and wouldn’t stop until she found Him. And Jesus rewarded her holy desperation.
Seeking God is serious business. Though it is birthed in grace, real effort is required on our parts. Listen to the hunger for God in Psalm 63:1 when David writes, “O God, You are my God; earnestly I seek You; my soul thirsts for You; my flesh faints for You, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”
“How desperate are you for the blessing, the breakthrough, the miracle? Desperate enough to pray through the night? Until your knuckles are raw? Until you knock the door down?” – Mark Batterson
Are you ready to seek God like this? Will you take hold of Him with the same kind of holy desperation as the Canaanite woman? Will you hunger and thirst for Him like David?
Mark Batterson in his book Draw The Circle asks: “How desperate are you for the blessing, the breakthrough, the miracle? Desperate enough to pray through the night? Until your knuckles are raw? Until you knock the door down?”
You can’t just stay inside the doorway of your tent and expect to have a deeper experience of God. It’s time to take the long walk to the Tent of Meeting.
A Prayer Experiment
Read through the 30 verses on seeking God, and choose the top five that speak the strongest to your heart. Write them out in your quiet time/prayer journal.
Pray aloud Psalm 63:1 right now. Say it slowly and meaningfully. Now as you go through the day, try to call it to mind and say it at least once an hour. Write down some observations you make about this prayer experiment in your journal.
Prayer
O God, You are my God. Be present in my thoughts all day long. Give me spiritual tenacity like that Canaanite woman to pursue You and not let go. Can I honestly say like David that I thirst for You? And faint for You? Help the fire of my faith in Christ grow brighter and stronger. Amen.