I’m a terrible golfer, but I go golfing anyway. Occasionally I’ll even go golfing alone, which I enjoy. When golfing alone, I’ll often get paired up with other players to speed up the pace of play when the course is crowded. This means that I end up having the great pleasure of spending four hours of my day embarrassing myself in the presence of a complete stranger.
One time I was paired with a guy whose language was a little less than refined. After a few holes of friendly conversation (with lots of explicits on his end), he asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was a missionary who trained pastors in Haiti. He turned red.
“I’m so sorry!,” he said. “I’ve been cussing up a storm here in front of a pastor!”
“No worries!,” I responded. “Please, come as your are. Jesus wants us to come as we are.”
From that point on, his language changed; much fewer explicits. Not only did his language change, his personality changed too. He made more of an effort to control his frustration after having bad shots, he wanted to share his struggles with me, he even shared his experience with faith. All of this because I was a full-time missionary.
This happens all the time. When people find out I’m a missionary, they take on a different personality (most of the time positive).
This is a common sociological dynamic. People’s behavior and personalities change according to the people they are around (some more than others). This is natural. We are shaped by how much stock we put in other people’s opinions of us, and we often live up to what we think those opinions are. It’s very simply really, there’s a human desire to fit in with the people we’re around, so we end up sounding and acting like the people we spend time with.
Prayer is like this. Prayer puts in the presence of God, and the nature result of that, before a single word is uttered, is a heart change. Yes, God’s presence is always with us, but when we pray, we consciously step into his holy presence, and that impacts everything about us. This is just one of the ways in which prayer shapes who we are.
One of the central ideas driving Christian spirituality is that because of Christ’s death,we are able to be in God’s presence constantly. Before the death and resurrection of Jesus, people had to go to the temple to be in God’s presence. The temple was God’s dwelling place. In order to enter into his presence at the temple, all sorts of sacrifices had to be made to make the worshipper eligible to be in God’s holy presence. This meant that being in God’s presence on a regular basis just wasn’t an option.
Jesus changed all of this.
With the death of Jesus, he made an atonement for sin (forgiveness) once and for all so that we could enjoy the presence of God every day, and in every moment. Because of the Cross, we are now God’s dwelling place. You and I are the temple of God. The season of Lent is a time to draw our attention to this fact; to be ever mindful of the presence of God in our lives so that we can be shaped and formed in his image.
