Inside Out Living

This morning I heard on K-Love about a newly proposed application for all of you iPhone users called "A Note to God." The application was designed by a Sacramento area teen named Allen Wright who thought the idea up when he was lying in bed and feeling lonesome. The concept is simple, you text your throught or prayer 'to God' where it is stored on a database. The app also allows you to view others' prayers and show your support of the prayers by clicking on a thumbs up.

I don't really want to discourage Allen from using his creativity in his efforts to exercise his faith, but I have a few concerns about some unintended consequences of this app. I don't plan on using the app myself, primarily because I don't have an iPhone nor plan on getting one, but also because I don't see it as necessary.

I understand the goal to be to give people an outlet for their prayers, to create a community of prayer, and to be able to pray for others' prayer requests that are posted (of course it is all anonymous). However as the Rev. James Murphy, who was quoted in the Sacramento Bee article, said, "Prayer is direct to God, and God should be the primary motive...If the motive is to be seen by others, be careful. There's a sense in which prayer is private." Now I do believe in corporate or group prayer and that there is nothing wrong with sharing prayer requests, but he danger of praying in groups or in public is praying to gain the approval of those around you. This is the first concern that I have is that the feature that allows people to state their approval of the prayer sets people up to be praying for the approval of others and not to connect or petition God himself. This is what Jesus condemned the Pharisees for in Matthew 6:5, "When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full."

The other concern that I have probably has something to do with my understanding of the grip that technology has on our culture. This may have something to do with the fact that I am old enough to remember when my family got our first home computer, when we first connected to the internet, and when we still used rotary phones, and cell phones were the size of bricks. Will God honestly hear and answer a prayer that is sent to a database somewhere in California. Is that seriously a prayer? Will people become dependent upon technology to prayer and forget that they can pray anytime anywhere regardless of their battery life or cell coverage. If a prayer becomes deleted from the database does that mean it is now invalid? I know I am getting a little scarcastic here but this are just some of the questions that I think about in reading this story.

Now I have to admit this isn't all that different than what myself and others are already doing on facebook and twitter. How much different is it really than the written prayers of the great spiritual fathers who have gone before us? I have typed prayers on both those applications and so they have been read by others. Some of them are responses of prayer for others and some are just expressions of what God has put on my heart. So maybe this whole rant has been hypocritical, I don't know. I like to think that when I have typed the prayers that the typed message is more for the benefit of the reader, not for God. God already knows my thoughts and my needs before the words even leave my mouth or my fingers hit the keyboard. So I guess this is my conclusion. The prayer is my personal communication with God (whether that is said internally or externally), the writing of the prayer down is not the prayer itself, but a record of it that is intended to benefit others or help them in their spiritual journey.

In the first chapter of the book of Romans in the New Testament, we read some helpful words for those of us who wrestle with trying to figure out what this sin nature is all about. Essentially the beginning of our depravity is the fact that we are unwilling to recognize and worship God as God. In saying the 'beginning of our depravity' I don't mean to imply that we are not born without a sin nature, for we most certainly are, rather it is to say that our refusal to recognize God as such is the source of sin and depravity. Now we see in this passage that even though we do inherit this depravity, its presence does not remove the ability nor the responsibility for making a decision to recognize and worship the one true God.

A key thought in this passage is in the middle of verse 21, "And they began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like." By definition the one who is created is not able to dictate who or what their creator is. This would be like a child who is able to pick their biological parents. The idea of this scenario would seem crazy to us and yet this is what many people do when it comes to their understanding of God. They pick and choose what they like or dislike about beliefs or statements of God, to create their own concept of who God is. Why would someone want to worship something that they have created in their own mind, unless the deity they have created then allows them to continue to live according to their own rules and conceptions of what life should be like. This is the issue for so many people is that they want to live life by a set of rules that they design rather than recognize that there is a God who created life, set the rules of the universe, and has lovingly revealed himself through Jesus Christ.

So the question for you today is this, are you worshipping a deity that you have defined to clear your conscience, or are you worshipping a Deity that created you and has revealed Himself to you?