It had been a hard soccer game, even in the cooler temperatures of the middle of the night. After two hours of running hard, all of us were tired, sweaty, and thirsty, so the three of us Americans as well as several of our local friends went back to our apartment to cool down and rest.
The next morning as we served breakfast, one of the Americans asked to bless the food, which surprised our local friends (who were Muslim). As we ate, one of them commented, “You know, before we eat, we say ‘In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.’ How do you usually pray?”
I responded, “Well as Christians we have a relationship with God because he lives in us, so we talk with Him about the good things and the bad things in our life. It’s usually not anything memorized though.”
“That’s weird,” our friend said, “why would God want to listen to you? You are nothing compared to him.”
We turned to Romans 8 in an Arabic Bible, and my local friends got to hear that “God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” They saw in scripture where we believe that the same power that raised Christ from the dead lives in us and enables us to live lives and to pray prayers which are consistent with God’s plan for our lives since the beginning of time.
After all this, another of our local friends said something in Arabic. I asked the first friend what he said and he replied “he said ‘You aren’t thinking of becoming a Christian too are you?’”
Prayer is powerful. As believers indwelled by the Spirit, we have a direct audience the the Creator of the universe, with one who “is able to do immeasurably more than we could ask or imagine.” Yet I worry that for many of us, Muslims, with their 5 daily prayers, make prayer a greater part of their lives than we do. Yet God’s command is simple: Pray continuously. Pray that God would gives us a gratitude and joy for the unrestricted access He gives us to Himself, and pray that God would open the eyes of our Muslim neighbors that God made us for more than just submission- He made us for a personal relationship with Him out of the grace he poured out for us on the cross.