This week we will focus on preparing our hearts for our 21 Days of Prayer and Fasting. Each day we will focus on an aspect of prayer. We will ask God to soften our hearts and our minds to meet with Him and hear from Him during the 21 days we will spend in prayer together as a church.
Read Psalms 40:1-3
“I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear the Lord and put their trust in him.”
Believe it or not I heard this Psalm first, not from the Bible, but from a lyric from the band U2 in their song “40”.
Waiting is a familiar concept to all of us, and certainly to those of us who have ever prayed about something in anticipation or suffering or both.
We want an answer to prayer, and we urgently hope for the answer that would meet our requirements for healing or help.
Psalm 40 is a testimony from David that God hears us and saves us by giving us a firm foundation and new song to sing that is a witness to Him.
Does Psalm 40 really describe answered prayer?
In his essay “The Efficacy of Prayer”, CS Lewis explains that prayer is not about achieving specific outcomes but about communion with God:
“Our assurance—if we reach an assurance—that God always hears and sometimes grants our prayers, and that apparent grantings are not merely fortuitous, can only come in the same sort of way. There can be no question of tabulating successes and failures and trying to decide whether the successes are too numerous to be accounted for by chance. Those who best know a man best know whether, when he did what they asked, he did it because they asked. I think those who best know God will best know whether He sent me to the barber shop because the barber prayed.
For up till now we have been tackling the whole question in the wrong way and on the wrong level. The very question “Does prayer work?” puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset. “Work”: as if it were magic, or a machine—something that functions automatically. Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person. Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine. In it God shows Himself to us. That He answers prayers is a corollary— not necessarily the most important one—from that revelation. What He does is learned from what He is.
Our assurance—if we reach an assurance—that God always hears and sometimes grants our prayers, and that apparent grantings are not merely fortuitous, can only come in the same sort of way. There can be no question of tabulating successes and failures and trying to decide whether the successes are too numerous to be accounted for by chance. Those who best know a man best know whether, when he did what they asked, he did it because they asked. I think those who best know God will best know whether He sent me to the barber’s shop because the barber prayed.”
Prayer gives us comfort not only in the human feeling as to whether it has been answered (to our liking) or not, but in the communion with God that encourages us.
This verse reminds us that God listens attentively to our prayers. Even when answers seem delayed, He is present and working behind the scenes and will give us a new song to sing.
