Prayers of Preparation: the Listening God
Midweek in Advent 1
December 3, 2008
Psalm 80:1-7
Advent is a season of preparation. That doesn't mean we only prepare
during Advent. It means that it is a time in the Church Year that
reminds us that our entire lives are that of preparation. How you
learn to prepare is by being formed by the Holy Scriptures. Your Lord
prepares you to be prepared for Him. He mostly does this by giving you
His Gifts. He provides for you and sustains you. He does this through
His Gospel and His precious Sacraments.
But there's even more. He also gives you things that you do in order
to be strengthened by Him. One of these is the discipline of prayer.
Being the giving God that He is our Lord teaches us to pray. He
prepares us to pray to Him. One way He has done this is by giving us
the Psalms.
In Psalm 80 we are encouraged to take heart that He is the Listening
God. "Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel," the Psalmist prays to his God.
Why does he want God to listen to him? Because he needs salvation. He
prays to his God who is like a shepherd. A shepherd leads his flock.
He is the salvation of his sheep. He listens to his sheep. If the
sheep are in trouble they will cry out in the hopes that their
shepherd will hear them. Sheep who have a faithful shepherd count on
their shepherd hearing them.
That is why the Psalmist prays as he does. His Shepherd is faithful.
His Shepherd listens. His Shepherd is standing at the ready with
salvation. In Advent we learn how to prepare for the way our Lord, our
Shepherd, brings to us His salvation. The way He brings His salvation
to us is by Himself saving us. A shepherd won't call across the
pasture to his sheep that is in trouble that everything will be all
right. The shepherd goes to his sheep and gently pulls him out of
being stuck in the fence.
Our Lord has listened to us. He doesn't speak to us from the Heavenly
Realms with soothing words. He comes to us in our need with His
salvation, with Himself. So why do we need to be prepared for this? If
He comes to us to save us, what do we need to do to get ready? We need
to be prepared that it won't be comfortable. Our Lord saving us
doesn't mean it will be pleasant. We need to be prepared that we are
going to be relying on things that go against what seems should be the
case. We need to be prepared for our Lord coming to us with His
salvation in ways that we would never expect.
We so often treat the ways God comes to us with His salvation as
afterthoughts. They are miracles, they just don't seem like it because
they seem so ordinary. We need to be prepared for the fact that when
our Lord saves us He does it through humble means. Beginning with
Himself. He is All-Powerful but comes in humility. He can do anything
but comes as a baby. He alone is Judge but sacrifices Himself in the
shedding of His blood. He has power to destroy the earth with a flood
but saves you through ordinary water in Baptism. He is the Creator of
the universe but feeds your soul with simple bread and wine.
This is where prayer comes in. This is how we prepare for our Lord to
bless us in these ways. We pray that He would increase our faith so
that we do not go through the motions in repenting of our sins and
receiving the Body and Blood of Christ and hearing the Gospel
proclaimed, but that we would hunger and thirst for them as if we were
hungering and thirsting for water and food in the desert. When we pray
that our Lord would listen to us, we pray for Him to prepare us for
His coming to us with His salvation. Prayer is formed by our being in
the Word of God. When we meditate on His Word He is preparing us for
the ways He brings His salvation to us.
He listens to us in our need. The reason we need to be prepared by Him
is that He understands our need better than we do. That is why we need
to be prepared by Him. When we are prepared by Him then we are able to
prepare for Him. We can take comfort in the fact that our God is the
Listening God; but He doesn't just listen to our story and have an
understanding of what we want. He listens to us in the best way
possible, listening with an ear toward acting toward us in the way
that will bring about our greatest good.
His listening to us moves Him in action toward us in His Gospel and
His Sacraments. If we doubt He's listening, then we should turn even
more to His precious Word and to our Baptism and to His
life-sustaining Body and Blood. When we pray to our God to save us we
can be assured He hears us, that's why He's given us Himself. That's
why He gives us His Gifts. We're always in invited to pray and may
always rejoice that He hears and answers us in His Son. Amen.
SDG
--
Pastor Paul L. Willweber
Prince of Peace Lutheran Church [LCMS]
San Diego, California
princeofpeacesd.net
three-taverns.blogspot.com
It is the spirit and genius of Lutheranism to be liberal in everything
except where the marks of the Church are concerned.
[Henry Hamann, On Being a Christian]
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