As a new year begins, it’s a great time to take God up on the invitation to pray and be renewed

3 min read

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4:6-7

There’s something fascinating about the idea of a portal, a passageway to another world. It just grabs us. Like the secret wardrobe discovered by Lucy in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, for example. Lucy stumbled upon it while playing hide-and-go-seek with her siblings and suddenly found herself stepping into a place that she didn’t know existed.

But isn’t this just a fantasy?

Maybe not entirely.

When you think about it, isn’t prayer kind of like this? A portal to another world?

After all, doesn’t prayer give us access into the very presence of God? Doesn’t it transport us from one vantage point to another?

Because of Jesus and the power in his Name, when we pray, it’s like we’re crossing a threshold and stepping into a different world. And it’s no fantasy. Not that our bodies go anywhere, but when we pray, in a spiritual sense we find ourselves very much elsewhere. Prayer moves us into that space where our consciousness of God is enhanced and this has a way of making everything look beautifully different than it did before.

Our feet may still be on the ground, yet in prayer we’re meeting with God in a place that is far, far away.

Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. -Hebrews 4:16

Yes, when we find ourselves in the throne room, we find that it is a very different place from the normal world in which we live. It’s a wonderfully different sphere of life. When we pray, we leave all of this…the noise, the conflict, the lies, and the angst for that…the peace, the hope, the truth, and the wonder. Prayer allows us to step out of the harsh realities of this world – if only for a moment – and step into the eternally good realities of that world, the world where Jesus reigns as King.

Those who are in Christ will someday dwell in that place for good, but in the meantime, we catch glimpses of it when we pray.

Our feet may still be on the ground, yet in prayer we’re meeting with God in a place that is far, far away.

In the Chronicles of Narnia, Lucy’s siblings were skeptical when she told them about the secret portal she had found in the wardrobe. They thought her imagination had gotten away from her. They thought the wardrobe was only that, a boring, brown wardrobe. Until they stepped through the wardrobe themselves, they didn’t realize what it really was.

The same is true of prayer. Until you step through it for yourself, you don’t know what it really is.

It’s a new day (and year) with God. Run with it.