A covenant is a two-way commitment. Christ made a covenant with you through his blood shed on the cross, and Covenant Prayer is your responding commitment to him. Jesus says in John: “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word.” Our response to his love is obedience.
This is not a legalistic, robot-soldier obedience. It is a duty in the sense of De Caussede who said “duty is the sacrament of the present moment.” This is obedience without reservation. Selfless, joyful obedience. An expression of love. A desire to please the God who has lavished the riches of his grace upon us.
Commitment is scary; most of us naturally veer away from it. We see it as confining, a sacrifice of freedom. (Yet freedom actually results from restraint. Only through discipline and commitment do we gain mastery of a skill or a relationship to the point that we can operate freely within it.) We see commitment as compulsory, a sacrifice of spontaneity. (But just because something is required does not mean it must lack joy or generosity.) We may fear commitment because we fear failure and the resulting self-condemnation. (But God knows the intention of your heart, and he will provide the desire and strength to take us to the heights as well as the grace and humility to catch our falls. A.W. Tozer writes, "We pursue God because and only because He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to that pursuit.' And here is the beautiful thing: finding God only deepens and heightens the pursuit.")
This Covenant is not a boring promise to obey but a redirection of the heart and mind to seek God at the center of you and at the center of everything, an expectant and relentless pursuit of God. When you seek him, spend time with him, when you know him, then you begin to know his will.
Prayer is a prerequisite of obedience. So Covenant Prayer is meant to be a quantifiable promise of a fixed habit of prayer, not merely an open-ended sentiment. It likely will involve a commitment of time (length and frequency) and of place (a location to anchor your focus). We must be careful of impossible burdens, but we must also be careful of complacency and stagnation.
This may all sound confining and uninspired, but John Dalrymple reminds us: “The truth is that we only learn to pray all the time everywhere after we have resolutely set about praying some of the time somewhere.” As soon as you set up a rule for yourself, you will be distracted. But you have a choice “you alone will decide whether you will hold steady in the inner sanctuary of the heart or rush out of the holy place, tyrannized by the urgent.”
Let this prayer and its commitment be a language of love, not a language of obligation.
The Experience
In praying about what kind of commitment I was going to make for at least this week, I turned open to Isaiah 2, and all over the page is the exaltation of the Lord alone. I was reminded not to give him just what is easiest, but to give him what is my best. I was reminded not to do this for this blog, for myself, for any personal agenda, but for him alone.
I committed to a quiet time with the Lord first thing, every morning, no excuses. Later that afternoon, a friend told me about the devotional website Pray As You Go. As soon as I checked it out, I knew that this would be a part of my Covenant Prayer.
As it turned out, this week was wonderful. The messages and quiet meditations from Pray As You Go were a respite for me, a renewal rather than a striving. It was something I looked forward to upon waking up, and I know this was a gift from God. A reward for my desire for commitment, a burden made light. A means to draw easily and comfortably closer to my Lord.
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