Prayer: Who’s Really Listening?

Ed Vitagliano

 

            Christians should be accustomed to the public grumbling of people who gripe about the religious right on a full-time basis.

            What is much more spiritually perilous for the Christian, however, is the subtle pressure to conform to a more syncretistic or even universalistic religious ideal. That pressure grows as politically correct critics demand that Christians include clergy from other religions in their NDP (National Day of Prayer) events.

            For example, JewsOnFirst.org, a Web-based activist group that exists to defend “the First Amendment against the Christian right,” denounced NDPTF (National Day of Prayer Task Force) for being “narrow and exclusive.” The group demanded that “clergy representing…Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and other faith traditions be included in all observances staged on public property.”

            At a White House gathering to acknowledge this year’s NDP, President Bush implied that when we have prayed together, we have all “prayed to the same God.”

            Would this “togetherness” be a good thing, as the president added shortly thereafter, to have “an International Day of Prayer,” during which “people of faith around the world…stop at the same time to pause to praise an Almighty?”

            An Almighty, as if any one will do?

            Christians do no favors for Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists by acting as if no distinctions exist among religions. Christians are commissioned in Scripture to call the nations to repentance, to flee from idols and false religions and deceptive philosophies and to worship God and His Son, Jesus Christ.

            Such a commission is offensive to secularists and members of other religions, who appear to want only one type of god for our public life. They increasingly demand that the public god be as pale as possible, a mere smudge and a wisp of vapor, harmless and benign, accepting of all peoples and all religions. Such an approach amounts to idolatry—the worship of a false god created by men. Scripture makes it clear that only demons dwell behind such idols.

            For Christians to ally themselves with and serve such a god would be a spiritual catastrophe—catastrophic for the individual believer as well as for the nation. For we not only harm ourselves by kneeling before such an idol, but also we rob our countrymen of the witness by whom the true God is glorified and Christ is exalted.

            Perhaps it was this concern that led some evangelicals to note that the official NDPTF prayer, posted on the organization’s Web site and offered as a sample prayer for other NDP gatherings, was not specifically Christian. The prayer, written by Dr. Ravi Zacharias, a well-known and respected evangelical leader and the 2008 honorary chairman for the NDPTF, mentioned nothing about Jesus Christ and ended with the words, “In God’s holy name.”

            Clearly, the biblical manner of addressing God the Father in prayer is in the name of Jesus Christ (John 16:23-24).

            “We are not here as Christians to appease those of other world religions.  We cannot come to God except through His Son’s righteous merits,” insisted Ingrid Schlueter, host of Crosstalk Radio Talk Show. “To pray as ‘Christians’ in any other way is both a farce and a mockery.”

            Moreover, as the Liberty Counsel stated in a press release, the NDPTF prayer, devoid of the name of Jesus, “stands in stark contrast to the first prayer of the Continental Congress, which was delivered on September 7, 1774, by Reverend Jacob Duche.”

            That prayer, which began, “O Lord our Heavenly Father, high and mighty King of kings and Lord of lords,” ended unapologetically with these confident words: “All this we ask in the name and through the merits of Jesus Christ, Thy Son and our Savior. Amen.”

              Surely, as Americans of all faiths, we can do much together to make our country better; however, prayer to a god created by men is not one of them.

 

---American Family Association Journal, July 2008, pg. 15.