7 Portraits in Prayer, Day 9: Morning

Week 2, Radiant Prayer, Day 2: Relationship

(Read Exodus 33:11-23)

 

Have seen that glow? Sure you have. Take a look at a couple once they are engaged. Doesn’t he beam like a firecracker on the Fourth of July? Look at a soon-to-be mom, once she’s been given the news she’s expecting with that long-awaited child (okay, maybe not so glowing after a bout of morning sickness, but in the afternoon, take a look). You’ve seen it on Veterans’ Day: two military buddies who were in a foxhole or on a ship together, brought back together for the first time. There’s that incandescent glow again.

Relationship: When we are in a good relationship with God, it shows. When we repent from our sins, we are ready for an intimate relationship with God. As a result, our prayer life will result in us being spiritually radiant!

Have seen that glow? Sure you have. Take a look at a couple once they are engaged. Doesn’t he beam like a firecracker on the Fourth of July? Look at a soon-to-be mom, once she’s been given the news she’s expecting with that long-awaited child (okay, maybe not so glowing after a bout of morning sickness, but in the afternoon, take a look). You’ve seen it on Veterans’ Day: two military buddies who were in a foxhole or on a ship together, brought back together for the first time. There’s that incandescent glow again.

You’ve seen the opposite in a child after a wrong has been done. The face is downcast, eyes filled with tears. Then you speak a kind word of restoration, you give a wink or maybe a playful tickle to the ribs. Suddenly, the little down-turned mouth makes a rebounding reversal and there’s nothing but teeth from ear-to-ear and giggles fill the room. There, in a relationship restored, comes the radiant glow.

When Moses spoke with God, it was “as a man speaks to his friend,” Exodus 33:11. Imagine, the glory of the Lord, descending to the tent and there Moses experienced an intimacy, a relationship with God. Moses finds favor in God’s sight, and as a result, Moses wants more of God; he wants God’s presence to never leave. Moses wants to see more of His glory revealed to him (Exodus 33:18).

Do you want more of God? Exodus 33:20 explains that no matter how close we are in relationship to God, we can always grow closer. Moses wanted to see God in all of His glory, which no mere mortal can do (see 33:23).

In prayer, we can have a relationship, an interchange between friends. You and your heavenly Father can have a discourse to light up your prayer life. God did not create you because He was lonely, or for His own companionship. The Triune Godhead of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has always existed. God had no insufficiency or deficiency within Himself.

God created humanity, He made you and me, so that we could have relationship with Him, to share in His glory. There is a profound difference in seeing our relationship is not to fulfill His need, but rather so much more instead, God created us with an innate desire to have fellowship and relationship with Him. We are created in His image to have a relationship, a communion with Him.

We have the need, God does not. When we pray to God, the result will be in His glory emanating within us because we are doing what God created us to do: have a relationship with Him. Spiritually, when we realize that for this--for this relationship--we have been created, our faces will radiate His glory.

 

Pray this prayer to God: “Lord, make my prayer life with You be more like a friendship, even a Father/child relationship. Help me seek You in prayer to reveal myself and also have You reveal Your glory, Your radiance in me. In Jesus’s Name, Amen.”

Click here for Day 9, Evening.