Call to Prayer: Music as Prayer

By Raleigh (Name Changed)

I have often said that my favorite way to connect with God is through singing. I have also often told people that my worship songs feel as if they’ve been given to me. In fact, it has been in times of prayer with my guitar at hand that some of my best songs have come.

“You Showed Us How (Adoration)” came into the world in one moment of such prayer:

You lived and you died
You lived a perfect life
You lived and you died to show us how to live and die
You left everything
You gave it all away
You left and gave everything to show us how to leave and give everything
Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Man, perfect sacrifice
Adoration, Adoration
Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Man, perfect sacrifice
You died and now live
You chose to forgive
You died and now live to show us how to die and live.

The Apostle Paul tells us that “the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. For example, we don’t know what God wants us to pray for. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words” (Romans 8:26, NLT). I wonder if these “groanings” might sometimes be music.

Recently I was driving alone to the airport and decided to sing prayers rather than think or speak them. I was surprised how much more real my praises and petitions felt to me as I expressed them in this way. It was as if the words became alive with new meaning, as if lifting from a journal page and flying to the heavens. The words felt enlivened by the Spirit of God groaning within me, connecting me with the Father God.

Another prayer song came to me as our family was preparing to move to be among our unreached people group. I longed to find hospitality in that new place, for me and for my family. I longed to find neighbors with whom to live life and to whom Jesus could become visible through our witness and our prayers for them.

I was surprised how much more real my praises and petitions felt to me as I sang them.

I was given a picture of many doors: the door of our future house in that town; doors of neighbors being opened to us; a door of heaven opening for our neighbors to enter; a door through which Jesus will come when he returns to earth. And a simple song emerged in the language of our people group.

A couple months ago I stopped by a local farmer’s house to pick up milk, a visit I make weekly. He saw the guitar in the back of my car and asked me to play it for him. In his language, I sang the song which was actually in many ways an answered prayer in his family’s kindness to me over these past years. Now almost every time I go to his house he sings this simple prayer song back to me:

Open the door
Open the doors
Open the door of heaven
Come, Jesus Messiah!

Jesus, you have answered my prayer of doors opened in hospitality in this place. I will keep on singing until all our friends and enemies receive you into their doors and you come again to this earth.

Raleigh and Opal (names changed) serve with their four children in North Africa among an indigenous people group. They serve in partnership with Rosedale International.