The business of “reminding the Lord” is based on Isaiah 62:6-7. “You who remind the Lord, take no rest for yourselves, and give Him no rest until He make Jerusalem a praise in all the earth.” The Hebrew word is MAZKIR, built on “ZAKAR,” meaning “remember.” The M (meme) in front of the word makes it “to cause to remember.”
Mazkir was the title of an official in the court of David and Solomon and presumably other Israeli rulers (see 2 Samuel 8:16 and I Kings 4:3). Usually translated “recorders,” these officials functioned like court reporters of our day. They kept notes on the king’s doings, rulings, court orders, summit conferences and the like. As the need arose, the king would call in the Mazkir. “What did I promise King Ben-hadad the last time we met in Ammon?” Or, “Has this defendant ever been before me? If so, what was my verdict at that time?”
The Mazkir’s good notes enabled the king to make wise decisions.
“Your Heavenly Father knows what things you have need of before you ask Him,” said our Lord in Matthew 6:8.
So there we have it. The Father already knows, but we are to remind Him.
Why should we be asked to remind God of anything? You’ll think of 50 answers to this, but most will come down to the simple fact that God wants us to have faith, to believe in Him and to “bring our burdens to the Lord,” as the old hymn puts it.
I am suggesting—urging is more like it—that in your most important prayer in the worship service, pastor, you will have given thought to planning your prayer based on this little formula used by God’s people to one degree or the other all through Scripture: Reminding the Lord of Who He is, what He has done, what He has promised, and then, what our present situation is, and finally, what we are requesting today.
I am not saying all prayers in Scripture were this way. There were all kinds of prayers prayed by the Lord’s faithful. But the big ones—like David’s dedication of the temple material in I Chronicles 29:10ff, Solomon’s dedication of the temple itself in I Kings 8:22ff, Jehoshaphat’s prayer in 2 Chronicles 20:5ff and the one in Acts 4—all followed this plan.
Quick short prayers are always in order. The great literacy pioneer Frank Laubach called these “prayer arrows.” But nothing inspires a people to pray, and lifts their standards of what takes place in prayer, like a well thought out prayer that follows this pattern.
One final thought. Over the years, I have sometimes heard unthinking preachers berate longer formal prayers that begin with something like “O God, Thou who didst make the heavens and the earth, who spoke the worlds into being …” and so forth. I can hear one now saying, “Why do we do such silliness? God knows Who He is! He doesn’t need us padding our prayers this way!”
The well-intentioned preacher (we assume) was dead wrong. While we may want to update our references to something like “Lord, you raised up men and women to found this church. You put it in the hearts of your people to bring the gospel to our city. And now, the baton has been handed to us. We want to be faithful in this our hour.”
But let us have done with prayers that bore the congregation and insult the Father. It’s a safe bet that if our prayers are boring us, they could use some attention.
The Pastor Is the Worship Leader
