O come, let us adore Him'
How to praise God in prayer – and why.

by Roy Lawrence

Back in my teenage years, when I was preparing to be confirmed as an adult church member, I was taught that my daily prayers should contain four main elements and that the word ‘ACTS' would help me remember what they were:

A stands for Adoration
C stands for Confession
T stands for Thanksgiving, and
S stands for Supplication.

There is a lot of wisdom in this prayer advice, but we do not find all four elements equally easy. If we look at them in reverse order, ‘supplication' is probably the one that comes most easily to us. It just means ‘asking for things'. It comes naturally to us because there always seems to be something or other which we either need or fancy, whether for ourselves or for someone we care about. In fact, prayer can sometimes degenerate into what my father used to call an attack of the ‘gimmies' (Lord gimme this, Lord gimme that!).

As far as the third element is concerned, ‘thanksgiving', we may not be quite so good at this, but at any rate we know what it means. Even when we are going through hard times and life is difficult, there is always something for which we can be thankful. So, for instance, when we are ill, we can be thankful for medical care, for the love and support of family and friends, and for any basic comforts that may be available at home or in hospital. Being thankful increases our capacity both for enjoying good times and for coping with the bad times. We do ourselves down if we miss out on this important part of prayer.

If we turn to the second element, ‘confession', this may be something which we find much less palatable. Yet, if we are prepared to put away self-deception, to see ourselves as we are – warts and all – and to include in our prayers an admission of the fact that we do and say and think all sorts of things that are wrong, the honesty involved in bringing this to God and in asking him for forgiveness will certainly be good for us. The phrase we sometimes use is ‘coming clean' and it is an appropriate choice of words. We are always cleaner for confessing our faults to God. As the Bible puts it, ‘If we confess our sins to God, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.' God longs to forgive us and Jesus died on the cross to make this possible, but it will all be of no avail if we delude ourselves that personally we have done nothing that needs to be forgiven.

There remains the fourth of the prayer elements – ‘adoration'. It means acknowledging the wonder of God and being filled with worship, love and praise as we do so. We sing about this in many a hymn. For instance, Harvest Festival hymns are packed with instances of this sort of prayer. A good example is provided by the hymn by Sir Henry Baker, which starts:

Praise, O praise our God and King.
Hymns of adoration sing.
For his mercies still endure,
Ever faithful, ever sure.

God doesn't need it
As in the case of the other three prayer elements, praising and adoring God does us good. He wants us to do it for our sake, rather than his sake. God is not like those rather nauseating people who constantly require to be flattered and buttered-up. The reason he wants us to adore him is that we do ourselves so much good in the process. If we fail to worship and adore him, we damage ourselves by failing to recognise the highest and the best. It is rather like the way in which I diminish myself if I do not appreciate great art, beautiful music or fine literature. Rodin, Beethoven and Shakespeare will not be lessened by my failure – but I will. This is why adoration should have pride of place in my prayers. Every time I truly worship and adore God, I grow a little in spiritual stature. But every time I cannot be bothered with adoration, I shrink a little.

The problem is that we do not find that the prayer of adoration comes easily to us. Of course, it is not difficult to tell God that we praise and adore him, but that only takes a few seconds. It is hardly an adequate response to God's call to us to ‘be still and know that I am God'.

So may I offer you a method of adoration which I have evolved over the years and which has come to mean a great deal to me? It is based on the Holy Trinity and seeks to enter into an adoring stillness through contemplating first God the eternal Father; then God the incarnate Son; and finally God the Holy Spirit. Try it for yourself.

Be still
Start by a few moments of total quietness. Then prepare yourself for an encounter with God by saying the Lord's Prayer slowly and thoughtfully. Then just rest in the knowledge that you are within the Father's essence. You and I do not have to work at being so – actually, we have no option. As St Paul reminds us, ‘In him we live and move and have our being'. This is the fundamental theological truth which underlies all religions. It is not confined to the Christian Faith. Indeed, when Paul used these words, he was quoting the Greek sage, Epimenides, who lived 500 years before the Christian era.

However, though we do not have any option about existing within the essence of God the Father, there is a choice to be made. The choice is between being within God's essence trustfully, obediently and rejoicing or being resentful and rebellious about the whole thing. We can either rest in God – or we can wriggle against him. There is no shortage of wrigglers in our world-gone-wrong. What the prayer of adoration does is to make a conscious choice to be glad that in God ‘we live and move and have our being'.

How great Thou art
There are hymns we can use as aids to prayer as we do this. My own favourite aid to adoration is these words from a 17th century hymn by John Mason:

How great a being, Lord, is thine,
which doth all beings keep.
Thy knowledge is the only line
to sound so great a deep.
Thou art a sea without a shore,
a sun without a sphere.
Thy time is now and evermore,
Thy place is everywhere.

If these words do not speak to you personally, then take a trip through any hymnbook and make your selection. You might, for instance, look at the words of ‘How great thou art', or ‘Great is thy faithfulness', or ‘Praise my soul, the King of Heaven'.

If in our prayers of adoration we rest in the essence of God the Father, when we turn to God the Son, it is in his presence that we find ourselves resting. We owe the privilege of resting in his presence to that mysterious event at the end of his life which we call the Ascension. During his earthly ministry Jesus was in only one place at a time. If he was in Jerusalem, he was not in Nazareth, and vice versa. Even during the forty days of Easter, when he was risen from the dead, we are only told of his being at one place at a time. But all this changed at the Ascension. It was then that all spatio-temporal restraints were lifted from him and he was able to guarantee to every believer, in the mighty closing words of St Matthew's Gospel, ‘Lo, I am with you always to the end of the age'.

So because of the Ascension Jesus can be our companion upon life's way, and in our prayers of adoration we practice his presence and relish his company. It is good to be with good friends and best of all to be with our very best friend, Jesus. Once again, there are hymns to help us with this sort of prayer. For instance, what could be better than these words, ascribed to St Patrick:

Christ be with me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ behind me, Christ to win me.
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in heart of all who love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

Free to accept of reject
Experiencing the presence of Jesus in the way that St Patrick describes so graphically involves a positive act of choice and of will on our part. When Jesus comes again, this will not be so. He will confront his friends and his foes alike. But for now, we are free to accept or reject him; to travel through life with, or without him. So before we can pray the prayer of Adoration which rests in his presence, we need to invite him quite specifically to be with us. Once we do so, we can rely upon his own promise, ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hear my voice and open the door, I will come in.'

Once we have rested and rejoiced in the essence of God the Father and the presence of God the Son, there remains that part of the prayer of Adoration which concentrates on God the Holy Spirit. Here it is in his activity that we rest. In fact, it is because he is active that we can be at rest.

The Holy Spirit is God within you and me. There must be something of the Spirit of God in us. For he alone gives and sustains life. You and I are physically alive because he moves in every cell and atom of our being. Our mental and spiritual life depends upon him in the same way. It is our privilege to receive him more and more deeply into our being, if we choose to do so. Jesus promises, ‘The Father will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask'. But once again, we have a choice. We can choose to ask – or not. Scripture tells us that on the one hand we can ‘stir the Spirit', but on the other hand we can ‘grieve the Spirit' and, God help us, we can even ‘quench the Spirit' in us. It is our choice whether we stir the Spirit of God and so embrace our own spiritual side or whether we reject the Spirit and choose to become selfish and brutish, a godless travesty of that which we were meant to be.

So the prayer of adoration which rests in the activity of the Holy Spirit is of immense importance, and once again we can go to our hymnbooks to find suitable words to help us. They may range from the ancient hymn Veni Creator Spiritus (Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire), to a modern hymn like Daniel Iverson's ‘Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me'.

An exciting experience
I am aware that descriptions of prayer can easily seem dry and theoretical, but it is very different with an actual experience of prayer. When prayer is real it is an exciting and empowering process. And this is certainly true of the prayer of adoration. It comes first in the ‘ACTS' sequence, because those who wonder and rejoice at the essence of the Father, the presence of the Son and the activity of the Holy Spirit find that the prayer of adoration leads naturally to honest confession, heartfelt thanksgiving and to a capacity for supplication which is enhanced because it not only reflects our own mind but that of God also. Adoration can bring the whole experience of prayer to vibrant life. It can show us more of God's nature, help us experience more of God's healing power, and make us more aware of his personal call to each one of us.

But don't take my word for any of this. Try it for yourself. And if you have any new and revealing prayer-experiences in the process, we at The Plain Truth would love to hear from you.

1 John 1:9
Psalm 46:10
Acts 17:28
Matthew 28:20
Revelation 3:20
Luke 11:13

This article first appeared in the British Plain Truth June/August 2004, and was used with permission

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