There's an old hymn that goes: Take time to be holy, speak oft with thy Lord....
But time is a precious commodity. So what do you do if you don't want to take the time to pray yet still want to experience the benefits of prayer? Simple! You just pay to get a computer to pray in your stead!
This is the service provided by the Information Age Prayer website. It doesn't matter of you're Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, or whatever. According to World magazine, you can have the computer recite the Lord's prayer for you each day for just $3.95/month. Or you can have the "Protestant Daily Prayer Package," wherein you "Get 8 Prayers in One Bundle." If you're Catholic, you can purchase "The Complete Rosary Package" - purported to be worth nearly $50. The site also has prayers for Muslims, coupled with a promise to point their speakers toward Mecca.
How exactly does this work? The company (founded just this year) states, "We use state of the art text-to-speech synthesizers to voice each prayers at a volume and speed equivalent to typical person praying. Each prayer is voiced individually, with the name of the subscriber displayed on screen. If the prayer is for someone else, then that name is displayed on screen instead."
Most if not all of the TruthWalk readership would see such a service as absolutely ridiculous and highway robbery, run by religious hucksters "who suppose that godliness is a means of gain" (1 Timothy 6:5).
I think the broader principle we need to be reminded of and take to heart is: there are no short-cuts to holiness. As D. A. Carson has so poignantly written,
People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.
Ouch.
Dear readers, do we take time to be holy? Here are some questions for consideration:
- Do I ask people to pray for me or a given situation without devoting significant time to prayer myself?
- When I come across something in the Bible that I don't understand, do I take the time to dig into the Scriptures myself, or do I constantly look to a more knowledgeable Christian for a quick answer?
- If I'm wrestling with an issue of personal conviction, do I weigh out the matter before the Lord in prayer, asking Him to direct my conscience according to His Word, or do I take someone else's conviction as my own?
- When a need arises within my church family, do I ask the Lord what He would have me to do, or do I assume that someone else will meet that need?
While we may not be guilty of outsourcing our prayers to some computer, still we may be succumbing to similar sins of a more subtle nature.
Time is a precious commodity. And the time we spend in prayer is an indicator of how important prayer, even God Himself, is to us.
Take time to be holy, the world rushes on;Spend much time in secret with Jesus alone;By looking to Jesus, like Him thou shalt be;Thy friends in thy conduct His likeness shall see.