Good Food, Good Meat...

I’m sitting in a restaurant in South East, Texas. It’s the kind of place that greasy old men come to eat greasy biscuits and gravy and drink more than 50 cents worth of their 50 cent cups of coffee.

I love it!

Seriously.

As much as I love the trendy little coffee shop, (and I do) I’ve got to get out of them once in a while. I can spend incalculable hours in a bare-brick/ cool music/ expensive espresso kind of environment- I’ll tell you to this day that my all time favorite place in the world is a little shop in New London, CT. called the “beanandleaf”. But sometimes you can have too many people wearing skinny legged jeans with high art IQs and socialist leanings in one place.

So that’s why I’m at Lanes.

I’m not the only one here, though. It’s the standard Wednesday morning crowd- the same men sitting at the same tables they’ve sat at for years. There are also a few people here that I know to be Believers- and they just got their food...

I wonder what’s about to happen?

Eyes clinched tight- check.

Hands held across the table- check.

From across the crowded diner, I can hear the prayer- check.

I can also see a few people staring. Even in the buckle of the “Bible Belt” this appears strange.

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Ok, a lot of prefacing and disclosures need to take place.

Prayer is Important:

I fully assert that prayer is one of the most important disciplines that a Believer can practice.

Prayer has both private and public elements which are necessary for spiritual growth, community and evangelism.

Joint prayer can build a community of believers in a powerful way.

Public Profession of Your Faith is Important:

Even though our relationship with God is a personal one- it was never intended to be a private one.

We should never be concerned with or censor our faith in an attempt to prevent the world from judging us for it.

I’m also very familiar with a certain text in the Bible that begins:

“If you acknowledge me before men...”

Thanking God for His Provision is Important:

I can say with integrity that I hold this view with more weight than most. I believe that the Bible teaches a constant gratitude. One that leads you to give credit for every good taste and every good smell coming from that plate to God and His perfect creativity. I also believe that failure to give Him the glory for all of that is an act of blasphemy.

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So now that all the disclaimers are out of the way- and the proud Christians have stopped yelling: “Like Paul- I am not ashamed of the Gospel!” maybe we can talk...

Did the eyes clinched, hands clasped, extra loud prayer in the crowded diner accomplish anything towards the cause of the Gospel?

In an action that was certainly vigilant in it’s ‘unashamednity’, did anybody in the crowd staring move closer to a relationship with Jesus?

I think a stronger argument can be made for the opposite. That people already put off by the Gospel were pushed further away from it.

(It should be noted: In my experience, those people do not usually have an aversion to the Gospel as much as they have one to many of the people who are supposedly claiming it.)

I’m not against families praying together over a meal in a public place. I’m not against parents teaching their children to thank God for all he gives to us- but it’s also been my experience that those who are very overt in “public displays of faith” are also very anemic when it comes to displaying it privately.

I know it’s reductionistic but seriously- those that are louder in public generally are the most spiritually dead in private. Like many other things in the life of a believer, compensation is made. Much like the person who doesn’t know how to study the Bible for themselves will live vicariously through preachers- they will be involved in every Bible study the church offers. Or the person who slips in sin will attempt to “pay God back” by pouring into the body- the Overt Public Prayer (hereto after referred to as the “OPP”) typically never prays when there’s no one to see them do it.

This leads me to believe that their prayer is much more an attempt to be seen by men for how faithful and unashamed they are than an opportunity to pause and thank God for something He’s seen fit to bless them with.

It’s an attempt to make much of themselves; not God.

Which begs the question: Is that prayer even one God will listen to?

Paul did say to the Romans that he wasn’t ashamed of the Gospel but Paul also died for his faith in a first century Roman prison. Don’t echo his words just to be pretentious in a restaurant.