Pac-Man and Prayer

Pac-Man and Prayer

My eyes perked up when I read in the book, The Battle Plan for Prayer, about an observation made by economists regarding the 1980s arcade game Pac-Man. The observation was that if you had invested the twenty-five cents it cost to play Pac-Man in 1980 in a brokerage account on one of the higher stocks in the S&P 500, today that twenty-five cents would be worth $1800. If, over the course of the summer in 1980, you had resisted the temptation to spend $100 on Pac-Man and instead invested the money in stocks, you would now have nearly $750,000.00. Where was that information in 1980 when I needed it? Although I never spent $100 on Pac-Man, I’m fairly certain one of my friend’s did. I can hardly remember a time when we were teenagers visiting Mr. Gatti’s that he didn’t take the time to drop in a few quarters in exchange for the opportunity to try and get the high score.

But Stephen and Alex Kendrick didn’t include the story about Pac-Man to make me, and other readers who lived in the 80s feel bad about not investing in stocks back then. Instead, they did it to underscore how important it is for us to invest our time wisely. And how do they suggest we do that? They contend that we do it by taking time to pray for other believers. They write: “How much of our time has been eaten up by little more than our own gripes, our own problems, and our own tirades, when it could’ve been invested instead in praying for others…?”

If you will take a few minutes and read through Ephesians 1:15-19 and 3:14-21, as well as Philippians 1:3-11 and Colossians 1:9-14, you will get a great idea of how to pray for other believers. In those passages we see Paul emphasizing things like wisdom, knowledge of the hope we have in Christ, an understanding of the glorious inheritance we have in Christ, a better comprehension of the greatness of God’s power, the ability to grow in love and discernment, the capacity to move toward purity and blamelessness, the knowledge of God’s will, the ability to walk worthy of the Lord and be fully pleasing to him, the ability to bear fruit for God, the ability to endure and be patient and have joy and give thanks, etc. Boy, I don’t know about you, but I sure want people praying those things for me. I want those things because unlike money, they have eternal value.

It’s fine for us to pray for physical needs (3 John 2). But we must never pray as if physical needs matter more than spiritual needs. Praying for others the way Paul prayed for others will keep us from making this mistake because his prayers definitely concentrated on spiritual concerns; things that matter for eternity. Let’s make sure that our prayers reflect the same eternal concerns.