I have been saying for a while that the great issue that causes us so many problems is our inability to rely upon God as Creator. John Pless wrote about how Luther dealt with prayer and connected it to our struggles in life. To rely on God and not the devil or our own flesh or the world is a declaration of war. This is stunning stuff.
God’s First Commandment, confiscates this center of our entire human nature for itself. God, as our Creator, calls our heart out of clinging to what is created and demands it for itself in an exclusive and undivided way. Here the First Commandment and the Creed interlock.” #. It is only this confiscated heart, fearing, loving, and trusting in God above all things that is free to pray in the fashion that God commands and promises to hear. Such prayer is not easy; it involves struggle, for “when we meditate on the first commandment we are involved in a battle between the one Lord and the many lords (cf. 1 Cor. 8:5f).” *To meditate on the First Commandment and to pray from it is to let God be God, but for the flesh, the world, and the devil, such meditation is a declaration of war.
#Albrecht Peters, Commentary on Luther’s Catechisms: Ten Commandments, trans. Holger Sonntag (St. Louis: Concordia, 2009), 118.
*Oswald Bayer, “Theology the Lutheran Way”, Lutheran Quarterly
