There Is a Half of This You Cannot Do Alone

My uncle prayed every day of his adult life and never once out loud in front of another person.

He was not shy. He ran a business and could talk to anybody. He simply had it fixed in his mind, from somewhere he could not name, that praying was a private matter, like counting money or crying, and that a man who did it in front of people was doing it for the people.

So he did it in the car. He did it early, before anybody was up. Forty years of it, honestly and faithfully.

At my aunt's funeral one of my cousins asked him to pray at the table, and he said no, and then he sat down and looked at his hands. Afterward, out on the steps, he said something I have thought about ever since.

He said: I do not know how. I have said His name every day for forty years and I have never said it where anybody could hear me, and I got to seventy-one years old before anybody noticed there was something I did not know how to do.

The word is a lens, not a compliment

There is a line in the thirty-fourth psalm that most of us have heard a hundred times and read as a solo.

O magnify the LORD with me, and let us exalt his name together. (Psalm 34:3, King James Version)

Two things in one short verse, and both of them are worth stopping on.

The first is the word magnify. In English it has drifted toward flattery, as though a person could make God larger by saying nice things about Him. That is not what it does. To magnify is what a lens does. It does not change the size of the thing. It changes how much of it you can see.

Nothing anybody says adds a millimeter to God. But a name said out loud can absolutely change how much of Him is in view in a room, and that is a real effect and it is why He tells us to do it.

You have an instrument in your mouth that changes what people in a room can see, and it never once changed the size of God, and Psalm 34 is where that stands rather than in any theory about worship, and it is the Spirit who makes a spoken name land as sight rather than as noise.

The second thing is the two little words that follow. With me. And then, in case it was missed: together.

Why the invitation is plural

David is not writing this from a platform. Read the heading of that psalm. He wrote it after pretending to be insane in front of a foreign king in order to escape with his life, which is one of the least dignified passages in his whole biography.

That is the man saying magnify the LORD with me. Not a man at his best. A man who has just done something humiliating in order to survive, calling other people over to say a name with him.

You were given a plural instruction by somebody at his lowest, not by somebody at his highest, and Psalm 34 carries that heading in the text itself rather than in anybody's commentary, and the same Spirit who kept the heading is the one who keeps the invitation open now.

Scripture keeps doing this. Malachi describes people who feared the LORD speaking often one to another, and says a book of remembrance was written before Him for them that thought upon His name. Not for the people who thought about it. For the people who thought about it and then said it to each other.

Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it. (Malachi 3:16)

He hearkened and heard it. The listening in that verse is aimed at the conversation, not at the private thought behind it.

What the private half cannot do

I want to be careful here, because the private half is real and nobody should trade it away.

The closet and the shut door are commanded by Jesus Himself, and a person who only prays in company has a different and equally serious problem. My uncle's forty years in the car were not wasted. They were the foundation the rest of it should have been built on.

But there is a thing the private half structurally cannot do, and it is not a matter of intensity. It cannot let another person hear the name in your voice.

That sounds small. It is not.

You have something in your voice that does not travel through a closed door, and it was put there to be heard, and Psalm 34 is where the plural instruction comes from rather than from anybody's preference for group prayer, and the Spirit is the one who makes a spoken name land on another person.

A child learns what a name weighs by hearing what it weighs in a parent's mouth. A frightened person in a hospital corridor learns whether God is close by hearing whether the person beside them can say His name without flinching. None of that transfers through a closed door.

You have been carrying something other people needed to hear and nobody told you it was portable, which is what Malachi 3 is describing when it puts the Lord's attention on the conversation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a name spoken between two people into more than information.

And there is a promise attached that only opens in company.

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. (Matthew 18:20)

In my name. Not in my subject matter. The gathering is around the name, spoken, out loud, where the others can hear it.