Atheists sometimes tell me that I am wasting my breath when I pray to God. So it was weird when I was out to dinner with a bunch of self-proclaimed atheists that they would ask me to pray and bless the dinner table. It was probably a novelty ask to help remind them of their good Sunday afternoon childhood dinners back in the Midwest.

Whatever the case, I was super excited and I immediately jumped into prayer.

Later that evening, one of these guys said to me, “Yo Jon, you don’t really believe the hot air and smoke coming out of your mouth, do you?”

I said, “Bro, God loves the smell of chicken rice in my breath, it’s like incense and God is compelled to draw my closer to Him.”

I call to you, Lord, come quickly to me; hear me when I call to you. May my prayer be set before you like incense; may the lifting up of my hands be like the evening sacrifice. – Psalm 141:1-2

David writes this Psalm and says prayer, or the act of praying, is like incense. God loves the fact that we pray. It doesn’t really matter what comes out of our mouths when we pray to Him, it matters that we pray to Him and He receives it as an aromatic fragrance which covers up the unpleasant odors of everything else we have said, whether it’s blaspheming His name and cursing other people.

Prayer sets the mood for a worthy sacrifice to God. Prayer marks the beginning of our calling toward God. So often we don’t pray because we’re afraid of offending God with what we have to say. We think that just because we don’t brush our teeth, God will be offended by the smell coming out of our mouths.

There is no “right thing to say.” God wants us to hang everything out there and start everything we do and everything we feel with prayer. For God it is sweet smelling incense. He just wants you to open your mouths and allow the hot air come out.

God’s response to our prayer is always good and always received as an act of worship, whether or not we have the right words. Our prayers, because they are like incense before God, prepares the way for any and every act of worship.

Let me be a little more clear about this: we need to primer our actions before God with prayer so that God can receive all our actions as worship to Him. We often go about trying please God with things we do in His name without prayer and this is our biggest problem.

Then we hate God when we are ill received. It’s because we don’t burn our prayers to God like we would burn incense before worship. We need to open our mouths to pray to set the tone and to draw God near to us.

When we burn our prayers to God like incense, God begins to work our sacrifice. We see in the prophets that it is God who often takes the evening sacrifice by His fire. God will take whatever we lay before Him to a place where only He can take it.

This is where we need to see ourselves. When we move, when we act, when we engage in life, we need God to receive us in our actions as worthy sacrifices for Him.

If we haven’t ever laid down our prayers before God like incense, we need to earnestly start. Our actions will be received by God when we draw Him with our prayers.