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May 22 - September 24, 2018
The glib way people talk about prayer often reinforces our cynicism. We end our conversations with “I’ll keep you in my prayers.” We have a vocabulary of “prayer speak,” including “I’ll lift you up in prayer” and “I’ll remember you in prayer.” Many who use these phrases, including us, never get around to praying. Why? Because
American culture is probably the hardest place in the world to learn to pray. We are so busy that when we slow down to pray, we find it uncomfortable. We prize accomplishments, production. But prayer is nothing but talking to God. It feels useless, as if we are wasting time. Every bone in our bodies screams, “Get to work.”
It’s intimate and hints at eternity. We don’t think about communication or words but about whom we are talking with. Prayer is simply the medium through which we experience and connect to God.
Oddly enough, many people struggle to learn how to pray because they are focusing on praying, not on God.
In prayer, focusing on the conversation is like trying to drive while looking at the win...
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Nor is faith isolated from prayer. The more my faith grows, the bolder my prayers get for Jill. Then, the more my prayers for her are answered, the more my faith grows. Likewise, if I suffer, I learn how to pray.
So don’t hunt for a feeling in prayer. Deep in our psyches we want an experience with God or an experience in prayer. Once we make that our quest, we lose God. You don’t experience God; you get to know him. You submit to him. You enjoy him. He is, after all, a person.
If God is sovereign, then he is in control of all the details of my life. If he is loving, then he is going to be shaping the details of my life for my good. If he is all-wise, then he’s not going to do everything I want because I don’t know what I need. If he is patient, then he is going to take time to do all this. When we put all these things together — God’s sovereignty, love, wisdom, and patience —
we have a divine story.
But as we learn to pray well, we’ll discover that this is my Father’s world. Because my Father controls everything, I can ask, and he will listen and act. Since I am his child, change is possible — and hope is born.
The quest for a contemplative life can actually be self-absorbed, focused on my quiet and me. If we love people and have the power to help, then we are going to be busy. Learning to pray doesn’t offer us a less busy life; it offers us a less busy heart.
We keep forgetting God is a person. We don’t learn to love someone without it changing us. That is just the nature of love that reflects the heart of God. Because God’s love is unchanging, the second person of the Trinity, Jesus of Nazareth, now has a scarred body. The Trinity is different because of love.
What’s the problem? We’re trying to be spiritual, to get it right. We know we don’t need to clean up our act in order to become a Christian, but when it comes to praying, we forget that. We, like adults, try to fix ourselves up. In contrast, Jesus wants us to come to him like little children, just as we are.
Come with your wandering mind. Come messy. What does it feel like to be weary? You have trouble concentrating. The problems of the day
Private, personal prayer is one of the last great bastions of legalism. In order to pray like a child, you might need to unlearn the nonpersonal, nonreal praying that you’ve been taught.
Just start praying. Remember the point of Christianity isn’t to learn a lot of truths so you don’t need God anymore. We don’t learn God in the abstract. We are drawn into his life. Become like a little child — ask, believe,
When Jesus tells us that “apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5), he is inviting us into his life of a living dependence on his heavenly Father. When Jesus tells us to believe, he isn’t asking us to work up some spiritual energy. He is telling us to realize that, like him, we don’t have the resources to do life. When you know that you (like Jesus) can’t do life on your own, then prayer makes complete sense.
When Jesus is with someone, that person is the only person in the room. Jesus slows down and concentrates on one person at a time. The way he loves people is identical to the way he prays to his Father.
This one-person focus is how love works. Love incarnates by slowing down and focusing on just the beloved.
You don’t create intimacy; you make room for it. This is true whether you are talking about your spouse, your friend, or God. You need space to be together. Efficiency, multitasking, and busyness all kill intimacy. In short, you can’t get to know God on the fly. If Jesus has to pull away from people and noise in order to pray, then it makes sense that we need to as well.
Praying out loud can be helpful because it keeps you from getting lost in your head. It makes your thoughts concrete. But it is more than technique; it is also a statement of faith. You are audibly declaring your belief in a God who is alive.
you are not praying, then you are quietly confident that time, money, and talent are all you need in life. You’ll always be a little too tired, a little too busy.
Here are seven simple suggestions for how you can spend time with your Father in the morning:
We tell ourselves, “Strong Christians pray a lot. If I were a stronger Christian, I’d pray more.” Strong Christians do pray more, but they pray more because they realize how weak they are. They don’t try to hide it from themselves. Weakness is the channel that allows them to access grace.
Edith Schaeffer, author and wife of evangelist and philosopher Francis Schaeffer, “Who is the greatest Christian woman alive today?” She replied, “We don’t know her name. She is dying of cancer somewhere in a hospital in India.” I’m talking about that woman. Underneath her obedient life is a sense of helplessness. It has become part of her very nature … almost like breathing. Why? Because she is weak. She can feel her restless heart, her tendency to compare herself with others. She is shocked at how jealousy can well up in her. She notices how easily the world gets its hooks into her. In
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March 19, 1991. Amazing how when I don’t pray in the morning evil just floods into our home. I absolutely must pray! Oh, God, give me the grace to pray.
took me seventeen years to realize I couldn’t parent on my own. It was not a great spiritual insight, just a realistic observation. If I didn’t pray deliberately and reflectively for members of my family by name every morning, they’d kill one another. I was incapable of getting inside their hearts. I was desperate. But even more, I couldn’t change my self-confident heart. My prayer journal reflects both my inability to change my kids and my inability to change my self-confidence. That’s why I need grace even to pray.
I’m at my worst when I’m passionate about a new idea. I can drift into selling instead of listening and can easily become dominating. My heart is a dry and weary land. But when I begin to pray, the energy of my life is directed into the life of God and not into changing people’s minds … and I shut up!
More specifically, it is the Spirit of his Son praying. The Spirit is bringing the childlike heart of Jesus into my heart and crying, Abba, Father. Jesus’ longing for his Father becomes my longing. My spirit meshes with the Spirit, and I, too, begin to cry, Father. When Jesus prayed, most scholars think he regularly addressed his Father as abba. It is similar to our word papa. Their logic goes like this: We know the word abba because it burned itself on the disciples’ minds. They were so stunned — no one had ever spoken to God so intimately before — that when they told the Greek Christians
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THE OPPOSITE OF A childlike spirit is a cynical spirit. Cynicism is, increasingly, the dominant spirit of our age. Personally, it is my greatest struggle in prayer.
deadly intimacy that gossip offers.
Since the Fall, evil feels omnipresent, making cynicism an easy sell. Because cynicism sees what is “really going on,” it feels real, authentic. That gives cynicism an elite status since authenticity is one of the last remaining public virtues in our culture.
We’ve moved from a Promethean age of great deeds to a listless, detached age.
Yoani Sánchez, a thirty-two-year-old Cuban blogger and leading spokesperson for her generation, wrote, “Unlike our parents, we never believed in anything. Our defining characteristic is cynicism. But that’s a double-edged sword. It protects you from crushing disappointment, but it paralyzes you from doing anything.”
A praying life is just the opposite. It engages evil. It doesn’t take no for an answer. The psalmist was in God’s face, hoping, dreaming, asking. Prayer is feisty. Cynicism, on the other hand, merely critiques. It is passive, cocooning itself from the passions of the great cosmic battle we are engaged in. It is without hope.
As my friend Cathie reflected on why this is true in her own life, she observed, “I make the jump from optimism to darkness so quickly because I am not grounded in a deep, abiding faith that God is in the matter, no matter what the matter is. I am looking for pleasant results, not deeper realities.”
Psychology’s tendency to hunt for hidden motives adds a new layer to our ability to judge and thus be cynical about what others are
doing. No longer do people commit adultery out of lust — they have unmet longings that need to be fulfilled.
Jesus isn’t just offering practical wisdom. His wisdom works because in his death he himself acted boldly, trusting his Father to help him.
religious leaders cynically mock him for his childlike trust. “He saved others; he cannot save himself…. He trusts in God; let God deliver him” (Matthew 27:42-43). In effect they are saying, “Look what happens when you act like a child and trust your Father. He abandons you.” They accuse Jesus of naïveté, of acting foolishly because he believes in God’s goodness.
When you pray, you are touching the hopeful heart of God. When you know that, prayer becomes an adventure.
All I’d done was pray, and God had acted. It seemed too easy. Trite. I realized I was hunting for something to doubt. I was also hunting for something to do. At bottom, I didn’t like grace. I wanted to be a player in the way God answered my request. In fact, at that moment I didn’t like God. I was more comfortable with his distance.
To hear a good story, we need a simple, childlike wonder. Alan Jacobs, in his biography of C. S. Lewis, reflected that “those who will never be fooled can never be delighted, because without selfforgetfulness there can be no delight.”1 Lewis was able to write such captivating children’s stories because he never lost his childlike spirit of wonder. The cynic is never fooled, so he is never delighted.
Jesus acts out Psalm 23 at the feeding of the five thousand. When he sees that the crowds are “like sheep without a shepherd,” he feeds them spiritually by “teach[ing] them many things.” Then he has them “sit down … on the green grass” and feeds them with so much food that their baskets overflow (Mark 6:34-44). Jesus meditates on Psalm 22 to prepare for his death. On the cross, overwhelmed by evil, he recites Psalm 22:1: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In the darkness, Jesus doesn’t analyze what he doesn’t know. He clings to what he knows.
Shepherd’s care. I drift through the previous day and watch God at work. Nothing undercuts cynicism more than a spirit of thankfulness. You begin to realize that your whole life is a gift. Thankfulness isn’t a matter of forcing yourself to see the happy
To become thankful is to be drawn into the fellowship of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, into their enjoyment of one another, of life, and of people. Cynicism looks reality in the face, calls it phony, and prides itself on its insight as it pulls back. Thanksgiving looks reality in the face and rejoices at God’s care. It replaces a bitter spirit with a generous one. In the face of Adam and Eve’s evil, God takes up needle and thread and patiently sews fine leather clothing for them (see Genesis 3:21). He covers their divided, hiding selves with love. The same God permits his Son to be
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purporting to “see through” others’ façades, cynics lack purity of heart. A significant source of cynicism is the fracture between my heart and my behavior.
attempts to expose this fracture of the two selves. Repentance brings the split personality together and thus restores integrity to the life. The real self is made public. When the proud person is humbled, the elevated self is united with the true self.
“Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?” (1 Samuel 17:26). David reacts to the split between Israel’s public faith and its battlefield cowardice.
The presence of Jesus, the only truly authentic person who ever lived, would reveal itself in the restoration of authenticity in people. I’d see Christians whose inner and outer lives matched.
