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by
David Mathis
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September 28 - December 8, 2016
Lifelong learning, over time, will mean developing the resistance to simply veg out whenever you feel the impulse, and rather to turn some of these moments, if not many, into opportunities to grow. It may not feel like much on any given day, but the payoff over the long haul is enormous.
And wonder of wonders, not only does he express himself and bid us hear his voice, but he wants to hear ours. The speaking God not only has spoken, but he also listens—he stops, he stoops, he wants to hear from you. He stands ready to hear your voice. Christian, you have the ear of God. We call it prayer.
Prayer is the glad response from the bride, in a joyfully submissive relationship with her Groom, responding to his sacrificial and life-giving initiatives.
It shouldn’t surprise us, then, to find that prayer is not finally about getting things from God, but getting God.
The great purpose of prayer is to come humbly, expectantly, and—because of Jesus—boldly into the conscious presence of God, to relate to him, talk with him, and ultimately enjoy him as our great Treasure.
So, prayer—having God’s ear—is ultimately about having more of God. And having God’s ear (like hearing his voice) is not first and foremost about our particular practices and postures—the specific habits we develop—but the principle of continually relating to him, privately and with others. He is holy, and so we worship (adoration). He is merciful, and so we repent (confession). He is gracious, and so we express appreciation (thanksgiving). He is loving and caring, and so we petition him for ourselves, our family, our friends, and our world (supplication).
Not only is he a Father who reveals his bounty in words, and “knows what you need before you ask him” (Matt. 6:8), but he wants you to ask. He wants to hear. He wants to interact. He means to have us not in a hypothetical relationship, but in reality. He is even more ready to hear us than we are to pray.
The infallible test of spiritual integrity, Jesus says, is your private prayer life. Many people will pray when they are required by cultural or social expectations, or perhaps by the anxiety caused by troubling circumstances. Those with a genuinely lived relationship with God as Father, however, will inwardly want to pray and therefore will pray even though nothing on the outside is pressing them to do so. They pursue it even during times of spiritual dryness, when there is no social or experiential payoff.
Private prayer shows who we really are spiritually and is essential in healing the many places we find ourselves broken, needy, lacking, and rebellious.
This is the heart of prayer—not getting things from God, but getting God. Prayer is where we speak back to God, in response to his word to us, and experience what it means to enjoy him as an end in himself, not just a means to our petitions. In prayer, we enjoy the gift of having God’s ear (chap. 7) and discover for ourselves that we are not just servants, but friends (John 15:15). We are not just hearers of his word, but his own children who have his heart (Rom. 8:15–16; Gal. 4:6–7). He wants to hear from us. Such is the power and privilege of prayer.
Find your regular place for private prayer, and if you can’t locate a ready-made spot, make one. It may simply be a clean desk, or someplace you can kneel.
Because prayer is a conversation we didn’t start, but a response to God’s initiation and speaking to us in his word, many of us have learned, with George Mueller, to start with the Scriptures.
After reading and meditating on the Bible, and before opening the gates to “free prayer”—voicing whatever is on our hearts—it can help to have some form ready at hand.
One time-tested form is ACTS: adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. First, adore God with praise for the truth revealed in your reading of and meditation on the Scriptures, then confess your own sins and failings and foibles, then give thanks for his grace and mercy, and finally supplicate—petition him, ask him—for requests for yourself, your family, your church, and beyond.
But prayer to God is not only the place for divulging our heart, but also developing our desires. There is power here. Prayer changes our hearts like nothing else—perhaps especially when we follow the prayers of the Bible,
prayer is at the very heart of the Christian life. Not only is it obedience to God’s command, but it is a vital means of our receiving his ongoing grace for our spiritual survival and thriving. And the joy of prayer—communing with God—is essential to what it means to be Christian. Without prayer, there is no true relationship with him, and no deep delight in who he is, but only glimpses from afar.
Arranging for accompaniment in prayer takes more energy than a whispered prayer while on the move. It takes planning and initiative and the syncing of schedules in a way that private prayer does not. But it is worth every ounce of effort.
This is an effort that I don't put forth. I live with Paige and we'll only pray two or three times a week before bed, almost as an afterthought. For sure, this is something I need to put the effort forth to grow in.
And so we have at least two fronts to a healthy life of prayer. We pray personally, in secret and on the move, and we pray corporately, resisting the privatizing of our prayers, not just by asking others to pray for us but especially by having others pray with us.
Our need for God’s help today is no less than the early church’s, and prayer together remains a vital means of God’s ongoing grace in the Christian life and for our communities.
There is an added power to our prayers when we unite with fellows in the faith and make our requests to the Father with our hearts joined together.
When we make the regular practice of praying together with fellow believers, we avail ourselves of a channel of joy we otherwise would be neglecting.
Praying together not only adds power to the request, but also means more glory for the Giver when he answers.
God means for us to pray for each other in our various ministries and manifestations of mission, in light of our great shared Commission.
Praying together is one of the single most significant things we can do together to cultivate unity in the church.
the greatest benefit in praying together is that we know Jesus better when we pray together, in his name, with fellow lovers of him.
Our problem might be how we think of fasting. If the accent is on abstinence, and fasting is some mere duty to perform, then only the most iron-willed among us will get over the social and self-pampering hurdles to actually put this discipline into practice. But if we are awakened to see fasting for the joy it can bring, as a means of God’s grace to strengthen and sharpen godward affections, then we might find ourselves holding a powerful new tool for enriching our enjoyment of Jesus.
“Fasting can be an expression of finding your greatest pleasure and enjoyment in life from God.”
What makes fasting such a gift is its ability, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to focus our feelings and their expression toward God in prayer. Fasting walks arm in arm with prayer—as John Piper says, fasting is “the hungry handmaiden of prayer,” who “both reveals and remedies.” She reveals the measure of food’s mastery over us—or television or computers or whatever we submit to again and again to conceal the weakness of our hunger for God. And she remedies by intensifying the earnestness of our prayer and saying with our whole body what prayer says with the heart: I long to be satisfied in
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Fasting, like the gospel, isn’t for the self-sufficient and those who feel they have it all together. It’s for the poor in spirit. It’s for those who mourn. For the meek. For those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
We fast in this life because we believe in the life to come. We don’t have to get it all here and now, because we have a promise that we will have it all in the age to come. We fast from what we can see and taste, because we have tasted and seen the goodness of the invisible God—and are desperately hungry for more of him.
Don’t go from no fasting to attempting a weeklong. Start with one meal; maybe fast one meal a week for several weeks. Then try two meals, and work your way up to a daylong fast. Perhaps eventually try a two-day juice fast.
Fasting isn’t merely an act of self-deprivation, but a spiritual discipline for seeking more of God’s fullness. Which means we should have a plan for what positive pursuit to undertake in the time it normally takes to eat.
Fasting from food is not necessarily for everyone. Some health conditions keep even the most devout from the traditional course. However, fasting is not limited to abstaining from food, as we saw from Martyn Lloyd-Jones: “Fasting should really be made to include abstinence from anything which is legitimate in and of itself for the sake of some special spiritual purpose.”60 If the better part of wisdom for you, in your health condition, is not to go without food, consider fasting from television, computer, social media, or some other regular enjoyment that would bend your heart toward greater
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Christian fasting turns its attention to Jesus or some great cause of his in the world. Christian fasting seeks to take the pains of hunger and transpose them into the key of some eternal anthem, whether it’s fighting against some sin, or pleading for someone’s salvation, or for the cause of the unborn, or longing for a greater taste of Jesus.
Journaling is a way of slowing life down for just a few moments, and trying to process at least a sliver of it for the glory of God, our own growth and development, and our enjoyment of the details.
Journaling has the appeal of mingling the motions of our lives with the mind of God. Permeated with prayer and saturated with God’s word, it can be a powerful way of hearing God’s voice in the Scriptures and making known to him our requests. Think of it as a subdiscipline of Bible intake, and especially of prayer. Let a spirit of prayer pervade, and let God’s word inspire, shape, and direct what you ponder and pen.
Writing it down provides an opportunity for gratitude and praise to God—not just in the moment, but also one day when we return to what we’ve recorded. Without capturing some brief record of this good providence or that answer to prayer, we quickly forget the blessing, or the frustration, and miss the chance to see with specificity later on how “’tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,”
Journaling is an opportunity to grow into tomorrow. We can identify where we need to change and set goals and pinpoint priorities and monitor progress. We can evaluate how we’re doing in the other habits of grace we want to be practicing.
An essential part of good journaling is not just self-examination, but getting outside yourself and being caught up in something great—in particular, Someone great. When you’re sad or angry or anxious, let your journal begin with your heart’s state. Be honest and real, but ask God for the grace to get beyond your circumstances, however bleak, to finding hope in him.
Think of journaling as the handmaid of that vital Christian discipline we looked at in chapter 3, meditation. This is likely the greatest role journaling can play, alongside prayer, in our practicing the means of grace.
Vital to making your journal serve your spiritual vibrancy is saturating it with Scripture and permeating it with prayer. As often as seems natural, make it godward, not only with specific texts from the Bible, but with carefully crafted prayers. Journaling and private prayer can serve as the thermostat for setting our gauges of gravity about Jesus and his providences and our relationship with him.
The best of journals are just for yourself and God, without constantly looking over your shoulder to think about what someone else would think if they were reading it. Settle the issue in your own heart now, and write for your own soul’s good. Don’t alter the course of a lifetime’s worth of private journaling just in case someone reads it someday.
Your journal is a venue for freshly preaching the gospel to yourself, in your particular circumstances, without parroting the stock lines of truth you’ll default to without pausing to meditate.
You need a break from the chaos, from the noise and the crowds, more than you may think at first. You need the spiritual disciplines of silence and solitude.
We are humans, not machines. We were made for rhythms of silence and noise, community and solitude. It is unhealthy to always have people around, and unhealthy to rarely want them. God made us for cycles and seasons, for routines and cadences.
The point of practicing silence as a spiritual discipline is not so we can hear God’s audible voice, but so we can be less distracted and better hear him speak, with even greater clarity, in his word.
But this fellowship is no isolated commune or static, mutual-admiration society. It is a “partnership in the gospel” (Phil. 1:5), among those giving their everything to “advance the gospel” (1:12), knit together for “progress and joy in the faith” (1:25). It is the fellowship in which, as Paul says to Christians, “you are all partakers with me of grace . . . in the defense and confirmation of the gospel” (1:7). In such a partnership as this, we need not worry too much that we will forget the lost and sequester the gospel. Real fellowship will do precisely the opposite. It must. The same Jesus
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true fellowship not only labors to win the lost, but serves to keep fellow saints saved.
Here the charge lands not on the drifting saint to get himself back on the path, but on the others in the community—to have enough proximity to him, awareness of him, and regularity with him to spot the drift and war with him, for him, against the sin.
Fellowship may be the often forgotten middle child of the spiritual disciplines, but she may save your life in the dark night of your soul. As you pass through the valley of the shadow of death, and the Shepherd comforts you with his staff, you will discover that he has fashioned his people to act as his rod of rescue. When the desire to avail yourself of hearing his voice (in the word) has dried up, and when your spiritual energy is gone to speak into his ear (in prayer), God sends his body to bring you back. It is typically not the wanderer’s own efforts that prompt his return to the fold,
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