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Contents Foreword Introduction Chapter 1: “What Good Does It Do?” Chapter 2: Where We Are Headed Part 1: Learning To Pray Like A Child Chapter 3: Become like a Little Child Chapter 4: Learn to Talk with Your Father Chapter 5: Spending Time with Your Father Chapter 6: Learning to Be Helpless Chapter 7: Crying “Abba”—Continuously Chapter 8: Bending Your Heart to Your Father Part 2: Learning to Trust Again Chapter 9: Understanding Cynicism Chapter 10: Following Jesus out of Cynicism Chapter 11: Developing an Eye for Jesus
Praying exposes how self-preoccupied we are and uncovers our doubts.
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.
One of the subtlest hindrances to prayer is probably the most pervasive. In the broader culture and in our churches, we prize intellect, competency, and wealth. Because we can do life without God, praying seems nice but unnecessary. Money can do what prayer does, and it is quicker and less time-consuming. Our trust in ourselves and in our talents makes us structurally independent of God. As a result, exhortations to pray don’t stick.
“Your relationship with your heavenly Father is dysfunctional. You talk as if you have an intimate relationship, but you don’t. Theoretically, it is close. Practically, it is distant.
A praying life feels like our family mealtimes because prayer is all about relationship. 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.
many people struggle to learn how to pray because they are focusing on praying, not on God. Making prayer the center is like making conversation the center of a family mealtime.
Conversation is only the vehicle through which we experience one another. Consequently, prayer is not the center of this book. Getting to know a person, God, is the center.
Since a praying life is interconnected with every part of our lives, learning to pray is almost identical to maturing over a lifetime. What does it feel like to grow up? It is a thousand feelings on a thousand different days. That is what learning to pray feels like.
You don’t experience God; you get to know him. You submit to him. You enjoy him. He is, after all, a person.
Doesn’t God control everything? If so, what’s the point? Because it is uncomfortable to feel our unbelief, to come face-to-face with our cynicism, we dull our souls with the narcotic of activity.
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.
A needy heart is a praying heart. Dependency is the heartbeat of prayer.
Releasing control of something I loved opened the door to communion with God.
Jesus’ rebuke would have surprised the disciples. It would have seemed odd. Children in the first century weren’t considered cute or innocent. Only since the nineteenth-century Romantic era have we idolized children.
The criteria for coming to Jesus is weariness. Come overwhelmed with life. Come with your wandering mind. Come messy.
Don’t try to get the prayer right; just tell God where you are and what’s on your mind.
The second thing we must do in learning to pray is believe like a child. Children are supremely confident of their parents’ love and power.
Little children can’t imagine that their parents won’t eventually say yes. They know if they keep pestering their parents, they’ll eventually give in. Childlike faith drives this persistence.
When your mind starts wandering in prayer, be like a little child. Don’t worry about being organized or staying on task.
Don’t be embarrassed by how needy your heart is and how much it needs to cry out for grace. Just start praying. Remember, the point of Christianity isn’t to learn a lot of truths so you don’t need God anymore.
As you get the clutter off your heart and mind, it is easy to be still in God’s presence. You’ll be able to say with David, “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother” (Psalm 131:2).
Jesus heals far into the night. That’s why he came—there aren’t supposed to be mute children, abandoned wives, or thoughtless bosses.
Clue #1: His Identity Whenever Jesus starts talking about his relationship with his heavenly Father, Jesus becomes childlike, very dependent. “The Son can do nothing of his own accord” (John 5:19).
Only a child will say, “I only do what I see my Father is doing.”
When you know that you (like Jesus) can’t do life on your own, then prayer makes complete sense.
Because Jesus has no separate sense of self, he has no identity crisis, no angst. Consequently, he doesn’t try to “find himself.” He knows himself only in relationship with his Father. He can’t conceive of himself outside of that relationship.
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.
Love incarnates by slowing down and focusing on just the beloved. We don’t love in general; we love one person at a time.
When he prays, he is not performing a duty; he is getting close to his Father. Any relationship, if it is going to grow, needs private space, time together without an agenda, where you can get to know each other.
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.
Jesus’ pattern of a morning prayer follows the ancient rhythm of the Hebrew writers who bent their hearts to God in the morning.
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.
While being “constant in prayer” (Romans 12:12) is an important way of praying that we’ll talk about later, this is no substitute for focused times of prayer.
If 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. But if, like Jesus, you realize you can’t do life on your own, then no matter how busy, no matter how tired you are, you will find the time to pray.
Little children are good at helplessness. It’s what they do best. But as adults, we soon forget how important helplessness is.
Because I was not helpless. I could manage our prayer ministry on my own. I never said this or even thought it, but I lived it.
God wants us to come to him empty-handed, weary, and heavy-laden. Instinctively we want to get rid of our helplessness before we come to God.
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.
Instead, they are frustrated by all the slow people they keep running into. Less mature Christians are quick to give advice. There is no complexity to their worlds because the answers are simple
What really ails you is that things simply haven’t happened as you expected and wanted. In fact I don’t want you to rely on your own strength and abilities and plans, but to distrust them and to distrust yourself, and to trust me and no one and nothing else.
your own strength will no more help you to stand upright than propping yourself on a broken reed. You must not despair of me. You may hope and trust in me absolutely. My mercy is infinite.
If we think we can do life on our own, we will not take prayer seriously.
Poverty of Spirit, Not Discipline
Teach me or Help me, Jesus. The psalms are filled with this type of short bullet prayer. Praying simple one-word prayers or a verse of Scripture takes the pressure off because we don’t have to sort out exactly what we need.
Often we are too weary to figure out what the problem is. We just know that life—including ours—doesn’t work. So we pray, Father, Father, Father.
We don’t need self-discipline to pray continuously; we just need to be poor in spirit. Poverty of spirit makes room for his Spirit. It creates a God-shaped hole in our hearts and offers us a new way to relate to others.
Not sure i agree
“Unceasing prayer” is Paul’s most frequent description of how he prayed and of how he wanted the church to pray.
slipping into prayer at odd hours of the day, not because we are disciplined but because we are in touch with our own poverty of spirit, realizing that we can’t even walk through a mall or our neighborhood without the help of the Spirit of Jesus.
Because anxiety is self on its own, it tries to get control. It is unable to relax in the face of chaos.
