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August 13 - August 25, 2019
To become more like Jesus is to feel increasingly unable to do life, increasingly wary of your 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.
The Spirit is not assisting us to pray; he is the one who is actually praying. He is the pray-er. 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.
We don’t need self-discipline to pray continuously; we just need to be poor in spirit.
A praying spirit transforms how we look at people.
When Paul tells the young churches to pray, he encourages them in this same pattern of “constant in prayer”
A praying life isn’t simply a morning prayer time; it is about 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.
Instead of fighting anxiety, we can use it as a springboard to bending our hearts to God. Instead of trying to suppress anxiety, manage it, or smother it with pleasure, we can turn our anxiety toward God. When we do that, we’ll discover that we’ve slipped into continuous praying.
We become anxious when we take a godlike stance, occupying ourselves with things too great for us. We return to sanity by becoming like little children, resting on our mothers.
When you stop trying to control your life and instead allow your anxieties and problems to bring you to God in prayer, you shift from worry to watching.
If Satan can’t stop you from praying, then he will try to rob the fruit of praying by dulling your soul.
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 begins, oddly enough, with too much of the wrong kind of faith, with naive optimism or foolish confidence.
Genuine faith comes from knowing my heavenly Father loves, enjoys, and cares for me.
Naive optimism is groundless. It is childlike trust without the loving Father.
The movement from naive optimism to cynicism is the new American journey. In naive optimism we don’t need to pray because everything is under control, everything is possible.
Instead of naive optimism, Jesus calls us to be wary, yet confident in our heavenly Father.
The feel of a praying life is cautious optimism—caution because of the Fall, optimism because of redemption. Cautious optimism allows Jesus to boldly send his disciples into an evil world.
Thankfulness isn’t a matter of forcing yourself to see the happy side of life. That would be like returning to naive optimism. Thanking God restores the natural order of our dependence on God. It enables us to see life as it really is.
All sin involves a splitting of the personality—what James calls being “double-minded” (4:8).
Cynicism is the seed for Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God, and it is the seed for our own personal rebellions.
By cultivating a lifestyle of repentance, the pure in heart develop integrity, and their own fractures are healed. By beginning with their own impurity, they avoid the critical, negative stance of cynicism.
Ministry itself can create a mask of performance, the projection of success.
Because he keeps his eye on the present work of Jesus, Paul is not overcome by evil but overcomes evil with good. Goodness infests Paul’s prayer life. He is living out the gospel.
A grace-saturated vision enables us to defeat cynicism and talk with our Father, restoring a childlike simplicity and wonder.
The Enlightenment mind-set marginalizes prayer because it doesn’t permit God to connect with this world.
First, prayer is defined as phony, and then it feels phony.
The issue of power—the ability to make a difference, to change something—is at the heart of asking.
She believes that some people are more powerful with God.
But unlike these other kinds of experts, power in prayer comes from being in touch with your weakness. To teach us how to pray, Jesus told stories of weak people who knew they couldn’t do life on their own.
Learned desperation is at the heart of a praying life.
Overspiritualizing prayer suppresses our natural desire that our house not be burning. When we stop being ourselves with God, we are no longer in real conversation with God.
The husband’s love for his wife is not disengaged from responding thoughtfully and generously to her requests.
Jesus neither suppresses his feelings nor lets them master him.
Prayer is a moment of incarnation—God with us.
What do I lose when I have a praying life? Control. Independence. What do I gain? Friendship with God. A quiet heart. The living work of God in the hearts of those I love. The ability to roll back the tide of evil. Essentially, I lose my kingdom and get his. I move from being an independent player to a dependent lover. I move from being an orphan to a child of God.
Suffering is God’s gift to make us aware of our contingent existence.
Love, like prayer, makes perfect sense when you realize it is a reflection of the divine image.
The first danger, on the left side of the following chart, is Not Asking.
The second danger is Asking Selfishly:
All of Jesus’ teaching on prayer in the Gospels can be summarized with one word: ask.
The name of Jesus gives my prayers royal access.
We can’t do battle with evil without letting God destroy the evil in us as well.
A thankful heart is constantly extending grace because it has received grace.
You can’t separate prayer from love.
Prayer is the positive side of the surrendered will.
Ironically, self-will often becomes a self-defeating prophecy.
Prayer doesn’t exist in some rarified spiritual world; it is part of the warp and woof of our lives.
want God’s help so we can dominate our son. We forget that God is not a genie but a person who wants to shape us in the image of his Son as much as he wants to answer our prayers.
Because we live in a fallen world, God has to use broken images of himself, such as fathers.
