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by
Tyler Staton
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September 2 - November 30, 2024
This Presence is so immense, yet so humble; awe-inspiring, yet so gentle; limitless, yet so intimate, tender and personal. I know that I am known. Everything in my life is transparent in this Presence. It knows everything about me—all my weaknesses, brokenness, sinfulness—and still loves me infinitely. This Presence is healing, strengthening, refreshing—just by its Presence . . . It is like coming home to a place I should never have left, to an awareness that was somehow always there, but which I did not recognize.
This Presence is so immense, yet so humble; awe-inspiring, yet so gentle; limitless, yet so intimate, tender and personal. I know that I am known. Everything in my life is transparent in this Presence. It knows everything about me—all my weaknesses, brokenness, sinfulness—and still loves me infinitely. This Presence is healing, strengthening, refreshing—just by its Presence . . . It is like coming home to a place I should never have left, to an awareness that was somehow always there, but which I did not recognize.
an increasing post-Christian America, nearly half the population still admits praying daily, a number that dwarfs the nation’s church attendance.
an increasing post-Christian America, nearly half the population still admits praying daily, a number that dwarfs the nation’s church attendance.
Fascinating!
an increasing post-Christian America, nearly half the population still admits praying daily, a number that dwarfs the nation’s church attendance.
Fascinating!
It’s always the common places that turn out to be holy, isn’t it?
To me, this is holy ground. This is the place where God started something in me that has never stopped.
Reminds me of that moment in church however many years ago
most Christ followers spend far more hours turning over anxious thoughts than surrendering them in prayer.
Even in a very busy, very distracted world, people still make time for what really matters to them.
Prayer always means submission. To pray is to willingly put ourselves in the unguarded, exposed position. There is no climb. There is no control. There is no mastery. There is only humility and hope. To pray is to risk being naive, to risk believing, to risk playing the fool. To pray is to risk trusting someone who might let you down. To pray is to get our hopes up. And we’ve learned to avoid that. So we avoid prayer.
Oh wow this hits home. How many things have i been unwilling to commit to praying about because "what if it doesn't happen". There is SO much vulnerability in that hope/faith posture
We know all too well the cacophony of motives forever swirling inside us. When we pray, we become increasingly aware of those motives.
Again, so true
They simply drag God into our overwhelmed lives, and the only way we can make him fit is to shrink him down to a reduced size. We keep on praying, but we lower the bar of expectation and power in prayer.
Trust allows us to say, “I don’t understand what God is doing right now, but I trust that God is good.”
God listened to overreacting rage, dramatic despair, and guileless joy, and he called David a man after his own heart.13 When it comes to prayer, God isn’t grading essays; he’s talking to children. So if God can delight in prayers as dysfunctional as the ones we find wedged into the middle of the Bible, he can handle yours too without you cleaning them up first.
C. S. Lewis said of prayer, “We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”
Knowledge is hearsay. It’s memorizing the facts. Discovery requires personal experience.
Pray for a personal experience of the Father's love for Noah
That discovery is God’s end of the deal. Your part is just to show up honestly.
But we cannot brush past simply being with the Father and arrive at anything close to the sort of prayer Jesus won back for us. Prayer starts with presence.
But actual communication with a divine being? A divine being intelligent enough to have created me, everything I know, and everything I experience? Come on. If such a being exists, the idea that he (or she or they) would be at my beck and call for conversation is pretty absurd.
Guess it does kind of seem absurd in a way
Owen was introducing CJ to the stillness and wonder from which all prayer emerges.
Prayer doesn’t begin with us; it begins with God. It doesn’t start with speaking; it starts with seeing. As Philip Yancey writes, “Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God’s point of view.”
As of 1370, when people started managing their time artificially, time shifted from being a limit governing our lives to a resource used according to our individual agendas.
Time as a limit governing our lives. We once bowed to time’s boundaries and now we try to make it meet our demands
A Senate subcommittee in 1967 jointly predicted that by 1985, the average American would work twenty-two hours a week for twenty-seven weeks a year because of all the leisure time this new technology would free up.6 In reality, “the average time people spend on leisure has decreased since the 1980s.”
Crazy! If only!
In a society that prizes efficiency and productivity above all else, that uses time like a tool rather than a limit, hurry isn’t an occasional necessity; it’s the new normal. “Be still.” It’s not as simple as it sounds.
“You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
Quite about going on walks with kids, really doing anything with kids) and how they want to stop and look at everything, never fast. “But maybe that’s the point”
our stage in life, and the current demands on our time are the assumed chief causes of our overwhelmed lives.
If we think of the Milky Way galaxy as being the size of the entire continent of North America, our solar system would fit into a coffee cup.
In the vast expanse, who is this God who would concern himself with the likes of me? The great scandal and most important work of prayer is simply to let ourselves be loved by God.
Reminds me a lot of Death by Living
There’s a good kind of small, and it comes with wonder at the God who is big enough to fashion the cosmos with his breath and personal enough to take a real interest in the events of my day and the fluctuation of my emotions.
Isn’t there profound symbolism in the fact that our artificial lights drown out the heavenly lights? Unless you get a particularly clear, dark night, we’ve found a way to darken the stars, a way to pretend that all we see here on the ground is all there is.
Stillness is the quiet space where God migrates from the periphery back to the center, and prayer pours forth from the life that has God at the center.
Live like this world and this life is all you’ve got, and you’ll lose yourself in trying to be everything for everybody. Pretending you are eternal is a miserable, dehumanizing lie—the original lie. We never tire of believing it and never fail to lose ourselves in it.
I AM limited by the hours in the day, I CAN’T accomplish it all
“Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self . . . Solitude is the place of the great struggle and the great encounter—the struggle against the compulsions of the false self, and the encounter with the loving God who offers himself as the substance of the new self.”27
TILL WE HAVE FACES
bottles up every tear I’ve ever shed.
Something for the light circus??
He began his ministry with forty days of wilderness solitude.
Cool parallel to 40 weeks of pregnancy to prepare our preparations for our motherhood ministry
Jesus was intentional, and yet he was equally interruptible.
Jesus was intentional and interruptible. There’s a word for that posture: unhurried. Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life. Why? Because hurry kills love. Hurry hides behind anger, agitation, and self-centeredness, blinding our eyes to the truth that we are God’s beloved and she is sister, he is brother.
Practice silence as a sacrificial offering to God.
probably more—listening than talking.
Instead, the existential question in ancient days was, “Is God knowable?” Because a pillar of fire doesn’t provoke doubt, but neither does it provide intimacy.
the serpent takes aim at Eve’s belief in the character of God.
He’s not asking Eve to eat the fruit; he’s chipping away at her trust in God.
In Genesis 2, God is repeatedly called Yahweh Elohim (“LORD God,” in English). But every time the serpent refers to God, he just says Elohim (“God”), the abstract name for divinity, dropping the personal.
Ohhh how interesting!!!
That’s because the biblical use of the word saint has nothing to do with human competence and everything to do with divine grace.
To call someone a saint is not to necessarily call them good; it is only to name them as someone who has experienced the goodness of God.11
God’s love is the defining reality of every square inch of creation, including me and you.
His predisposition toward you is generosity.
Until we know that love, nothing can truly be right within us, but after that simple revelation, something becomes irrevocably right within us at the deepest level.
the words we speak first should honor the God who is on the receiving end of our prayers.
Crazy how closely this ties into our sermon today with Lazarus’ resurrection: Mary & Martha remembered who they were talking to. He is big enough to wrestle with but holy enough to disdain contempt
never get too sophisticated for the wonder of God. And neither do we.
Reminds me of Drew’s “woah’s”
