Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools: An Invitation to the Wonder and Mystery of Prayer

by Tyler Staton

When we trust God with our worldview but not our current experience in the world, we are falling victim to the lure of control.

Prayer replaces control with trust. A God-given desire is only fulfilled by God-given means.

If the royal and divine Son of God cannot be exempted from the rule of asking that He may have, you and I cannot expect the rule to be relaxed in our favor.”

God responds to his own character. That’s his nature. John Mark Comer concludes, “God is more of a friend than a formula.”18

The tendency in our modern churches is to strip the Bible of mystery and reduce it to abstractable principles. The tendency is to read something like Exodus 32 and think, Wow, Moses and God really had something special there, and then continue to lob halfhearted prayers up to Aristotle’s god, as if Moses was some sort of superstar with different access to God than we have. In fact, Jesus said the opposite: “Whoever is least in my kingdom is greater than those who came before me.”19 To put the sentiment bluntly, “You are greater in God’s eyes than Moses because you carry Jesus’ authority when you pray.”

Of course, many times God uses prolonged waiting and even withholds power to form something essential in the inner life of the praying person. Equally, though, God shakes the temple floor beneath the feet of the gathered church, causes the paralyzed to stand, heals the sick, frees the addict, delivers the demonized, and throws open the cell doors of the imprisoned.

When we pray, we both participate in God’s action and benefit from God’s action. We join God.

The middle voice is the language of Edenic relationship. In prayer, Jesus invites us back into the relationship we knew in Eden at first and then lost in that first tragic act of deception.

The aim is not to get God in on what I think he should be doing. Rather, the aim of prayer is to get us in on what God is doing, become aware of it, join it, and enjoy the fruit of participation.

“The better a man learns to pray,” writes Hans Urs von Balthasar, “the more deeply he finds that all his stammering is only an answer to God’s speaking to him.”

Social justice was simply the natural response to being with Jesus.

Those who prioritize a loving relationship with God, meeting with him in prayer through stolen moments throughout the day, long stretches of disciplined contemplation, and fiery pleas of intercession, are those with whom he shares his divine power.

Fruitfulness comes because we love Jesus and want to be with him. When that’s our heart, the expression of that relationship begins to look like justice in the world, compassion for others, and peace in our inner being.

To pray is to be led by the hand to broken places, broken people, and broken parts within yourself.

I am deeply comforted in remembering that I popped into a story where I’m not playing the lead. I’m an extra in the background of a single scene in a narrative that is grander, more complex, and more redemptive than I could fathom. This is a story about God. He is the lead, at the center of every scene. I am the Lord’s servant.

Whenever there’s a specific detail in the Bible, one that seems gratuitous or strange, lean in and pay close attention. There are no unimportant details in the Scripture.

Jesus promises to fill all who will receive him with his very Spirit—the same Spirit that gave birth to new life at creation, new life in redemption through Sarah, new life in incarnation through Mary, and new life in resurrection through Jesus.

New life requires labor—laboring in prayer. But the joy of salvation always far outweighs the preceding pain, struggle, and persistence.

in those instances when the church gathers to worship and pray and the fire falls, Jesus is there, dancing with a supernatural smile stretched across his face. God ignites the church because he’s jealous for the city.

Pray specifically enough that you’ll know if God answers your prayer, and regularly enough that endurance and labor are required.

I know the power of God and the silence of God, and sometimes I think I’d handle the silence better if power was never on the table at all. A God with a personality and a will is so unpredictable. Maybe it would be easier if we had a God who worked like an operating system designed to deliver predictable results based on the buttons I push. But that’s not the God revealed on the pages of Scripture. It’s not the God revealed in Jesus. It’s not the God I’ve walked with all these years.

Need first drives us to our knees, but relationship keeps us there. That’s what Jesus was getting at—the deeper invitation hidden in three simple verbs—ask, seek, and knock.

He does not simply tolerate our company or benevolently entertain our requests; he affirms our person, chooses our company, and delights in our presence.

We come for gifts, and we get the Giver. And we find ourselves seated at his table, welcomed, accepted, and loved, being fed, being listened to, relaxing in the warm presence of the loving God.

Prayer—in any form, by anybody—is God’s invitation to pull up a chair to the table and enjoy restful, intimate, unbroken conversation with the triune God. Or as Jesus succinctly said it, “Knock and the door will be opened to you.”3

Jesus doesn’t compare the unjust judge to God. He distinguishes God from the judge. His point is that “if even a judge this bad will give justice to the persistent, how much more will God see that those persistent in prayer get justice?” “Prayer is not begging God to do something for us that he doesn’t know about, or begging God to do something for us that he is reluctant to do, or begging God to do something that he hasn’t time for,” writes Eugene Peterson. “In prayer we persistently, faithfully, trustingly come before God, submitting ourselves to his sovereignty, confident that he is acting, right now, on our behalf.”9 Where does this confidence come from? From the assurance that we are his “chosen ones,” as Jesus names us in the same breath. What’s God up to right now? He’s weaving history into a redemptive, good future for his chosen ones—that’s you, me, and all who call Jesus “Lord.”

The renewal of the world, heaven and earth restored as one, begins with God pouring out all the prayers of his children like a purifying fire with one great, resounding yes. Every prayer in the end is an answered prayer. Some are still awaiting that yes, but it’s coming. That’s the kind of “judge” we’re dealing with.

Every tear of ours that falls to the ground will grow the fruit of redemption. God bends history so that the moments of greatest pain become the moments of greatest redemption, twisting the story to be sure that the pain we feel releases the power of new life, and the tears we cry become the foundation of a better world.

Our persistence in prayer comes from the promise that we don’t pray to a reluctant, half-interested, can’t-be-bothered judge, but to an unfathomably loving Father who collects our prayers like love letters and our tears like fine wine.

Wrestling with God through persistent prayer is a confirmation of true belief, not distressing doubt. Those who only half-heartedly believe don’t take offense at silence. It is only those of us who believe and believe hard—hard enough to walk out on a limb of faith with our full weight, who feel that limb snap beneath us and send us into a free fall without a harness, who care to wrestle with a God who at times seems fickle—it is only those who are offended by silence.

We have to invite God—the very One who broke our trust—into the muck with us. We invite the One we are labeling “perpetrator” to be our healer. It’s the most courageous of all choices.

There, feeling her way around in the dark, it wasn’t a God of resurrection power she discovered, but a God willing to enter the night and feel around in that same darkness with her. A God weeping in the garden. A God hanging on a cross. A suffering servant. A man of sorrows.

A God who displays healing power and also chooses personal suffering as the means to final healing.

But I can trust the God who is revealed in Jesus—the God who has never looked down on suffering from a lofty throne but has always looked into the eyes of the suffering from level ground. I can trust the God who refuses to offer platitudes from a safe distance, the God who descends into the mess with me.

Where does that come from? Only from the belief that God is bottling up my tears and saving them right next to my prayers. That both are key ingredients in the recipe of redemption. That he loves me too much to let either go to waste.

This is the story she would’ve gone on telling forever. Her place of great shame became the place of great mercy. The very part of her story she wanted to erase or hide in the fine print at the bottom of the page became the very part of her story she’d never stop telling. That’s the kind of author God is. He doesn’t edit. He repurposes and redeems. He turns the worst moments into the irreplaceable, climactic ones. Her most obvious failure was also her greatest victory.

Like love, prayer comes easy at the first and at the last, for sinners and saints, but all the years in between are the important ones.

“Prayer does not mean much when we undertake it only as an attempt to influence God, or as a search for a spiritual fallout shelter, or as an offering of comfort in stress-filled times,” writes Henri Nouwen.

Before prayer is about power or outcomes or heavenly armies and a righteous uprising, it’s about love. It’s the way we freely choose the God who freely chose us first.

Prayer is about love, and that means it cannot be sustained on fluttery feelings, good intentions, and spontaneous moments alone. It needs a container, something like the fidelity of a marriage, a set of practices or rituals within which that love can grow, mature, and blossom.

The early Christians placed a higher value on gathering to pray than we commonly do today, and they possessed a higher concentration of the Spirit’s power than we commonly do today.

My suspicion is that when the apostle Paul instructed the church to “pray without ceasing,”22 he had in mind both a constant state of interior being and an outward, committed, concrete rhythm. The invitation is something like “pray like a band of wild, unruly monks,” and as you do, love and power will bloom together from within you.

If we want a biblical experience, we must live biblical lives, taking on biblical practices in a new time and place.

Jesus’ personal discipline was always about freedom and life. When he rolled out of bed and made his way alone to the Mount of Olives to pray, it was love that drove him there, not a spiritual scorecard. For Jesus, being with the Father was his deepest desire, the source of identity, and only way to true life.

What if you slipped away at midday for a few minutes or a few seconds, because every other force is vying for your attention but only Jesus has your heart?

What if you were to spend your commute home or the final moments before you fall asleep at night recounting the magnificent and minuscule ways you saw heaven pierce earth today?

In short, if you want to play jazz, you’ve got to learn the sheet music first. And if you want to pray with passion, spontaneity, and freedom, you’ve got to learn the sheet music. On his knees in Gethsemane, sweating bloody drops of dread and anxiety, Jesus began to pray, “My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.”30 It strikes me that Jesus’ prayer in Matthew 26 is a mirror image of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”31 The words that involuntarily spilled forth from his mouth in that moment of anguish bear a striking resemblance to the way he taught his disciples to pray years earlier.

Get these ancient, recited prayers into your bloodstream, and they’ll come out of you when you need them most. The memorable moments of spontaneous prayer emerge from a rooted, disciplined life of prayer.

A daily prayer rhythm is not a fast track to revival or a hocus-pocus solution to drum up something powerful; it’s a pathway to rebellious fidelity, to love expressed through prayer, to a commitment to keep on choosing him on all the ordinary days.

You’re escaping because you know a secret. You know the secret that this kingdom that everyone is so feverishly building, willing their bodies and brains into a few more hours of productive focus, isn’t the one that will stand.