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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tyler Staton
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March 14 - April 22, 2023
“What do you think God would do in the lives of your unbelieving friends if you spent every day this summer walking a circle around your school in prayer for them?” “I have no idea.” “Why don’t you find out?” I liked that idea.
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.
Jesus once wisely said that we’ll know a tree by its fruit.6 So what’s the fruit of that story of self-sufficiency in the life of the modern person? We’re overwhelmed. Everyone I meet is drowning in “their thing.” It doesn’t matter if “your thing” is an artistic endeavor, profit margins, wining and dining clients, or raising children. We can’t see past “our thing” because “our thing” (whatever it happens to be) is all-consuming.
We keep on praying, but we lower the bar of expectation and power in prayer.
Constantly overwhelmed lives should drive us to prayer at its purest and rawest, but the tendency for many of us is to pray safe, calculated prayers that insulate us from both disappointment and freedom.
Trust allows us to say, “I don’t understand what God is doing right now, but I trust that God is good.”
Without trust, we suppress the disappointment that God’s silence leaves with us. We build a wall to protect ourselves from the very God we pray to. We carefully nuance our prayers, guarding ourselves against allowing God to disappoint us like that a second time
The deep fear that robs our prayers of power is the lie that the Lord isn’t near. The lie that God has forgotten me, that I’m not in good hands, that my future isn’t secure. It’s the worry that, at the end of the day, this God, near or far, can’t be trusted, that he’s something less than who he promises to be, and that—really,
“I want to be with you. I choose you, God, over every other option.”
It’s being present to the One who chose me first and chooses me again today. It’s the joy of my life.
“And so we end up as good people, but as people who are not very deep: not bad, just busy; not immoral, just distracted; not lacking in soul, just preoccupied; not disdaining depth, just never doing the things to get us there,”
go to bed worried about deadlines, bills, and to-do lists. David hit the pillow worried about the enemy camped in the hill country and waiting for the right moment to charge. And he prioritized time for stillness. He had a habit of stillness that allowed him to see his own life from God’s perspective.
Solitude is the furnace of transformation,” says Henri Nouwen. “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.”
“God keeps count of my anxious tossing while trying to sleep and bottles up every tear I’ve ever shed. God’s good thoughts toward me outnumber the grains of sand on the world’s beaches!”28 Where does someone get the moxie to pray like that?
There’s a word for that posture: unhurried. Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life.
“I want to name my symptoms, completely and comprehensively, because I want healing, completely and comprehensively.”
True spiritual maturity, though, is the opposite. It’s not an ascension; it’s an archaeological dig as we discover layer after layer of what was in us all along.
The pathway of spiritual maturity is a descent, not an assent. A maturing community is a confessing community—not a church without sin, but a church without secrets.
We pray the safest kind of prayers—the ones so passive and vague we’d never be able to tell if God responded to them or not.
The motive behind all true intercessory prayer is love for the other. Jesus isn’t describing some real-life version of wishes to a cosmic genie that occasionally come true if you figure out the formula. He’s talking about the kind of prayers that start with love for someone else and end with inviting God’s activity into places where that love is lacking. Intercession is a willing and intentional choice to turn from the endless spiral into the self—my desires, my needs, my circumstances—to the desires, needs, and circumstances of another. To utter even a syllable of intercessory prayer is a
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“Hold on, that’s prayer? Well, I could wake up a few minutes earlier for that. I’d spend my lunch hour differently for that. I might even skip a meal or two for that.”
The only reason I ask is that you are a ruler, a co-heir with Christ, a manager of heavenly resources. What are you doing with all that authority? If we really took Jesus seriously on the invitation to prayer, what would happen? What would happen in you? What would happen to your community? What would happen in your city? Isn’t it worth finding out?
Sometimes God will move heaven and earth, bending space and time to weave a supernatural narrative in response to our prayers. But God always purposes prayer to change the heart of the intercessor themselves.
Intercessory prayer is often about what the intercessor has become after they’re finished praying.
In your asking, be brief and be specific. We tend to pray wordy, vague prayers when asking, almost like we’re afraid to lay our requests before him boldly. Resist the urge to cover for God or make it easy on him. He can handle your requests. Just ask.
Gratitude is the God-given reward for those who can stomach praying for small things.
The millennial generation, of which I am a part, is the most socially conscious, globally minded, justice-oriented generation in recent memory. We are also the most mentally ill and chronically unhappy. We are a generation of people doing exactly what we want with our lives, channeling our energy freely into chosen pursuits for global good, and yet we are completely overwhelmed, utterly exhausted, and chronically anxious. Those are the symptoms of a good desire out of order.
Daily bread prayers are a daily reminder that we are not in charge, not in control. Prayer replaces control with trust. A God-given desire is only fulfilled by God-given means.
God wants us to ask. He wants to hear you and me say it. As Charles Spurgeon points out, this rule even applies to Jesus himself: “Remember, asking is the rule of the kingdom . . . Remember this text, JEHOVAH says to His own Son, ‘Ask me, and I will make the nations your inheritance . . .’ [Psalm
When you ask anyone for anything, you risk rejection or at least disappointment.
Ask vulnerably, with enough specificity that God has the chance to disappoint you or surprise you. Ask boldly, with enough empowerment that you wonder if you’re allowed to be this forward with God.
The assumption of spirituality is that always God is doing something before I know it. So the task is not to get God to do something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can respond to it and participate and take delight in it.
Not only is God keeping his promises, Mary must have thought, but he’s keeping them in my days. I won’t read the stories of the Messiah in a scroll; I’ll watch them with my own two eyes. And if that weren’t enough on its own, God has selected me for the cast in his redemption drama. It’s good news.
With that angelic appearance, the life Mary had been piecing together, the future plan she had been anticipating, seemed to be demolished, shattered into countless tiny shards. And what’s her response? “I am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled.” That’s a resilience I don’t have, but I want it.
She was saying that everything she was being awarded for—caring for the poor, rehabilitating the addicts, creating a community of heavenly love in a poor slum—all of it just accidentally happened in response to prayer.
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.
In the ancient Hebrew understanding of righteousness, a community of pious, private spiritual practice without equal devotion to costly public compassion was not only dysfunctional but oxymoronic.
The problem is not the work of compassion, mercy, and justice; rather, the problem is the pursuit of fruitfulness apart from an equal pursuit of intimacy. Prayer is the furnace that fuels mission.
When desperation is replaced by safety and comfort, however, they tend to put their trust in something more tangible and predictable, something requiring less faith.
Every great move of God in church history, every revival and awakening, follows a common pattern: the church catches fire, leading to an increased priority of prayer, resulting in an outpouring of the Spirit on a city.
Need first drives us to our knees, but relationship keeps us there.
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.
“The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without hope, faith, and love.”16
Have you ever wondered how the apostles were able to gather their scattered congregations for emergency prayer meetings in a huge city in a world before cell phones? The most likely explanation is that they were already gathering for prayer at set points throughout the day.
To order your day according to intimacy with God is the lived intention to keep him as your first love.
It’s a quiet rebellion, a free choice to live our lives by a different order of loves, marching to a different beat in the procession of another King.
“Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up.”
you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.”
When we pray for the lost, several things are happening all at once. We are recovering the Shepherd’s heart, allowing God to break our hearts for what breaks his own. We are taking up our authority as intercessors, calling heaven to act out of love for one another. And we are taking the risk of being sent, knowing that God often commissions us to go, incarnating our prayers with our hands and feet.
And yet Jesus’ actions showed that when the Roman soldiers planted a cross in the ground with his gangly body spread out on it, it was the equivalent of a king planting a flag in enemy-occupied territory to claim land for himself. God takes creation back. It is finished!
