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

by Tyler Staton

Spiritual maturity means more confession, not less.

assent. A maturing community is a confessing community—not a church without sin, but a church without secrets.

Revival didn’t happen because everyone agreed it was a good idea; it happened because everyone stripped off their fig leaves in front of one another.

It is not by our gifts, insights, ideas, or qualifications that God is determined to heal the world, but by our scars. By his wounds we are healed,25 and by our wounds the healing is shared.

Confession is two parts: searching and naming. Searching is God’s part; naming is ours.

Our prayers don’t reflect the wide-eyed, blazing sense of empowerment that the Son of Man’s words engender in anyone who really believes them. 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.

Human beings were made to be intercessors participating with God in lovingly overseeing the world, set apart, bearing God’s authority to rule in selfless love.

To pray is to experience the very same access to God the Father that Jesus has.

“To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”20

“Intercession is impossible until we allow the things that break God’s heart to break our hearts as well.”

Our appetite for the idea of prayer tends to be stronger than our stomach for the actual experience of prayer, unfortunately.

“If you may have everything by asking, and nothing without asking, I beg you to see how absolutely vital prayer is, and I beseech you to abound in it.”12

“Now, she was crying out loudly as tears streamed down her cheeks, wailing in a language I didn’t understand. And she wasn’t alone. It was everyone. Every last one of them praying with more desperation and desire to a god I don’t even believe exists than I’ve ever prayed to Jesus.”

The middle voice means I am an active participant but the action began with another. We participate in the action, and we reap the benefits of the action. We are not entirely active. God’s action doesn’t depend on our initiative. Neither are we entirely passive. God has freely chosen to act almost exclusively in partnership with people. When we pray, we both participate in God’s action and benefit from God’s action.

But neither does God ask Adam and Eve to sit back and watch him rule. He invites their participation, even designing creation in such a way that it demands participation.

“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

“Our [Satan and his minions] cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”17