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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tyler Staton
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March 21 - April 4, 2025
It only takes a moment to turn an everyday place into holy ground.
I discovered that I didn’t just “need” God in some ultimate sense; I liked God. I enjoyed his presence. I looked forward to his company.
If it’s right there, so plain and clear, why not take God up on such a satisfying exchange? Short answer: we don’t buy it.
Prayer always means submission. To pray is to willingly put ourselves in the unguarded, exposed position.
Prayer means the risk of facing silence where we’re addicted to noise.
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.
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.
You can read the description of every entrée on the menu, listen to the server’s eloquent description of the few that draw your attention, and carefully watch the plates coming out, eyeing the reactions of restaurant patrons as they take the first bite. But none of it will satisfy your hunger. Until you pick up a fork and knife and taste for yourself, it’s all just hearsay.
“You haven’t changed, so I’ll keep asking: ‘Do it again, Lord.’”
It may be the case that (1) Christians are assimilating to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload, which leads to (2) God becoming more marginalized in Christians’ lives, which leads to (3) a deteriorating relationship with God, which leads to (4) Christians becoming even more vulnerable to adopting secular assumptions about how to live, which leads to (5) more conformity to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload. And then the cycle begins again.
When we use others to meet our needs, we can’t love them. Codependent people don’t truly love each other. They’re using each other.
God has to break our attachments to the world so we can truly love the world. God has to break our attachments to the people in it who feed our egos so we can truly see others, know others, welcome others, and love others.
Jesus did nothing to diminish the reverence, nothing to minimize the power of God. Jesus made that powerful God knowable.
Eve didn’t only forget who God is; she lost her own identity as well. When she imagined God as something less than “Father,” she in turn imagined herself as something less than “daughter.”
“Merciful God, meet me here with your mercy.”
“Sin is a refused relationship with God that spills over into a wrong relationship with others.”
The good news is called grace; the bad news is called sin.
That love I can’t seem to outrun—it’s the only thing powerful enough to change me.
The leading surgeon came in to speak to the family. He wept as he recounted the moment in the operating room when the surgical team gave up and informally declared Van deceased. Then a nursing student, whose only role was to hand the surgeon the scissors, began praying for him in the operating room. Immediately, the surgeon located the bleeding tear he had been unsuccessfully searching for over the last five hours, and Van survived.
Prayer releases power.
You’re not Jesus. But if you’re a follower of Jesus, every single time you pray, you come before the Father clothed in the robe and crown of a ruler. In the eyes of heaven, you are filled with Jesus’ status and standing.
When God won your authority back, God was winning prayer back.
This is where so many of us get hung up when it comes to prayer—the asking part. Jesus insists on it though. Jesus insists on “world hunger” prayers and “parking space” prayers alike. He won’t have it any other way. Right in the middle of a prayer as cosmic as “hallowed be your name,” as apocalyptic as “your kingdom come,” as contrite as “forgive us,” and as spiritual as “deliver us from the evil one,” Jesus includes the unavoidably practical, circumstantial, and immediate “give us today our daily bread.”
If we pray for only big things, exclusively limiting our conversation with God to the objectively noble requests, we live a cramped spiritual life, with little room for the actual God we meet in Jesus. Gratitude is the God-given reward for those who can stomach praying for small things.
shameless audacity
fruit comes from intimacy.
Our lives are about intimacy. Fruitfulness is the collateral gain of that intimacy.
So just for the record, how did a shoe salesman with a fifth-grade education become one of the most influential evangelists in recorded history? Prayer.
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.
God, I asked you for a microwave once, and you gave it to me. I’ve asked you for a baby every day for years, and all I get is silence. Why are you so in touch with the trivial needs of my life and so distant from my deepest desire?”
Silence means God sees and hears but is willfully ignoring my distress. That’s what divine silence feels like to the praying person with their hands clasped.
I was tethered to Jesus because so much good was built on him too. If I were going to deny him, I couldn’t just deny his absence in this moment, but I’d have to deny his presence in so many profoundly good moments.
He does not simply tolerate our company or benevolently entertain our requests; he affirms our person, chooses our company, and delights in our presence.
“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.”
Don’t begin with grit or faith. Start with disappointment, naming your pain and need to God.
“Here’s my secret: pray with the heart of a lover and the discipline of a monk. That’s how you choose fidelity, and when you do, it quenches your desires in such a satisfying way that everything else becomes the boring part.”
Let your marriage sustain your love.”
What if at the center of your every day, you placed communion with the God who personifies love? What if the waking thoughts of your day were spent dreaming with God—dreams as big as “kingdom come” and as ordinary as “daily bread”?
None of us want to spend the rest of our lives cloistered off in socially irrelevant, spiritually dry weekly meetings. What’s the alternative? The radical reprioritization of prayer. And if the cost is foolishness, count me in. If the cost is sacrifice, count me in. If the cost is faith, count me in. If the cost is perseverance, count me in.
