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

by Tyler Staton

Prayer can’t be mastered. 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.

“Silence is frightening because it strips us as nothing else does, throwing us upon the stark realities of our life,” writes Dallas Willard. “And in that quiet, what if there turns out to be very little to ‘just us and God’?”5

Jesus hasn’t revealed a God we can perfectly understand, but he has revealed a God we can perfectly trust. Trust is the certainty that the listening God hears and cares. I trust the God who, even when he doesn’t make the suffering go away, wears the suffering alongside me. Trusting the God revealed in Jesus means silence is real, but it’s not forever.

Immanuel, God with us!!

The one, simple assurance that fills our prayers with power is “the Lord is near.”

When it comes to prayer, you can read all the classics, study the revival stories, and treasure up every biblical insight. You can memorize the facts. Or you can live daily in relationship with God through prayer, insist on processing the extraordinary, the devastating, and all the mundanity in the middle with the eagerly listening Father. Guess which method is more effective? Prayer is learned by discovery.

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.”1

Technology has continued to advance and save us time. They got that part right. What they misjudged was how we’d use it. We’ve spent that time on things other than deep rest.

The Christian philosopher Dallas Willard was once asked, “What do I need to do to be spiritually healthy?” After a long pause, he offered this (now famous) response: “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

So a prayer like “Let me know how fleeting my life is” is not self-deprecating or depressive; it’s self-aware victory. To turn our fast lives into stillness and our busy minds into solitude is an act of rebellion against the curse that runs through our veins.

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.”

Adoration given to God is always given back to us. As we lift our eyes, recovering a true view of God’s identity, we also recover his view of

us.

When we call God our Father, we are equally remembering that we are completely, uniquely loved. 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. When we pray, “Our Father,” we are really asking him to remind us again today that we are loved.

“Our Father” is a reminder of God’s intimacy; “hallowed” is a reminder of his separateness, his majesty, his incomprehensible greatness.

In fact, this “hallowing” business isn’t for God’s benefit at all; it’s for my own benefit, and yours. For my prayer to have any sense of coherence, I need to start by “hallowing” because our prayers come from the setting of the world.

Adoration is not always the overflow of our hearts. In fact, it rarely is. It is an act of rebellion against the empty promises of this world and of defiance in the face of circumstances.

Why were you created? The biblical answer is “to rule.” And this is not a manipulative, power-hungry sort of “rule.” It’s an imago dei (image of God) kind of authority, ruling on earth as a direct reflection of God’s Trinitarian character. 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.

New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado writes, “To pray in Jesus’ name . . . means that we enter into Jesus’ status in God’s favour, and invoke Jesus’ standing with God.”19 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.

Intercessory prayer simultaneously restores our world and restores the God-given identity that was breathed into us first. It is the active experience of restoring creation.

God doesn’t need intercessors; God chooses intercessors.

We dream of a God who brings heaven to earth; God dreams of praying people to share heaven with.

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.

The biblical story ends in relationship. Currently, the work of the church includes mission, evangelism, perseverance, and justice, but a day will come when all those things will be done away with. Heaven, at its simplest, is eternity with God with no work left to do. The mission is accomplished, the evangelism done, justice the forever reality, and perseverance no longer needed. God’s end game is just to be with you, to enjoy you forever, and to be enjoyed by you forever.

God is our Father. He’s got a lot going on—a whole lot more than our minds can grasp at any given moment. And he still loves to give us what we want, even if it’s parking spaces. Ask. That’s all he wants from us.