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

by Tyler Staton

Prayer is the free choice to be with the Father, to prefer his company. In our desire for certain outcomes or our confusion over not getting certain outcomes, we are tempted to begin there. But we cannot brush past simply being with the Father and arrive at anything close to the sort of prayer Jesus won back for us. Prayer starts with presence.

“Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God’s point of view.”1 Before we open our lips and say a single word to God, we have to discover the proper posture.

The purpose is consent. It is the daily practice of consenting to the work of God’s Spirit,

When we pray, we step out of the fundamental reality of the world and into the fundamental reality of God, so we must begin by inviting God to reorder our affections.

One of the biggest mistakes we’ve made in the modern church is to reimagine spiritual maturity as the need to confess less. The unspoken assumption is, “As I ascend in relationship with God, I confess less because I have less to confess.” 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. Spiritual maturity means more confession, not less. Maturity is discovering the depths of my personal brand of fallenness and the depths to which God’s grace has really penetrated, even without me knowing it.

Simply and clearly ask that God’s kingdom will come where it is absent—friends

Two claims are hidden in this turn of phrase. The first is that heaven is the engine room for our prayers. Everything we can think to ask for finds its source in heaven. The second claim is that earth, the very ground we stand on while uttering our requests, is where the action happens. Heaven is the engine room, but earth is where our prayers are answered, are made visible. Earth is the atmosphere that heaven invades in response to our requests.

When it comes to any relational being, we’re gonna have to get comfortable with mystery. We will never know anyone so thoroughly that there’s no mystery left. I will know and love my wife for the rest of my life, and I’ll never reach the end of her. I’ll never eliminate the mystery in my most intimate relationship.

Our faith will be rocked when we see people praying with greater devotion to a false god than we pray to the one true God.

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.

I don’t (and never could) understand everything about God. 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.

The Bible is not a rule book or a set of directions; it’s a love story—a romantic, courageous love story we’re invited to believe.

“Teach us to pray.” And Jesus responds, essentially, “Pray to God more intimately than you think you’re allowed to because this is about love, and center your life according to a disciplined rhythm of prayer because fidelity is the soil that love grows in.” I hear Jesus saying, “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.” Jesus was saying to them and to us, “Pray like a bunch of wild, unruly monks.”