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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tyler Staton
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October 31, 2023 - April 7, 2024
We are trapped in a communication breach. God created an inseparable connection between his mind and our action. We are Christ’s body on earth,11 but the line of communication was broken in the fall.
Philip Yancey says, “Of all the means God could have used, prayer seems the weakest, slipperiest, and easiest to ignore. So it is, unless Jesus was right in that most baffling claim. He went away for our sakes, as a form of power sharing, to invite us into direct communion with God and to give us a crucial role in the struggle against the forces of evil.”18 God has shared his power with you. He calls you a co-manager of heaven, walking around on earth. Prayer is how this moves from a biblical rumor to your actual, everyday experience.
To pray in Jesus’ name means to pray with recovered authority. He won back on our behalf the authority we were created to carry and lost.
Don’t get me wrong, we still do it, mainly out of guilt or obligation or because we know it’s good for us, making prayer the spiritual equivalent of eating celery.
But what if, according to Jesus, you’ve never really prayed? “Until now you have not asked for anything in my name.”22 What if you’ve never come before the Father, wearing the robes of the heir, carrying the standing and status of Jesus? What if you’ve never plundered the riches stored away in the heavenly vault? What if you’ve never pushed back the curse alongside God? It’s already been defeated. He’s just looking for intercessors to implement the already-secured victory.
God doesn’t need intercessors managing his creation. He’s not overwhelmed by all the responsibility of overseeing the world. He’s all-knowing, all-powerful, and completely outside of time. He’s got this. 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.
Pete Greig writes, “Intercession is impossible until we allow the things that break God’s heart to break our hearts as well.”
The first half of the prayer gets us into God’s reality. “The first three petitions make us participants in the being and action of God,” notes Eugene Peterson.24 The pronouns tell the story—your name, your kingdom, your will. Your, your, your. The three concluding prepositions invite God to return the favor—to get his heavenly reality into us while our feet remain planted here on the ground. There’s an obvious shift in the pronouns. Give us, forgive us, lead us. Us, us, us. Peterson continues, “Prayer involves us deeply and responsibly in all the operations of God. Prayer also involves God
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But God always purposes prayer to change the heart of the intercessor themselves. Profound answers to prayer come equally in the forms of God’s independent action and God’s partnering action to reform and work through the praying person. Intercessory prayer is often about what the intercessor has become after they’re finished praying.
Intercession is nothing more than ordinary love combined with sober humility.
and his needs exceed my capacity, so what fills the space between love and humility? Prayer.
Our appetite for the idea of prayer tends to be stronger than our stomach for the actual experience of prayer, unfortunately.
Most of us had never clicked our phones off, closed the door to a room, and talked to God for a full, uninterrupted hour before.
Your will be done. This part of the prayer is about releasing control.
Ask for filling from the Spirit in place of releasing, peace in place of anxiety, trust in place of fear,
As you open your hands, picture in your hands some part of your life, something you’re clenching tightly to and trying to force your own will on. When you are ready, flip over your hands, physically symbolizing letting go, releasing control to God, setting those circumstances at the feet of Jesus. Turn your hands upward once again, this time open to receive the fruit of the Spirit in place of what you just released.
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.
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.”
Christians today tend to fill their prayers with euphemisms and phrases only heard between “Dear God” and “Amen.” At some point, the church invented a prayer language, which has been passed on to many of us. Jesus teaches a way of prayer that invites the common language we hear at the deli counter, on the street corners, in business meetings, and over drinks with friends.
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.
Gustavo Gutiérrez says the basic diet of the healthy soul consists of prayer, justice, and gratitude.
The “daily bread” variety of prayers is also a battle cry, a declaration of war against one of the soul’s fiercest enemies—control.
Every last one of us lives with the insatiable desire to get control over our own lives, an inescapable attraction to that original lie, “You can be your own god.”
Like every variety of fallenness, control is a good desire that is out of order. Control is a surface-level symptom of a soul-level desire for fruitfulness. We want to live consequential lives. We want to make a marked difference in the world, to matter in both a personal and profound way. But when we clinch our jaws and put that desire into action, we end up exhausted and overwhelmed.
Many have a subconscious, internal monologue that goes something like this: I want to live a fruitful, meaningful life, but I’m just not sure I can trust God. I can trust him as my answer to the big theological questions, but I’m not sure if I can trust him with my dreams, my hopes, my plans. I can trust him ultimately, but I doubt I can trust him immediately. So, I’m white-knuckling my life with everything I’ve got—micromanaging my surroundings, my perception, my next step.
When we trust God with our worldview but not our current experience in the world, we are falling victim to the lure of control. How many of us are exhausted, overwhelmed, and chronically anxious because we’re trying to satisfy good desires by the wrong means?
Jesus teaches us to include the phrase “give us” in our prayers. Daily, as we ask, he weans us off our addiction to independence, our insistence on living under the illusion that what we most deeply desire we can feed ourselves all on our own.
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.
when Jesus says to the invalid, “Do you want to get well?” it’s like he’s saying, “I want to hear you say it.”
Why is God so bent on asking? If he knows what we need before we ask him, why does he want us to ask him? I believe there are two primary reasons for God’s insistence on hearing us say what he already knows we need: relationship and empowerment.
Communication is essential to relationship—particularly because asking insists on vulnerability. When you ask anyone for anything, you risk rejection or at least disappointment. Until we ask God for something, he can’t disappoint or surprise us. We cannot build trust with God without asking. We can’t relate to God if we never ask.
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.
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.
Spend a few minutes praying for specific needs and wants in your life. I challenge you, especially, to ask for that which you think is too small to bring to God—the work meeting you’re really hoping goes well, the need you barely believe God will meet, the email reply you keep checking your inbox for, the house you just put an offer on, or the rent check for which you don’t have enough in your bank account to write.
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.” 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. Alina was reeling from that very experience. She had encountered prayer in its rawest, most active form.
The aim is self-emptying—letting go and surrendering to a divine other, an enlightened peace and serenity beyond themselves. This is prayer in its most passive, cerebral form.
Jesus prays in what Eugene Peterson calls “the middle voice.”1 In the active voice, I (the subject) am the actor. I initiate the action. “I give advice.” In the passive voice, I (the subject) am being acted upon. I receive the action. “I am given advice.” In ancient Greek, the language of the original New Testament, there’s a third way of speaking—the middle voice. “I take advice.” The middle voice means, “I am an active participant, but the action did not begin with me. I am joining the action of another.”
Eugene Peterson, whose work is instrumental in defining these terms, writes: Prayer and spirituality feature participation, the complex participation of God and the human, his will and our wills. We do not abandon ourselves to the stream of grace and drown in the ocean of love, losing identity. We do not pull strings that activate God’s operations in our lives, subjecting God to our assertive identity. We neither manipulate God (active voice) nor are manipulated by God (passive voice). We are involved in the action and participate in its results but do not control or define it (middle voice).
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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. We join 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. Prayer is the recovery of our role in God’s created order, the recovery of our true identity and the relationship that defines that identity to us.
“I am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled.”6 It’s a stunning prayer of surrender and participation. It’s prayer in the middle voice among the mess of ordinary life.
Praying in the middle voice is a participation in the action of God. It is an acknowledgment of our place in his created order, recipients of his action and responders to it. God’s activity is like the current of the Mississippi River. We can agree with it, enter into it, and swim freely along with the water’s pull. We can also deny his activity, swim against the current, and fight it with the flailing of our arms and kicking of our feet. Either way, we’re going with the river. No one wins a fight against that kind of current. You can agree with it and cruise along assisted, or you can fight
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When Mary prayed with staggering faith, “I am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled,” she was transforming her everyday tasks—doctor visits, proper nutrition, and three trimesters of discomfort—into a participation in God’s redemption. She was cooperating with God’s activity in the world and within her....
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I want that too. I want what I see in Mary. I want to cooperate with God’s redemptive work in this broken world. I want to swim with the current, speeding along effortlessly, paddling my arms and kicking my legs but propelled on by a stronger current too. I want to cooperate with God’s work in me, inviting his formation of my desires, thoughts, emotions, and actions, all of them hopelessly disordered by the fallen lineage of which I’m a part. I want the Sp...
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There’s a phrase in Psalm 112 I hardly go a week without pondering: “Surely the righteous will never be shaken; they will be remembered forever. They will have no fear of bad news; their hearts are steadfast, trusting in the LORD.”8 No fear of bad news? Can you even imagine living with that sort of resilience? My psyche is fragile. There’s nothing I fear like bad news. Daily, I fall for the illusion that peace is having all the scattered parts of my life in just the right order, under the illusion of...
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Prayer is the means by which we open our inner world to the Spirit’s work within us and say, “Yes, have your way.” By praying in the middle voice, we consent to the deep work of the Spirit within, deeper even than language, forming us into resilient people in a fragile world, with no fear of bad news.
Do you know this life of consenting participation? As time passes and your own lack of control becomes more apparent, are you growing in resilience, or in anxiety? Are your prayers mostly the entitled demands of the active voice, insisting on deliverance from circumstances that don’t align with your plan? Or might your prayers be the apathetic mumblings of the passive voice, acting out a part in a spiritual drama in which you don’t actually believe you have a consequential, participatory role?
Intimacy leads to fruitfulness, not the other way around. 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.
Jesus himself said, “This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit.”12 But fruit comes from intimacy. Fruitfulness comes because we love Jesus and want to be with him. When that’s our heart, the expression of that relationship begins to look like justice in the world, compassion for others, and peace in our inner being.
N. T. Wright writes, “The Christian vocation is to be in prayer, in the Spirit, at the place the world is in pain.”15 Proximity to pain lends credibility and power to our prayers.
