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Oddly enough, many people struggle to learn how to pray because they are focusing on praying, not on God. Making prayer the center is like making conversation the center of a family mealtime. In prayer, focusing on the conversation is like trying to drive while looking at the windshield instead of through it. It freezes us, making us unsure of where to go. Conversation is only the vehicle through which we experience one another. Consequently, prayer is not the center of this book. Getting to know a person, God, is the center.
When we slow down to pray, we are immediately confronted with how unspiritual we are, with how difficult it is to concentrate on God.
Jesus opens his arms to his needy children and says, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28, NASB). The criteria for coming to Jesus is weariness. Come overwhelmed with life. Come with your wandering mind. Come messy.
The criteria for coming to Jesus is weariness. Come overwhelmed with life. Come with your wandering mind. Come messy.
In bringing your real self to Jesus, you give him the opportunity to work on the real you, and you will slowly change. The kingdom will come. You’ll end up less selfish.
Jesus slows down and concentrates on one person at a time. The way he loves people is identical to the way he prays to his Father. This one-person focus is how love works. Love incarnates by slowing down and focusing on just the beloved. We don’t love in general; we love one person at a time. I think of that almost every morning as I kneel in front of Kim and lace up her muddy work boots. It is a daily foot-washing service for my soul.
Praying out loud can be helpful because it keeps you from getting lost in your head. It makes your thoughts concrete. But it is more than technique; it is also a statement of faith. You are audibly declaring your belief in a God who is alive.
When I first heard Martin Luther’s comment that he couldn’t get by unless he had three or four hours of prayer daily,
If you are not praying, then you are quietly confident that time, money, and talent are all you need in life. You’ll always be a little too tired, a little too busy. But if, like Jesus, you realize you can’t do life on your own, then no matter how busy, no matter how tired you are, you will find the time to pray.
If I didn’t pray deliberately and reflectively for members of my family by name every morning, they’d kill one another.
It didn’t take me long to realize that I did my best parenting by prayer. I began to speak less to the kids and more to God. It was actually quite relaxing.
You don’t need self-discipline to pray continuously; you just need to be poor in spirit.
As your heart or your circumstances generate problems, keep generating prayer.
When you stop trying to control your life and instead allow your anxieties and problems to bring you to God in prayer, you shift from worry to watching.
Satan’s first recorded words are cynical. He tells Adam and Eve, “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” (Genesis 3:5). Satan is suggesting that God’s motives are cynical. In essence, he tells them, “God has not been honest about the tree in the middle of the garden. The command not to eat from the tree isn’t for your protection; God wants to protect himself from rivals.
Satan seductively gives Adam and Eve the inside track—here is what is really going on behind closed doors. Such is the deadly intimacy that gossip offers.
Because cynicism sees what is “really going on,” it feels real, authentic.
A praying life is just the opposite. It engages evil. It doesn’t take no for an answer. The psalmist was in God’s face, hoping, dreaming, asking. Prayer is feisty. Cynicism, on the other hand, merely critiques. It is passive, cocooning itself from the passions of the great cosmic battle we are engaged in. It is without hope.
Genuine faith comes from knowing my heavenly Father loves, enjoys, and cares for me. Naïve optimism is groundless. It is childlike trust without the loving Father.
she observed, “I make the jump from optimism to darkness so quickly because I am not grounded in a deep, abiding faith that God is in the matter, no matter what the matter is. I am looking for pleasant results, not deeper realities.”
In naïve optimism we don’t need to pray because everything is under control, everything is possible. In cynicism we can’t pray because everything is out of control, little is possible.
Either I thanked God or I gave into bitterness, the stepchild of cynicism. There was no middle ground.
The same God permits his Son to be stripped naked so we could be clothed. God is not cynical in the face of evil. He loves.
Jesus’ brother James comes to the rescue and balances out Jesus’ extravagant promises. James describes two dangers in asking. The first danger, on the left side of the following chart, is Not Asking. James writes, “You do not have, because you do not ask.” The second danger is Asking Selfishly: “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (4:2-3). We can fall off either cliff.
Those who err on the Not Asking side surrender to God before they are real with him. Sometimes we try so hard to be good that we aren’t real. The result is functional deism, where we are separated from God. The real you doesn’t encounter the real God.
It’s very tempting to survive the desert by taking the bread of bitterness offered by Satan—to maintain a wry, cynical detachment from life, finding a perverse enjoyment in mocking those who still hope.
To live in our Father’s story, remember these three things: 1. Don’t demand that the story go your way. (In other words, surrender completely.) 2. Look for the Storyteller. Look for his hand, and then pray in light of what you are seeing. (In other words, develop an eye for Jesus.) 3. Stay in the story. Don’t shut down when it goes the wrong way.
We reverse the kingdom pattern of ask (seed), watch (growth), and work (harvest). Instead of working in partnership with God, we attack the problem. We tell Bob what a pain in the neck he is. Then we watch the relationship disintegrate. Finally, when nothing is working, we might pray. But by that time we’ve concluded that Bob is hopeless and God is powerless. We decide that prayer doesn’t work.
