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February 3 - March 9, 2019
Oddly enough, many people struggle to learn how to pray because they are focusing on praying, not on God.
Deep in our psyches we want an experience with God or an experience in prayer. Once we make that our quest, we lose God. You don’t experience God; you get to know him. You submit to him. You enjoy him. He is, after all, a person.
Don’t try to get the prayer right; just tell God where you are and what’s on your mind. That’s what little children do.
we might have to worry before we pray. Then our prayers will make sense. They will be about our real lives.
When Nathanael first hears about Jesus, he says the first thing that comes to his mind: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46). It is the pure, uncensored Nathanael. When Jesus greets Nathanael, you can almost see Jesus smiling when he says, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit!” (1:47). Jesus ignores the fact that Nathanael has judged Jesus’ entire family and friends in Nazareth. He simply enjoys that Nathanael is real, without guile, a man who doesn’t pretend.
Many Christians pray mechanically for God’s kingdom (for missionaries, the church, and so on), but all the while their lives are wrapped up in their own kingdoms. You can’t add God’s kingdom as an overlay to your own.
How do we structure our adult conversations? We don’t. Especially when talking with old friends, the conversation bounces from subject to subject. It has a fun, meandering, play-like quality. Why would our prayer time be any different?
Consistency is more important than length. If you pray five minutes every day, then the length of time will slowly grow.
The gospel uses my weakness as the door to God’s grace. That is how grace works.
Prayer is simply not important to many Christians because Jesus is already an add-on.
What does an unused prayer link look like? Anxiety. Instead of connecting with God, our spirits fly around like severed power lines, destroying everything they touch.
I am not called to put on rose-colored glasses and see everything in life as pretty and good and uplifting. Rather, I am called to trust that God sees what I see. In fact, he sees beyond what I see.
Like Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, cynicism looks too long into the Dark Lord’s crystal ball.
Paul’s own life reflects a spirit of thanksgiving. Almost every time he describes how he prayed for people, he mentions thanksgiving.
Eliab lacks purity of heart, so he presumes David lacks it as well. We see the same dynamics in the Garden of Eden. Satan accuses God of cynical motivations, when in fact Satan cynically twists God’s commands to his own ends. Cynicism is the seed for Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God, and it is the seed for our own personal rebellions. While attempting to unmask evil, the cynic creates it.
If you are going to enter this divine dance we call prayer, you have to surrender your desire to be in control, to figure out how prayer works.
I find that the closer my prayers are to the heart of God, the more powerfully and quickly they are answered.
His primary concern was to get us into the game. Start asking. Don’t just ask for spiritual things or “good” things. Tell God what you want. Before you can abide, the real you has to meet the real God. Ask anything.
God delights in giving his children good gifts, including vacation homes. But he wants to be part of all the decisions we make. He wants our material needs to draw us into our soul needs. This is what it means to abide—to include him in every aspect of our lives.
I prefer the biblical term wisdom to our more common term guidance. Guidance means I’m driving the car and asking God which way to go. Wisdom is richer, more personal. I don’t just need help with my plans; I need help with my questions and even my own heart.
I often find that when God doesn’t answer a prayer, he wants to expose something in me. Our prayers don’t exist in a world of their own. We are in dialogue with a personal, divine Spirit who wants to shape us as much as he wants to hear us. For God to act unthinkingly with our prayers would be paganism, which says the gods do our will in response to our prayers.
God customizes deserts for each of us.
Suffering burns away the false selves created by cynicism or pride or lust. You stop caring about what people think of you. The desert is God’s best hope for the creation of an authentic self.
When the story isn’t going your way, ask yourself, What is God doing? Be on the lookout for strange gifts.
gospel stories always have suffering in them. American Christianity has an allergic reaction to this part of the gospel. We’d love to hear about God’s love for us, but suffering doesn’t mesh with our right to “the pursuit of happiness.” So we pray to escape a gospel story, when that is the best gift the Father can give us. When I was sitting on the plane thinking, Everything has gone wrong, that was the point when everything was going right. That’s how love works.
Nothing in the modern mind encourages us to see the invisible links binding together all of life. We have no sense that we live in the presence of a loving Father and are accountable for all we do.
I am not naturally a people person, but when I regularly pray for people using some kind of written system, my heart tunes in to them. I am bolder about asking them how things are going because they are already on my heart.
When I begin praying Christ into someone’s life, God often permits suffering in that person’s life. If Satan’s basic game plan is pride, seeking to draw us into his life of arrogance, then God’s basic game plan is humility, drawing us into the life of his Son. The Father can’t think of anything better to give us than his Son. Suffering invites us to join his Son’s life, death, and resurrection. Once you see that, suffering is no longer strange. Peter writes, “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.
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Bob is sincerely trying to help by pointing out a need in my life. It helps me to know that Bob relates by criticizing. For folks like him, it’s satisfying to restore moral order to the universe.
When people call their own thoughts or feelings “God’s voice,” it puts them in control of God and ultimately undermines God’s Word by elevating human intuition to the status of divine revelation.
The problem is that the Holy Spirit comes in on the same channel as the world, the flesh, the Devil. The Lord does lead—we just need to be careful that we aren’t using the Lord as a cover for our own desires. If we frequently interpret random thoughts and desires as “God speaking,” we get weird.
I’ve come to realize that the more distant I am from a story, the less I know what God is doing. God will help me with my story but not someone else’s.
There are times when I can see what God is doing in another person’s life, but telling that person would crush his or her spirit. I suspect God is at times silent about stories because we just can’t handle it.
