Tag Archives: prayer

Intercession

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There seems to be a fresh spirit blowing through our church. People speak of a discontent with the status quo, and a desire for a fresh infilling of God’s spirit. Every Sunday at the conclusion of the service we are given the opportunity to pray at the altar, and it’s not the slightest bit contrived or high-pressure — just an invitation to pray, for the church and for an increased openness to God. Talking with a friend from out of state the other day, we learned that the same thing is happening in his church. They’ve had full altars for several Sundays running, with many of those kneeling coming to the Lord for the first time.

I think too of what has happened at our old church, in which the strongholds are finally breaking. God is in the process of restoring and healing there. He is rescuing his flock, as promised in Jer. 23.

When I listen to people talk and think about what’s happening, I am reminded of Francis Frangipane’s teaching that there will be a great coming together, a great “repairing of the breach,” in the church before Christ returns. “There will be a time of unusual grace,” he writes, “in which the living church of Jesus makes ‘herself ready’ (Rev. 19:7).” He goes on to describe “an unparalleled season of preparation,”

in which those who are alive in Christ shall realize a level of holiness and blamelessness of the quality in which Jesus himself walked (I Thess. 3: 1-13; Eph. 5:26-27; Phil. 1:9-10). The result of this new level of holiness will be a new level of unity. Fault-finding and gossip will disappear. In their place will be intercession and love. Wholeness will return to the church.

All I can say is, that’s an exciting thought.

I mentioned that our pastor is emphasizing prayer, personal and corporate, in these days — for preparation and purification, for the lost, for the church, for boldness. I like Frangipane’s words about intercession:

You do not have to go to college to find fault with the church. In fact, if you remember, you could find fault with the church even before you became a Christian. You do not need skill to find fault. But if you want to be like Christ, you have to die for people’s sins. You have to be an intercessor who “stands in the gap.” The “gap” is the distance between the way things are and the way things should be. You stand in that space, cast down the accuser of the brethren, and intercede! Have you seen something that is wrong? It is only because Jesus wants you to stand in the gap and see it changed. That is the only reason.

If you want to be like Jesus, you have to die for people’s sins. I’ve never heard it expressed that way, but that packs a punch!

We don't yet see things clearly. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We'll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us! (I Cor. 13:12)

Hearing God

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Dallas Willard’s Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship With God is less a how-to book than a renovation of our commonly accepted ideas about prayer. Quietly but assuredly, it confronts the skepticism that God would speak regularly and understandably to his children. It meditates on the qualities of God’s voice and emphasizes the disciplines that give us (as Jesus called it) “ears to hear.” Above all it places prayer in the context of a life totally committed to walking with God, and growing in friendship with him:

In our attempts to understand how God speaks to us and guides us, we must above all hold on to the fact that this is to be sought only as a part of a certain kind of life, a life of loving fellowship with the King and his other subjects within the kingdom of the heavens.

There is too much here to summarize. Suffice it to say I’ve found lots of opportunity to journal as I’ve read this book. Willard is a writer of such insight and substance that one could almost wish there were a little more fluff mixed in, to give me an opportunity to catch a mental breath. It’s not written in a particularly lively or flashy style, nor is it geared to impress. But the wisdom in these pages insists on careful, unhurried reading with lots of opportunity to pause and stare out the window. It’s fitting that each chapter ends with some questions for reflection.

Probably what I found most nourishing was the picture of “our communicating cosmos,” the title of chapter 4. For the Christian, the world is created and sustained by the Word of God, and the discussion of just what that means — and how it relates to our communication with God — spoke to a kind of despair I am often aware of in myself. I don’t want to live in a giant machine, but the world of modern conception is a mechanical one whether you look at technology, science, economics or corporate life. I loved being reminded that it’s God’s world and resembles a thought more than a machine. (Of course it’s elaborated so much better in the book…)

Even among Christians, we can adopt deterministic attitudes not only toward God’s purposes, but toward his way of interacting with us. Willard coins the term Bible Deism to describe the belief that God has spoken through his written word, and then, basically, left. Such a belief leaves us essentially on our own. Though Willard repeatedly affirms the importance of reading and meditating on the Bible (at one point he calls it “the permanent address at which the Word of God may be found”), he reminds us that the Bible itself is full of evidence that God speaks through other means as well.

Nowhere do we find a chatty or idolatrous God who can be made to speak on demand or give us our desires after the manner of a genie in a bottle. Willard reveals a much more stern and glorious picture of a loving God, close by and eager to maintain a cooperative relationship with us, ready to honor our choices along the way — for better or for worse:

We are hindered in our progress toward becoming spiritually competent people by how easily we can explain away the movements of God toward us. They go meekly, without much protest. Of course his day will come, but for now he cooperates with the desires and inclinations that make up our character, as we are gradually becoming the kind of people we will forever be. That should send a chill down our spine.

10 Reasons to Pray

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From time to time, I’ve written posts that ask questions about prayer. I thought that for once I’d set aside my reflexively speculative turn of mind, and write an unabashedly affirmative and practical post about it. So without further ado, and from the heart, here goes:

  1. Prayer creates an opening for God to speak. How many times in prayer has my train of thought been interrupted, intruded upon, by a new thought, one that has never occurred to me before, coming from left field?
  2. Prayer releases hidden things from underground springs. Case in point: in preparation for a family member’s surgery this week, my whole family converged at our house to pray together about it. We were fine, talking and laughing, and we’d had a month to pray independently about the surgery. But the minute we bowed our heads together, we felt like weeping. Something deep down was released.
  3. Prayer brings peace. It reaffirms that all the questionables and scattered pieces of the picture are comprehended by one loving mind.
  4. Prayer brings clarity. Seldom do I get up from praying without that wrung-out, refreshed, more composed feeling that is to the soul what a good night’s sleep is to the body.
  5. Prayer reminds me of my smallness. Especially when I don’t have any “suggestions” for God — you know, multiple choice answers like we’re accustomed to giving him: “Lord, here’s the problem. I pray that you would do this; or this; or maybe this.” My best prayer sessions may begin in this frame of mind, but discard it by the end, transformed into simply, “Lord, here’s the problem. Please help. I have no clue. Open my eyes to see you at work.” Seeing my smallness is the beginning of spiritual health.
  6. Prayer makes me more compassionate. Interceding for others, I become more aware of them as people in their own right, independent of whatever significance they may have to me personally. It makes me more forgiving.
  7. Prayer opens my eyes to the eternal significance of the mundane.
  8. Prayer opens my ears to the “still small voice” that waits till the last moment before whispering, “Go this way,” or “Hold your tongue; that doesn’t need to be said,” or “Here’s an idea:”
  9. Prayer increases my capacity for God’s love, received and expressed, because it reminds me of his perspective on things and people — including myself.
  10. Prayer satisfies my deepest need — for God himself, as George MacDonald says. It reminds me that it’s less about receiving answers, but about receiving the communion and friendship from God that he designed us for. It’s not that this replaces answers. It just restores them to their proper, secondary place.

Lord, teach us to pray. Not how to pray, or what to say, or what rules to follow, but just  to pray.

The Practice of the Presence of God

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Recently, a few friends and I realized that though we all possessed this book, none of us had read it. We’d felt that we should read it, and perhaps had tried, but none of us had succeeded. Then both Dallas Willard and A.W. Tozer made passing references to it. I decided my time had come.

Regarded as a devotional classic, Brother Lawrence’s reflections on learning to pray without ceasing contain their share of wisdom and exhortation. What he describes — the art of doing all that his hand finds to do to the glory of God, the discipline of keeping his mind trained on God at all times — is a worthy subject. For anyone who has felt the inadequacy of prayer as exclusively the use of words to “talk to God,” these letters provide gentle confirmation that prayer includes thinking and doing and listening as well as talking. Dallas Willard describes prayer as “talking to God about what we are doing together,” and Brother Lawrence offers an extended example of this.

My copy begins with notes of four conversations with brother Lawrence, followed by fifteen of his letters. The collection was compiled by M. Beaufort, Grand Vicar to M. de Chalons. I found the notes difficult to absorb; they’re simply lists of insights gleaned from brother Lawrence. The letters, because they represented whole units of thought, were easier to deal with.

It’s a highly regarded little book. Nevertheless it bothered me to be reading letters Brother Lawrence writes “only upon the terms that you show my letter to nobody. If I knew that you would let it be seen, all the desire I have for your advancement would not be able to determine me to do it.” Maybe I should have stopped reading at that point. I found it interesting, too, that the letters compiled in this book are written by a man who speaks of himself more than once as “not finding [his] manner of life in books.” I couldn’t help wondering how he would feel if he knew that the extreme quietness and humility of his inner life had been made “famous” in a book.

I’m still puzzling over Tozer’s comment in his chapter on divine omnipresence that to the “convinced Christian,”

‘the practice of the presence of God’ consists not of projecting an imaginary object from within his own mind and then seeking to realize its presence; it is rather to recognize the real presence of the One whom all sound theology declares to be already there, an objective entity, existing apart from any apprehension of Him on the part of His creatures. The resultant experience is not visionary but real.

Is Tozer saying that Brother Lawrence practices imaginative projection? This wasn’t my impression of Brother Lawrence’s style of meditation. Maybe I missed something. Or maybe Tozer is warning against a popular misconception of the ideas in this book. ? If anyone else has read both books, please feel free to share your thoughts on this question.

Letters to Malcolm

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C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964) is a short book (only 124 pages). When I closed it last night and turned off my light to go to sleep, I felt disappointed. It hadn’t reached out and grabbed me by the throat, as I’ve come to expect Lewis’s books to do. But this morning, I begin to suspect that first response was misleading, because I’m still reflecting on some of its lines of thought. Perhaps this book is a seed, rather than a storm; its effects will be felt over time, rather than sweeping suddenly and dramatically onto the scene of my inner life.

As its title suggests, this is a series of letters, written to a fictitious friend named Malcolm. It’s the last book Lewis wrote before his death, and it was published posthumously. This site provides some interesting information regarding the book’s evolution in Lewis’s mind and pen. Notably, the book was welcomed enthusiastically by its publisher, and regarded as his best effort since The Problem of Pain. (I’ve gathered some excerpts from Letters in this post.)

Lewis defined his audience as recent converts with no regular habit of prayer. He felt that existing books about prayer were written for more mature Christians, and he tries in this volume to address what he sees as the most basic obstacles. A few examples: How do you picture God? How do your mental pictures function in prayer? Why ask for things if God already knows? How do you imagine what’s happening when a finite being talks to an infinite Being? What about emotion? Should I use my own words or someone else’s? And so on.

Lewis does a pretty good job of tailoring his ideas to his audience. I was struck here, as I usually am in reading Lewis, by his humility. For a member of the intelligentsia, and surely one of its more brilliant stars, to want to write for laymen at all is noteworthy, and his overriding desire to communicate rather than show off is always evident. He’s not preachy, though at times he tosses off Latin phrases and references to a breadth and depth of reading that, though commonplace to him, won’t be shared by his audience. And although the book is “practical” in the sense that it keeps its focus on prayer, it delves deeply into theology in the course of addressing practical questions.

In my personal valuation of the book, what I appreciate most is the way it views God and his creation (including people) as connected in an ongoing creative act. This was put forth in The Problem of Pain too. Without belaboring a long and ineffective paraphrase of Lewis’s thought, I’ll just say that he has a way of providing imaginative categories for understanding spiritual realities that has the potential to revolutionize one’s prayer life far more than any single argument on a particular point can do.

I’m glad I read this, and I would recommend it to anyone else who may have run aground in the attempt to maintain a meaningful prayer life. When all is said and done, I don’t close the book with a checklist (”The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Prayers,” or “Things to Do to Make God Do What I Want,” or “Heavenly Incantations”). I do close the book with a few very slight alterations in thinking — alterations at the deep level, where the rudder can change the course of the becalmed vessel in such a way as to pick up a whiff of welcome breeze.