talking in the dark 18

Our church journeyed through January with a focus on prayer. Our preaching series was “Questions of Prayer,” which aimed to be honest about questions we share about prayer and give us orientation points for our praying. An optional step past Sunday morning is working through Steve Harper’s book, Talking in the Dark: Praying When Life Doesn’t Make Sense.

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After Steve’s beginning reflection on the difference between thinking as a “self” versus thinking as a “person” (see previous post), he moves into the practical application of that point in how the Lord’s Prayer can shape our praying. He says, “To be a person is to be like God, who is a Person. And this likeness to God (imago dei) is the starting point for praying for ourselves.” (p. 102)

Our

When we conceive of ourselves as a “self” we are considering ourselves isolated individuals. But when recognize that we are persons, we see that we are in relationship—first, to God, and second, to others. Steve witnesses to this insight’s effect on his praying: “Therefore, I will pray for myself with the spirit that says, ‘God, I ask only those things for myself that will glorify you and make me a fuller and finer member of the human family.’”

Father

Praying in a relational act, not a transactional one. It is family conversation with the God who is the parent any good father or mother strives to be like and any poor father or mother should have been. Good parents work for what is best for the child, whether the child understands and agrees to that or not. “The One to whom we pray is the one who made us, loves us, and wants to do more for us than we can ask or imagine” (p. 103).

In Heaven

This does not mean that “God is distant or aloof” (p. 104). Rather, “when I prayer for myself, I pray against the backdrop of the eternal and unchanging.” We can depend on God, and our praying can lean into God’s dependability in the face of our immediate reality.

Thy kingdom come / Thy Will Be Done on Earth as it is in Heaven

There is a realm in which God’s reign is perfectly followed and lived out. We want our world to be more like that. I once heard Dallas Willard say something to this effect: the point is not merely about getting us to heaven when we die; the point is getting heaven into us while we’re alive on earth. Amen. Praying the Lord’s Prayer this way asks for God to get heaven into us—individually and collectively—while we are on earth. “Rather than being egocentric selves, we are persons abandoned to God—people who want God’s will to be done, not their own. We pray for ourselves as consecrated and yielded selves.” (p. 105)

In the next post, we’ll take up the second half of the Lord’s Prayer.

talking in the dark 17

Our church journeyed through January with a focus on prayer. Our preaching series was “Questions of Prayer,” which aimed to be honest about questions we share about prayer and give us orientation points for our praying. An optional step past Sunday morning is working through Steve Harper’s book, Talking in the Dark: Praying When Life Doesn’t Make Sense.

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Chapter 8 of Talking in the Dark is titled “Praying for Yourself.” Steve begins by sharing the concern of a woman who attended a prayer workshop he was leading. “She remarked that she was weary of praying ‘give me, get me’ prayers” (p. 101). I’ll share the first part of his response here, which deals with our misunderstanding of ourselves.

It is, of course, alright to pray for ourselves. Plenty of biblical stories tell of people praying for themselves and many of the psalms are prayers offered to God with specific requests.

When there is darkness in praying for ourselves, what is at issue?

Steve tells us that the problem is our secular, rather than biblical, notion of the self: “The secular notion tells me I am an independent, individual self that is supposed to be affirmed and actualized. In other words, we are egocentric.” (p. 102)

But the bible tells a different story. “Instead of the psychologized understanding that I am a self, the Bible teaches that I am a person.” To say we are persons is to say that we are made in the image of God (imago dei is the Latin phrase). Understanding ourselves as persons in the image of God, imago dei, is square one for praying for ourselves. “Fundamentally, imago dei means that I am a being in relation to others. …As a self, it is possible to understand life in isolation. But when I realize that I am a person, I understand that I am always in community.”

When realize that we are “persons in community” rather than “individualized selves,” the way we pray for ourselves is different. The “give me, get me” prayers the woman was weary of are the prayers of an egocentric individualized self. The truer prayer for oneself as a person is praying that seeks what will help us glorify God and become “a fuller and finer member of the human family.”

In the next post, we’ll look at how the Lord’s Prayer helps us to pray as persons.

talking in the dark 16

Our church journeyed through January with a focus on prayer. Our preaching series was “Questions of Prayer,” which aimed to be honest about questions we share about prayer and give us orientation points for our praying. An optional step past Sunday morning is working through Steve Harper’s book, Talking in the Dark: Praying When Life Doesn’t Make Sense.

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Today I want to share one last post on discoveries concerning intercessory prayer, praying for others. I have only one discovery from Steve remaining to share, but it is a practical one with more application options.

The Management of Prayer

That may seem like an awkward discovery to make, but Steve points out that “the mystery and magnitude of prayer can overwhelm us if we are not careful.” Going through a lengthy list on a daily basis can become stale or seem needlessly redundant. That sounds awful to say, but I’m willing to bet that most people have felt that way and, of course, felt guilty about feeling that way.

But practical organization is okay, and maybe even to be preferred. Steve tells us that “John Wesley divided his intercessions over a seven-day cycle.” He had a focus for each day—virtues to cultivate and persons or situations for which to pray.

Steve reports his own pattern for years: “to use a weekly cycle with people and topics recurring once a week.” In addition to this, he includes a monthly prayer list for people and ministries to lift up in prayer.

Also, prayer guides can be helpful. Different Christian traditions have different approaches that can be used to structure one’s praying. The Book of Common Prayer is a good example, as is Phyllis Tickle’s The Divine Hours series of prayer books. Steve reports using various resources from Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox traditions, adding, “I do this as a way of ensuring that I am praying with the whole church, not just my preferred part of it” (p. 97).

Scripture itself is a rich resource for intercessory prayer. “Weaving its way throughout my intercession is my growing comfort in praying the scriptures back to God. …Sometimes I find that praying the Word gives me a perspective on my intercession that I would not have if I had limited my praying to my own words.”

Final Thoughts

Most important is developing a heart for intercessory prayer. “I believe it is an expression of God’s heart for the world,” Steve writes. And intercession can be our point of contact with God’s heart that moves us to action. The missionary Frank Laubach “began each day praying, ‘God, what are you doing in the world today that I can help you with?’” (p. 98). That is a prayer that seeks how God may want to use us as an answer to intercessory prayer—our prayers, or others’.

Finally, Steve reminds us that whatever the difficulties we might have understanding intercessory prayer, “it is not the most difficult to practice. …Here’s a suggestion: use the time you might normally spend trying to figure out intercessory prayer to pray for others.”

talking in the dark 15

Our church journeyed through January with a focus on prayer. Our preaching series was “Questions of Prayer,” which aimed to be honest about questions we share about prayer and give us orientation points for our praying. An optional step past Sunday morning is working through Steve Harper’s book, Talking in the Dark: Praying When Life Doesn’t Make Sense.

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We pick up today where we left off in the last post on intercessory prayer, or praying for others. When we wonder about intercessory prayer—how it works and whether we are making a difference—we make several discoveries when we ask our questions as earnest seekers rather than cynics. In the last post, we once again acknowledged mystery. Here are some more discoveries when we investigate intercessory prayer.

The Need to Be Absolutely Honest With Your Questions

Steve shares a helpful tool for assessing how honest we are before God. Imagine the pain chart at the doctor’s office or hospital room with the words “no pain” under a smiley face and “worst possible pain” under a contorted face. When a patient is asked where they are on the chart, they must be honest. Their responses determine the treatment. “Likewise, in prayer, if we lose honestly with ourselves and our situation, we determine who much assistance we are willing to receive from the Great Physician. …Nothing good comes from… denial” (p. 91).

Realizing That Intercession Has Been the Consistent Practice of God’s People

“The saints prayed for others, and they did so believing they were doing something that pleased God and had meaning” (p. 92). They did so in good times and bad, in encouraging conditions or discouraging situations. Further, not only was Jesus a constant intercessor in his earthly ministry (even praying for his crucifiers from the cross!), Hebrews 7:25 teaches that he continues his ministry of intercession at the right hand of God.

So why not learn about intercession from the many that practiced it faithfully? “We want to learn from the best examples [the saints], not the worst ones [the skeptics]. Why should prayer be any different?” Look to church history for solid examples. Renovare’s Devotional Classics and Spiritual Classics collections are a great resource here.

Learning to Pray Your Heart’s Desire

When we don’t know what to pray for in a given situation, perhaps because we’re not confident about what we should pray for, it is okay to simply pray what we desire and entrust the situation or the person to God’s wisdom and care. Instead of getting bogged down in what we don’t know and haven’t figured out, just act on what we do know. Honestly praying for our heart’s desire and trusting God for the best outcome—physical healing, some kind of provision, etc—is a good way to pray. “Such intercession puts prayer in the right arrangement,” Steve reminds us. “Our part is to pray; God’s part is to weave everything into the tapestry of the divine will” (p. 95).

talking in the dark 14

Our church journeyed through January with a focus on prayer. Our preaching series was “Questions of Prayer,” which aimed to be honest about questions we share about prayer and give us orientation points for our praying. An optional step past Sunday morning is working through Steve Harper’s book, Talking in the Dark: Praying When Life Doesn’t Make Sense.

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Chapter 7 is titled, “Praying for Others,” and deals with intercessory prayer. Here there are plenty of questions. The most obvious and plainly stated is this: What difference does it make? Since the connection between intercession and answer is not as predictable as we would like, this is a reasonable question.

But our motive in asking it is critical. Are we asking as cynics, always questioning but never praying (honest frustration is not the same as cynicism)? Or are we genuinely interested in growing as pray-ers? The latter motive is clearly the healthier stance. Approached from this angle, there are several discoveries to be made. We’ll begin looking at them here, and finish looking at them in the next post or two.

We Find Mystery

This is a truth we’ve been acknowledging steadily through this book, but it’s worth saying again. But Steve helpfully points out that he lives with mystery in lots of areas of life: “We operate machinery, use technology, travel…, do business, and form relationships without understanding how everything works. But we press on” (pp. 88-89). The same is true in intercessory prayer. We don’t understand how everything works, but we press on, hopefully. Admitting that some people struggle harder than others with unanswered prayers, Steve confesses, “I must tell you that intercessory prayer was saved for me when I realized that I did not have to understand it in order to practice it” (p. 89). That strikes me as just the sort of obvious and useful point that we need to hear when we wrestle with the question, “What difference does it make?”

Here’s a final admission about the mystery of intercessory prayer that I found convicting and helpful. Steve writes: “I had to come to the place where I could acknowledge that faith I can understand is actually faith in myself, not in God. One of the prerequisites for intercession is an ‘unknowing’ that takes me out of the center of things and allows God to dwell there” (p. 89).

talking in the dark 13

Our church journeyed through January with a focus on prayer. Our preaching series was “Questions of Prayer,” which aimed to be honest about questions we share about prayer and give us orientation points for our praying. An optional step past Sunday morning is working through Steve Harper’s book, Talking in the Dark: Praying When Life Doesn’t Make Sense.

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In chapter 6, “Praying When Life Suddenly Changes,” Steve Harper shares the story of a woman from a church he served as pastor. Her cancer returned about a year after he arrived and he and the church journeyed with she and her husband through her final battle with the disease. God used her deep faith and seasoned prayer life to infuse this difficult journey with grace and wisdom. Toward the end of her life, she and her husband elected to try a last-ditch measure to be cured. As she was being placed on the airplane, Steve felt the need to offer some words, getting out, “Joy, it’s going to be okay.” “And that’s when it happened,” Steve writes. “From a depth of reality only Joy was experiencing, she spoke back to me: ‘Steve, it is okay.’ We all knew what she meant.” (p. 78)

Joy’s example clearly offers a witness concerning praying when life suddenly changes. Here are four insights from Steve’s journey with her through her illness as her pastor.

We Pray in Relation to Stored-Up Resources

Living in the grace of God over the long haul definitely made it easier to continue drawing on God’s grace for this difficult struggle. Steve exhorts the reader: “If I could offer you one piece of advice about praying when life suddenly changes, I would say, ‘Don’t wait for the change to occur.’” (p. 79) Start digging the well now. Start the habit now. Start the maturing process now. Several times I have imagined that one benefit of becoming a contemplative and mystic now would be preparation if I become incapacitated one day. Steve notes, “Jesus did not use prayer like a rip cord on a parachute; rather, he practiced it regularly for spiritual nourishment” (p. 80).

Welcome Fresh Waves of Grace into the New Reality of Life

They reached a point when Joy would often reject his offers of prayer during a visit, observing that enough prayer has already been offered. Was she dejected and dismissing the power of prayer? No, she was aware of God’s presence through the whole visit. “She was living out the reality of the Twenty-Third Psalm, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.” Knowing the presence of Christ in deeper ways does not require words.

Understanding God’s Comfort Enables Discovery of Blessings along the Way

Steve names what we may have noticed in our experiences: “Something happens when life changes suddenly. … Values change; conversations change; perspectives shift. We use our time differently. People become much more precious to us than possessions” (p. 84). The blessing of adjusted perspective is held together by prayer—prayers of gratitude, prayers to make the most of our time. “Prayer becomes a spiritual Velcro to which other things stick.”

Prayer Takes Us to the Place Where We are Healed of the Need to be Healed

Even while diligently taking advantage of the best medical care available at every turn, Joy reached a point where “she no longer had to get well.” This is full trust—so trusting in Jesus that we know our life is in him no matter what happens to us next.

“Today,” Steve tells us, “we greatly need to regain the theology of ‘holy dying,’ …We do not have to have health restored in order to have hope” (p. 85). Because of Jesus’ victory through the cross and resurrection, whether or not it “will be okay” as we usually mean it, “it is okay” already.

talking in the dark 12

Our church journeyed through January with a focus on prayer. Our preaching series was “Questions of Prayer,” which aimed to be honest about questions we share about prayer and give us orientation points for our praying. An optional step past Sunday morning is working through Steve Harper’s book, Talking in the Dark: Praying When Life Doesn’t Make Sense.

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Today I’m continuing with the focus of Chapter 5, Praying When You’re Dry. In it, Steve Harper looks at the prayer of Asaph in Psalm 77, a psalm that speaks to dealing with times in the spiritual life during which we feel as if “God has moved away and left no forwarding address” (p. 67). In the last post, I shared the first two insights from Asaph’s prayer; now we’ll look at the last three.

Seeks the Cause of His Dryness

Check verses 7-9 of the psalm. Asaph’s questions are tough and direct. And genuinely interested in the answer, it seems. Steve shares his personal experience, the other poignant example I mentioned yesterday. He was teaching spiritual formation and prayer in seminary and writing a devotional commentary on the book of Acts, and was also enduring his longest and toughest experience of spiritual dryness, the feeling of God’s absence. Though he never stopped believing what he was teaching and writing was true, “the frustration was that I was offering a view of God to others that was not being confirmed in my day-to-day life” (p. 73).

Not harboring unconfessed sin, Steve wanted to know the reason for his dryness. One day God’s presence returned to him simply and unceremoniously, and returned with a question: “Do you know what your problem has been?” Of course he did!

“And I heard deep in my being: ‘Steve, your problem is that you have been working for me, but you haven’t been walking with me. You need to realize that I do not have employees in my kingdom. I have only beloved sons and daughters.’” (p. 74)

Do you need to hear that word from God?

Used Memory to Hold Him Secure

In Psalm 77, Asaph leans into his memory (and the collective memory of the Hebrew people) of what God has done for him in the past while his present experience is not strong. Remembering significant points in our journey with Christ is important for us too. Feelings ebb and flow, so while they are a gift in their own right they are not designed to uphold the whole of our Christian walk. We need to pause and remember God’s faithfulness and love and grace as we have experienced it, as we have seen him at work in others, and certainly the witness of Jesus’ loving sacrifice in the Bible. This is where the Sacrament of Communion plays a significant role in our walk. In it we remember—reenact in fact—Jesus’ last supper with the twelve disciples, and all that it symbolizes and foreshadowed.

Dryness Does Not Last Forever

“It is not a terminal disease,” Steve writes (p. 76). Grounded in his remembering of God’s grace and power for him, Asaph seems to regain some vitality in the rehearsing of God’s faithfulness.  We need not give up on God. We need to trust his use of our season of spiritual dryness and trust that it will come to a close in his time.

talking in the dark 11

Our church journeyed through January with a focus on prayer. Our preaching series was “Questions of Prayer,” which aimed to be honest about questions we share about prayer and give us orientation points for our praying. An optional step past Sunday morning is working through Steve Harper’s book, Talking in the Dark: Praying When Life Doesn’t Make Sense.

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Having looked at problems we face in our praying, we now begin looking at expressions of prayer. Chapter 5 deals with “praying when you’re dry.”

Steve shares two poignant personal stories on the subject of experiencing spiritual dryness. I’ll share one in this post, and one in the next. The first is from a church leader while Steve was a young pastor who confides in him about wrestling with feelings of spiritual dryness and the absence of God. Though this man was faithful in worship, administrative meetings, fellowship events and most everything else, he wouldn’t be attending the prayer study that had recently launched. Steve writes, “He just didn’t have it in him to try to pray to a God who was becoming more and more distant to him” (p. 66).

Spiritual dryness feels as if “God has moved away and left no forwarding address” (p. 67).  Psalm 77 is a prayer/song written by Asaph. It gives voice to the experience of spiritual dryness. I’ll share a couple of insights from this psalm here, and share the rest in the next post.

Realize Spiritual Dryness is Normal

Steve recounts, speaking from his own experiences of spiritual dryness, “I wish I had met him (Asaph), or someone like him, sooner. I mistakenly believed dryness was a sign of drifting or defection” (p. 68). He viewed dryness as “the warning light on the dashboard of my car,” telling him to check the engine for some problem. Noting that, yes, dryness can be a result of sin, Steve is just as quick to point out that it isn’t the only cause. In fact, there is ample evidence from the lives of saints that spiritual dryness also happens for other reasons and purposes.

But, again, we must keep praying, even though spiritual dryness makes a person feel like abandoning prayer altogether. But this would be a mistake. “It is a mistake because it makes sensibility the measure rather than faith” (p. 70). And being able to sense prayer’s effects and powers cannot be the foundation. Only faith in Jesus, the crucified and risen Son of God, is the proper foundation for our praying.

Pray Honestly When We are Spiritually Dry

Asaph may not have prayed nice and neat, but he did pray honestly and authentically. When it comes right down to it, we’re best off naming our dryness and offering it back to God in prayer. Steve offers this guidance: “Honesty gives God room to work. When we are superficial and artificial in our praying, it’s more difficult for God to respond to us as we really are” (p. 71).

talking in the dark 10

Our church journeyed through January with a focus on prayer. Our preaching series was “Questions of Prayer,” which aimed to be honest about questions we share about prayer and give us orientation points for our praying. An optional step past Sunday morning is working through Steve Harper’s book, Talking in the Dark: Praying When Life Doesn’t Make Sense.

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In Chapter 4, Steve surveys where we have been in our examination of prayer in order to transition us to the expressions of prayer we can make despite some of our problems in prayer. He writes, “In the face of the problems we’ve examined, we have three choices related to prayer: (1) to stop praying; (2) to keep praying, but with diminished commitment; or (3) to stay at our prayer post and continue to pryae as best we can” (p. 53).

To continue praying, and praying authentically (not “auto-pilot prayers” just to keep being religious), we need to embrace an important word: nevertheless. Jesus prays a “nevertheless” prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane when he prays, “not what I want, but what you want.”

“Abandonment,” writes Steve, “is one of the big actions for any believer” (p. 54). But it is also one of the major keys to maturity as a Christian. Beginning to pray with a “nevertheless” spirit is a big step toward that mature walk with Christ. “Nevertheless” praying makes at least three differences in our praying.

• It keeps us from ignoring reality
• It enables us to embrace revelation
• It leads us to make a response

Keeps Us from Ignoring Reality

To pray “nevertheless” is to look reality in the face and trust in the reality of God’s love in Jesus. “It does not ignore the feelings, sidestep the questions, or gloss over the circumstances. But neither does it allow those things to have the last words or the power to shut us down.” (p. 55) God himself has exercised a “nevertheless” insistence on his redeeming purpose. Humanity was mired in the pit of sin—“while we were still sinners” nevertheless “Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8) Likewise, we are to stare into the face of reality and continue praying, nevertheless.

Enables Us to Embrace Revelation

When we understand that so much of praying, because we face rather than deny reality, is “nevertheless” praying, we observe that “God does not eliminate suffering; but God comes to us in suffering” (p. 57). This allows us to hear and receive the words of Scripture more clearly. Take for one example Psalm 23. The psalmist recalls, “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” (Ps 23:4 TNIV) The dark valley will not be avoided, nevertheless the writer is not abandoned. God is with him, comforting him.

Leads Us to Make a Response

When we utter a faithfully defiant, “nevertheless,” in the face of life’s difficulties, we are being guided toward a response. Paul made this response, acknowledging that nothing in all creation can separate us from God’s love in Christ (see Romans 8:38-39). The spiritual writer Brennan Manning calls it “ruthless trust,” a great name for it indeed.

talking in the dark 9

Our church is journeying in prayer this month. Our preaching series is “Questions of Prayer,” which aims to be honest about questions we share about prayer and give us orientation points for our praying. An optional step past Sunday morning is working through Steve Harper’s book, Talking in the Dark: Praying When Life Doesn’t Make Sense.

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Chapter 3 begins by looking at some “church problems” in our praying, but it concludes with two concepts that can help us pray better. Here they are.

• Prayer as Speech
• “Total prayer for total living”

Prayer as Speech

Steve confronts the problem with prayer mentioned in the last post, assumption, but suggesting a different way of understanding prayer as something that is natural. Sometimes, we compare prayer to breathing: “It is just as natural as drawing a breath,” we might say. But Steve says, “Rather than assuming that prayer is like breathing, let’s assume it is like talking. Talk is natural. We are made to talk.” (p. 48) But talking takes work and practice and time to develop. “A child’s fist word ignites an entire process that leads the child farther into the experience of speech” (p. 49). What if we conceived of prayer this way? Would there be any doubt that prayer is something continually to develop? And wouldn’t we have grace enough to know that we aren’t experts overnight, that we are still developing?

“Total Prayer for Total Living”

Jesus shared a vision for God’s people, when he said that the Temple was supposed to be a “house of prayer” (Matthew 21:13). These words give guidance to the church. The church can create an environment of prayer. One of Steve’s mentors, Dr. Tom Carruth used the phrase, “total prayer for total living” (p. 50) to help us view prayer as a way of life and not only a “time of prayer.” Steve calls for “prayerful living,” though he stresses that this happens when we are connected with God in the midst of daily activities and when we pause to observe a time of prayer individually or collectively in the church. He reminds us: “Jesus modeled prayerful living for us. He observed fixed tiems of personal prayer and participated in synagogue worship services where specific prayers were offered. But he also moved through the day in communion with God… Jesus was attentive to God, on his knees and on his feet.” (p. 51)

To get to a place in our praying like that, “attentive to God, on [our] knees and on [our] feet,” takes learning – like learning to talk.

Question: What practices of prayer help you remain attentive to God, “on [your] knees and on [your] feet”?