Praise.

We all have heard the word thrown around.  Often the first thing to come to a Christian’s mind is the time of praise and worship that most American church services open with.  This is a time of singing intended to prepare our hearts to hear the Word of God preached.  But this is not a blog about singing or leading worship.  This is a blog about prayer.

The outline for prayer that Jesus taught us to use opens with the command to praise the Father, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name . . .” (Matthew 6:9, ESV)  Jesus teaches us our experience of prayer should begin should begin with praise.  Yet for many of us, clear praise is absent from our time spent talking to God.  Or it is vastly outweighed by the time spent asking for things.

Offering praise to God brings joy, both to us, and our heavenly father.  It has many other benefits for us as well.  If we are going to learn how to incorporate praise into our prayer lives, we should start at the beginning.

Praise Defined

Before we can start to effectively praise our Father in heaven, we must understand what it means to praise God.  This is how we define praise:

Praise is recognizing God’s character and attributes and in response to them, offering glory and adoration to God.

Let’s work through this definition.

Praise begins with God’s character.  God reveals his attributes to humanity through his inspired Word, the Bible.  He tells us what he is like.  The Bible boldly declares attributes he manifests that we could never show – his incommunicable attributes.  God is all-knowing.  He is all-powerful.  God is present in all places at once.  The Bible also proudly displays other attributes of God that humans can demonstrate – his communicable attributes.  God is love.  The Lord is patient.  The Scriptures paint a clear picture of who God is and what he is like.

We must start with this picture the Bible paints.  Do not start with what we think God is like.  And do not start with what we want God to be like.  Psalm 145:18 says, “The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.”  (ESV)  If we call upon, or offer praise, to God in a way that does not line up with his true character – we lie to God and ourselves.  We waste our time.  No one benefits.  If we respond to God in line with the way he really is – God will be near.

The starting place for praise, then, is God’s true character.  The starting place is the Bible.  Crack open the Bible and read about who God is.  Then we respond. 

Recognizing an attribute about God is not enough.  Intellectual assent is insufficient, insufficient to bring about joy in our hearts or change our lives.  And it fails to fully glorify God.

Instead, we contemplate upon a trait of God and we respond to it from our head and our heart.  We start to respond with wonder and awe.  We realize how amazing it is that a being could be the way he is described.  Pausing, we are filled with wonder as we think about how big the universe really is, and that God sustains it all.  We are overcome with awe when we realize how powerful God really is – and how weak we are in comparison.

Our minds and hearts also respond with the offer of Glory to God.  The more we realize how different, and better, God is from any other being – the more we should be inspired to tell him how much better he is than anything else in all creation.

Ultimately, our response should turn to adoration.  Seeing all of the attributes that are true about God and knowing how superior he is to all things – and then finding out this God if for us . . . Love is an appropriate response.  Praise is an expression of that love and appreciation.

Praise vs Thanksgiving

A point of clarification is in order here.  Discussions of praise will always be incomplete if they do not in some way include thanksgiving.  Praise and thanksgiving are closely related, yet they are different.  There is some overlap in their application, yet they are distinct.

The crucial difference is this:  Praise is to glorify God for who he is.  Thanksgiving is to express gratitude for what he has done.

Praise is concerned with who God is.  God is celebrated because of his unique and perfect attributes.  “Lord, because you are truly omnipotent and in control of everything, you are worthy of fear and respect – you are far above all people!”  “Father, you are a generous God who gives willingly, freely and happily!”

Thanksgiving, on the other hand, is concerned primarily with what God has done in our lives.  It is our expression of gratitude for the ways we have seen God’s hand at work in our lives.  “Thank you Lord, for providing the extra $1,000 we needed to pay the rent.”  “Thanks be to you Father, for giving me the right words to say at that important moment yesterday.”

Being closely related, praise and thanksgiving often blend together.  “God, you are so generous, thanks for being so generous to us and providing a job when we needed it.”  Both are vital.  Since both are vital, it is important that we clearly discern between the two so we can be sure to include them both in our prayer life.

Why We Need to Praise God

There are several good reasons for us to be careful to include the regular practice of praising God.

Praise is the Ultimate Expression of Our Purpose

The Bible is clear on what God’s purpose is.  The prophet Isaiah speaks for God when he says, “For my own sake, for my own sake I do it, for how should my name be profaned?  My glory I will not give to another.” (Isaiah 48:11, ESV)  God is telling his hearers that what he is doing, he is doing only for his sake.  Only for his own glory.  He is not doing it for their sake.  For his.  He will not share the credit, nor the recognition.  The prophet Ezekiel expresses similar words from God in chapter 20 of his book.  Three times in that chapter God says through him that “. . . I acted for the sake of my name . . .”  (Ezekiel 20:9,14,22, ESV)  God’s purpose is his the magnification of his name – his glory.

Everything God does, everything he allows to happen, he does in order to magnify and increase his glory.  John Piper says, “God governs the world with glory precisely that he might be admired, marveled at, exalted and praised.”  (Piper, Desiring God, 46)

If then, God’s purpose is his glory, and if he manages everything in such a way as to increase his glory – one of humanity’s main purposes must be the offering of praise to God.  Piper says, “The climax of his (God’s) happiness is the delight he takes in the echoes of his excellence in the praise of his saints.”  (Piper, Desiring God, 46)

The offer of praise to God fulfills the purpose of two parties.  It makes God happy.  It fulfills his purpose – he receives glory.  Praise also fulfills our purpose – as creatures made to praise the creator.

Praise Roots us in Reality

In our culture it is not that hard to get disconnected from reality.  Our pride, our hurts, our preconceptions and our ignorance – can all color the glasses we use to look at our world.  It is easy to carry inside of us a picture of reality that does not truly, or completely, line up with reality.  This is particularly true of spiritual reality.

The practice of praise forces us to recognize many realities we may me ignorant of, or realities we may be suppressing.  For example, as we recognize the fact that God is sovereign, we are forced to realize we are not king of our own lives.  We also are forced to acknowledge that we are dependent.  The more we rightly praise God, the more we know him rightly, and the more our sense of reality will conform to the actual reality.

Living life with a correct concept of reality will free us from many frustrations and false hopes.

Praise Completes Our Joy

We have made the point already that one of our main purposes is praise.  If we regularly practice praising God, then the joy and satisfaction that come with fulfilling our purpose will follow.  But there is more to it than this.

Think back to the last time we saw a movie in the theater that we thought was amazing.  A movie we loved.  What happened for the next few days?  We talked about the movie!  We asked our friends if they had seen it.  Excitedly we told them about it, about how entertaining it was, or how about how it moved us in a special way.  We eventually tell our friends they need to go see it.  And if a friend of ours has already seen it, together we extol the virtues of the film.

What is going on in this situation?  We watched a movie and enjoyed it very much.  But the experience of watching the movie was not enough.  Watching the movie again was not enough.  We are so full of excitement and joy that we have to tell someone about it.  Piper perfectly explains this phenomenon when he says, “We praise what we enjoy because the delight is incomplete until it is expressed in praise.”  (Piper, Desiring God, 49)  You see, praise completes joy.  We gain a great amount of pleasure from watching the movie, but we gain more satisfaction when we tell our friends how great the movie is.  And we gain even more when they go see it, enjoy it, come back and praise the movie with us.

This principle works exactly the same with our experience of God.  When we praise God, we experience God’s true self.  The response to such a joyful experience is to share it with someone.  The difference between the experience of God and of the movie is the direction of the praise.  When we glorify the movie, we aim the glory towards others.  The virtues of the movie are directed towards others.  With the experience of God, we express some of the glory towards other people, but primarily we offer the glory right back to the source:  God himself.

Learning who God is and what he is really like should thrill our hearts.  Responding to that by praising God completes that joy.

The Process of Praise

Recognizing the benefits of praise, both to God and to ourselves, the next question is obvious.  How do we effectively praise God?  We offer a simple process.

The first step is to open the Bible.  To praise God, we must know him as he reveals himself.  We have created a PDF that you can find on the PRAYER TOOLBOX PAGE that includes a list of God’s attributes and the verses where they are found.  You can download the guide to guide you on this step.

Second, as you read these verses, pick out one of God’s attributes to focus on.  Then meditate on it by asking yourself these questions as you pray:

1)       Lord, I realize you are ____________.

2)      Lord, because you are ____________ . . . I know . . . I feel . . . I can . . .

3)      Lord, if you were not ____________ . . . I would feel . . . I would think . . . I would do/not do . . .

Finally, because we want to be well rounded, include a time of thanksgiving.  Consider your life and circumstances, and think about specific ways God has expressed this attribute towards us.  Then tell him thank you.

Putting Praise into Practice

As Part of the One Year Prayer Experiment

When something becomes unbalanced, it is often necessary to shift some things around in order to restore balance.  Regardless of what the imbalance is in, be it physical weight, skill, or knowledge, one area must be built up to restore balance.  When the imbalance is found in our skill set, extra effort is often required to fill in the gaps and re-balance our skill set.

I think the practice of praise falls into this category for many of us.  If we started out day one praying like Jesus taught us Matthew 6 – which we talked about in a previous post – we would have a perfectly balanced prayer life.  Many of us, however, did not get off on the perfect first step.  I certainly did not.

Many of our prayer lives end up unbalanced.  The amount of time and effort we spend on offering praise to God pales in comparison to the time and effort we spend asking God for things.

So, we need to really work on praising God in order to build our skill and comfort with offering praise to God.  And, we may need to rebalance an out of whack prayer life.

To jump in with both feet, I am going to do something a little different.  I am going to spend one week spending my daily thirty-minute time of prayer only offering praise and thanksgiving to God.

A Word of Caution

I will not recommend praying this way as a long-term practice.  But to accelerate learning and to restore balance this could be a useful practice.  It also has a place for occasional short periods of just wanting to praise God.

With that said, try this method of prayer.  Just do not do it for more than a week.  Or else we will end up unbalanced in the opposite direction in which we started.

I will give it a try and LET YOU KNOW.

The post Offering Praise to God – A Primer appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

As Christians, we know we should pray.  From listening to sermons and from reading Bible, we have the sense that we should be taking time out to talk to God.  We look around us and we see a few people praying.  Pastors are always praying – but that is their job, right?  And we see the super-spiritual types praying, those people who seem much farther down the road than we are.

But we may not be a pastor.  We may not be one of those super-spiritual types.  Should we be praying too?  Should prayer be a regular habit?  Is prayer something that is required of Christians?  Is talking to God something that all Christians – not just the turbo ones – are commanded to do?

The Bible gives us a few intersecting lines to look at in regards to this question.

The Bible Models Prayer for Us

Old Testament Examples

It seems reasonable that if prayer is something vital to our spiritual health and joy, then Biblical characters would be people of prayer.  If talking to God is important, we will see it demonstrated by those characters so familiar to us.  Let start in the beginning of the Bible and take a look.

In Genesis 20, Abraham has lied to King Abimelech about his wife by saying she was her sister.  Abimelech takes her as a wife.  The whole issue gets sorted out after some angst, and the story ends with Abraham praying for Abimelech, “Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelech, and also healed his wife and female slaves so they bore children.  For the Lord had closed all the wombs of the house of Abimelech because of Sarah, Abraham’s wife.” (Genesis20:17-18, ESV) Shortly thereafter, Abraham’s son Isaac prayed, “And Isaac prayed to the LORD for his wife, because she was barren.  And the LORD granted his prayer, and Rebekah his wife conceived.”  (Genesis 25:21, ESV)

The great Moses, of the Red Sea fame, was no stranger to prayer.  Pharaoh, surrounded by the plague of flies, pleads with Moses to take them away.  “So Moses went out from Pharaoh and prayed to the LORD.” (Exodus 8:30, ESV) When the nation of Israel angered God yet again, Moses interceded, “Then the people cried out to Moses, and Moses prayed to the Lord, and the fire died down.”  (Numbers 11:2, ESV) Then take a look at Psalm 90. We are told in the opening notes that Moses wrote this Psalm.

Hannah was a woman deeply distressed by her inability to have children.  Not only a personal tragedy, but in that culture, a public humiliation.  Her response was a heartfelt pouring out to God of her feelings and desires, “She was deeply distressed and prayed to the LORD and wept bitterly.”  (1 Samuel 1:10, ESV)

King David, the man described as a man after God’s own heart, was certainly a man of prayer.  As the author of a great many of the Psalms, it is clear he knew how to pray.

The prophets were mouthpieces God used to communicate to his people.  As such, they were well versed in speaking on behalf of God.  Yet, they also spoke to him as well.  Surrounded by an army holding ill intent, “Then Elisha prayed and said, ‘O LORD, please open his (the opposing general’s) eyes that he may see.’  So the LORD opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.”  (2 Kings 6:17, ESV, parenthesis mine)

The prophet Nehemiah was in the presence of King Artaxerxes – his boss – and he was sad.  We all have had moments of sadness, but bringing such melancholy before this king was strictly verboten.  The king noticed, and confronted Nehemiah with it.  Nehemiah confesses he is bothered by the condition of Jerusalem, the home of his people.  Nehemiah relates what happens next when he says “. . . the king said to me, ‘What are you requesting?’  So I prayed to the God of heaven.” (Nehemiah 2:4, ESV) Nehemiah asks God for help in a moment of crisis and confrontation.

Daniel was in the habit of praying.  His friends knew it.  His enemies knew it.  He was so committed to his habit, and to his God, that his enemies convinced the king to ban prayer to anything except himself for thirty days.  “When Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem.  He got down on his knees and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously.” (Daniel 6:10, ESV)

New Testament Examples

Our Lord and savior Jesus Christ was himself a man of prayer.  Luke tells us, “. . . he would withdraw to desolate places and pray.”  (Luke 5:16, ESV) Several times we are told of Jesus going up mountain to pray.  The night before he goes to the cross, he prays in Gethsemane.  Jesus talked often with his Father.

Like his mentor, Peter had picked up the habit of going off by himself to pray.  “The next day, as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the housetop about the sixth hour to pray.”  (Acts 10:9)

Paul was another person who conversed frequently with the Lord.  In many of his letters he speaks of his prayers for his readers.  He tells the Roman believers, “For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his son, that without ceasing I mention you always in my prayers . . .” (Romans 1:9-10a, ESV)  To the Ephesian church he writes, “. . . I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers  . . .” (Ephesians 1:16, ESV)  In a touching letter to his protégé Timothy, Paul tells him, “I thank God whom I serve, as did my ancestors, with a clear conscience, as I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day.” (2 Timothy 1:3, ESV)

We could speak of numerous other examples of believers praying to the heavenly Father.  This list is by no means exhaustive.  The Bible records in its pages many other characters who converse with God.

Looking at the example of all of these men and women, spanning thousands of years and throughout the story of the Bible, it is becoming clear that the example God’s people set for us is that God’s people pray.  If your bracelet says WWJD – What Would Jesus Do? – it is clear that at least one of the things he would do is pray.  If you had a bracelet that read WWMPBD – What Would Most People in the Bible Do? – the answer remains the same.

God’s people pray.

Example is not enough

The pages of scripture contain a great many examples of people who pray.  We have examined some of them.  But, some of us might advise caution.  An example cannot always be a command.  After all, for many of these characters, the Bible also records their major failures.  Failures which include adultery and murder.  No one looks at the presence of these actions in the Bible and construes a command.

This gets us down to brass tacks.  Does the Bible actually command believers to converse with God?

The Bible’s Commands to Pray

As it turns out, the Bible does command Christians to pray.

Paul closes his first letter to the Thessalonian church with a list of things they need to remember to do.  On that list is a short sentence on prayer, “. . . pray without ceasing . . .” (1 Thessalonians 5:17, ESV) This command is pretty clear.  Pray.  We must pray.  Occasional prayer is not enough.  Prayer during just times of crisis is insufficient.  We must pray without ceasing.  We must be constant and fervent in our prayer.  The God of the universe wants you talk to him – regularly.

Jesus also issues a directive to pray.  He prefaces one of his parables by saying, “And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.” (Luke 18:1, ESV) The parable he goes on to share helps people understand that they need to pray, and pray a lot.  He proceeds to tell the parable of the persistent widow.

The parable is the story of a widow who is being oppressed and appeals to a judge for justice.  This judge does not fear God or people.  He is not motivated by a love for God, and he does not care what other will think about him for ignoring the widow.  So, he ignores her at first.  But the widow keeps coming to him seeking justice.  He resists for a while, but ultimately gives in – only to get her to go away.  Jesus implies we need to be like the widow.  We must pray.  And we must pray frequently.  We should pray so much that God could identify with the judge.

For good measure, Paul adds a few more commands to pray.  To the Colossians he says, “Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving.” (Colossians 4:2, ESV) Clearly an imperative: pray.  Pray faithfully.  Be sure to be grateful and give thanks as well.

To the church in Philippi he pens one of the more familiar passages on prayer, “. . . do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”  (Philippians 4:6, ESV)  A word of encouragement to many.  Great hope comes from being told to not worry and ask God for your requests.  Make no mistake though, the word in the original Greek for “let your requests be made known” is in the imperative.  This is an encouragement, but also a command.

At a fundamental level then, prayer is a matter of obedience.  The Word of God commands us to pray.  We must strive to become people of prayer.

The Command is Paired with a Promise

For some people, reading the above may have just been a “bad news first” moment.  Already stretched by life’s demands, we are now adding something else to the to-do list.  We might feel like our burden just got a little heavier.

This is a normal response.  Theologian John Calvin knows this is a common response, and in his Institutes of the Christian Religion he points us to hope.  He acknowledges the command to pray.  He Calvin also points out that the command to pray is paired with promise.

Preaching his sermon on the mount, Jesus tells his disciples, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.  Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?  Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?  If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:7-11, ESV)

What an amazing promise.  Especially for someone who has just been ordered to pray.  Yes, we have to pray, but we are also promised that God will answer our prayers.  Prayer is not intended to be some empty ritual that we do simply because we must.  It is intended to be powerful experince.  And it is intended to be effective.  What we seek in God’s presence – we will find!  What we ask for – we will get!  Our time conversing with God will have meaning far beyond rote ritual.

Jesus’ promise is a broad overarching promise to make our prayer effective.  God’s Word reveals many other, more specific promises in regards to prayer.  In the Psalms, Asaph tells us of God’s promise to hear our prayers: “I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, and he will hear me.” (Psalm 77:1, ESV)

The apostle Paul reminds the church in Philippi, “And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.”  (Philippians 4:19) This verse appears on a lot of coffee mugs, but it is still true.  God promises to meet our needs.

The pages of God’s word include other promise in regards to our prayer life.  One is God’s promise to guide us (Psalm 31:3).  Another is his promise to give us wisdom when we ask (James 1:5).  One of the most comforting to me is the promise to always forgive us when we confess our sins (1 John 1:9).

These promises change everything.

Promises and Lottery Tickets

Imagine I had the power to order people around.  Then imagine that I ordered people to purchase lottery tickets every day.  Most peoples’ response would be negative.  Why?  People’s response would be negative because they know they are not going to win.  The odds are too great.  Any normal person would be angered by a command to waste significant time, effort, and money pursuing something that would not benefit them in any way.

Many people think about prayer in the same way.

But imagine that along with the power to order people to purchase lottery tickets I also had the power to guarantee that you would win a large amount of money every time you played.  Purchasing our lottery tickets would jump straight to the top of our daily to-do list.  Why? – because we now expect the time, effort and money expended to be richly rewarded.

God’s promises in regards to prayer are just like the guarantee for the lottery tickets.  These promises mean that we will attain what we are seeking.  We will not be wasting our time or efforts – because God promises to hear and answer.

Exchange Our Lottery Tickets for Plane Tickets

These promises are great news to us who don’t have a consistent prayer life up and running.  This pairing of command and promise allows us change our whole conception of prayer.  Gone is the idea that we must endure drudgery and rote ritual.  In its place we have the idea of hopeful expectation.  Praying is not buying a lottery ticket.  It is buying a plane ticket.  We buy plane tickets with the expectation of getting somewhere.  We can now pray with the same expectation.

So, let’s embrace our responsibility to pray.  Embrace it with hope.  And start praying.  Or start again.

The post Do We Have to Pray? Is Prayer Recommended – or Commanded? appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

In the first week, we have already learned some important lessons.

Commitment Requires Adaptability

I started on this experiment with great excitement.  Eagerly I planned out my preliminary posts, and I picked November 20th as a start date.  As a typical guy however, who has no awareness of birthdates, holidays and anniversaries – I picked the week of Thanksgiving to start my experiment.

The first week of the experiment brought me an important lesson:  Be adaptable.  A fixed time and place to pray are crucial to creating a habit of prayer.  And they help sustain a habit of regular prayer.

But we cannot always control our circumstances.

I cannot always control mine.  Our family had plans to go out of town to visit family for Thanksgiving.  It was impossible to cancel our plans.  I considered pushing back the start date a week, but that is not real life.  If we are going to build consistent prayer lives, we are going to have to learn how to pray during vacations and during holidays.  So, I kept the start date, packed up the van and departed.

The smart play in this situation is to be proactive.  Get the lay of the land.  After unpacking the van and sketching out our schedule for the weekend, I knew what times were available and what places were free for me to be in.  Knowing this, I picked a new time and place to be my prayer times.  I, essentially, went through the process of selecting a consistent time and place that we talked about in a previous post.  If it will help, feel free to go to our Prayer Tool Box page and find our PDF guide to picking a place to pray.  Print it out and take it with you when you travel.

In my situation, it turned out that early morning was the best time to pray.  In a house full of kids, I find it is best to pray before they get up.  I set my alarm for 6:30 am.  With so many kids in the house, our youngest slept in the room with us.  In the mornings he is a light sleeper.  The chances of turning off an alarm, getting changed, and getting out without waking him were slim.  The place to pray became sitting up in the bed.  Normally I would not recommend this, but we must be adaptable right?  Part of adapting my prayer times to this new time and place also required a nod to bedtime.  To get up early and pray in bed meant that I had to be well rested enough to stay awake.  That meant no late nights watching cheesy holiday movies with the family.  I made sure I went to bed earlier than I usually do while on vacation.

These adaptations worked.  I managed to not miss a day of praying 30 minutes every day over the entire holiday weekend.

Praying For a Full 30 Minutes?

Thirty minutes seems like a long time to pray.  Holidays or not.

In our culture thirty minutes is a long time to do anything, much less sit still and quiet.  This thirty minutes figure I am sure intimidates many of us.  Our understanding of prayer, however, can greatly shape our view of the thirty-minute figure.

Thirty minutes is a long time to pray if all you are doing is making requests.  We pray for ourselves first, asking for our needs and desires.  Then we pray for our family.  Next we make requests for our friends.  We check our watch and see only twelve minutes have passed.  The rest of the time is then spent trying to think of everyone we have ever known or of every world situation we can think of.  That is not fun.  That is not relationship building.  This is not the experience we are after.

The outline for prayer that Jesus provides for us presents a very different idea of prayer.  We talked about Jesus’ teaching on prayer in more detail in an earlier post.  To summarize, Jesus taught us that to have a healthy and balanced prayer life, we must include five elements of prayer:  praise, justice and unity, requests and thanksgiving, confession, and protection from the enemy.

This is a picture of prayer that is not just asking God for things.  It is a picture of talking to God about several different topics in different ways.  A give and take.  Never having prayed this way, I set out faithfully to give it a try.  I hoped the variety offered by this outline would make it easier to last thirty minutes.

What I Found Trying to Pray for Thirty Minutes

To my surprise, I had no trouble making it for thirty minutes.  In fact, I found that my timer was usually going off when I was finishing confessing or starting to pray for protection.  And this is not because I am a babbler.

I had to think about why this was happening.  Then it occurred to me.  I was not just making requests, I was not sitting around desperately trying to think of things to ask for.  As I had hoped, using Jesus’ outline, I was praying for a variety of things in a variety of ways.

For many, our outline for prayer looks like this:

Make requests                 :30

Praying like that is hard, and it is not enjoyable.  But what I was beginning to experience looked more like this:

Praise                                                     :05

Justice & Unity                                      :05

Requests & Thanksgiving                   :10

Confession                                            :05

Protection                                              :05

Total                                                       :30

Thinking of prayer – and the thirty-minute figure – in this way is groundbreaking.  This method of prayer breaks that thirty minutes in smaller, more user-friendly pieces.  Pieces that are much less intimidating than the big thirty-minute number.  I am not recommending you set a series of five minute timers, but I am suggesting we think of our prayer time in this way.  It eases the intimidation of such a long time frame, and it unloads the burden of expectation.

Praying this was refreshing, and stretching at the same time.

Being Stretched in Two New Ways

Praying consistently with this new outline stretched me in other ways I did not expect.  Two of these components of Jesus’ outline have never been a consistent feature of my prayer times.  Adding them to my daily practice of prayer forced me to grow and stretch.

Praying for Justice and Unity

Jesus instructs us how to pray with his Lord’s prayer.  In it, he tells us to pray for, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  (Matthew 6:10, ESV)  We are to pray that people here do God’s will, that they live the way he wants them to.  To put this in a nutshell, we are to pray for justice and unity.  Two crucial markers of life in the Kingdom.

I will admit, starting on this prayer experiment, I never have spent much time or effort praying for justice and unity.  I have given the practice lip service.  In times of great enough social upheaval that it makes the news I prayed for it.  When peace and calm returned, these prayers would go by the wayside.  I quickly came to realize I had a major gap in my prayer life.

Working my way through the Jesus’ outline for prayer, I came to this portion each day.  That moment was like hitting the brakes.  Not knowing what else to do, my first attempts came out vague and broad.  “Uh, Lord, please take away the injustice in the world.”  Well, it’s a start.

So as part of my time of praying for justice and unity, I went to God for help.  I admitted I was not doing very well, and asked God to start showing me more specific ways to pray for this.  God revealed to me, as the week went on, two ways.

Praying for Justice and Unity:  Pray for Peoples’ Eyes

First, God challenged me to pray for people’s eyes.  Their spiritual eyes that is.  Particularly as Americans, we have trained our eyes to tune out many of the injustices we see around us.  We have also trained our minds to dismiss them, to excuse them, or to turn it into an occasion for blame.

So, I was challenged to pray that peoples’ eyes would be opened to the injustices that surround them – my own eyes included.  I started to pray that people would start to see how people on earth are not doing God’s will, as they do in heaven.

Only two days later, my son came to me with questions about abortion.  If you want to think about a topic that is interwoven with multiple layers of injustice – that is it.  And it was great fodder for my time with prayer.

We will see what else God brings to the forefront as we continue our prayer experiment.

Praying for Justice and Unity:  Pray for Peoples’ Hearts

God challenged me in a second way to pray for justice and unity.  God challenged me to pray for peoples’ hearts.  It is one thing for people to start seeing and realizing what goes on in the world around us.  It is a totally different thing for them to care.  An incident years ago in New York City perfectly illustrates this.  A woman was attacked one night.  She screamed in the alley repeatedly, but no one came to help.  No one even alerted the authorities.  During the subsequent investigation, the police interviewed numerous people who lived nearby.  Dozens of people reported hearing the screams – but not one of them went to help or called the police.  They all knew what was going on, but none of them cared.  Or they assumed someone else was doing something about it.  Knowledge is not the antidote to apathy.

So, I began to pray that once people began to see what was going on around them, they would be moved.  That they would care.

This is clearly not the only way to pray for injustice, but it is a start.  And it is encouraging because people who see and who care – become people who act.

If we have trouble praying for justice and unity, start with these two requests.  Make sure we pray for our own eyes and hearts – not just those of others.  And then pay attention.

Praying for Protection

Praying for protection from temptation and from the enemy were also new ways to pray for me.

In his Screwtape Letters, one of C.S. Lewis’ antagonists describes the two most common errors people make in thinking about spiritual warfare and the activity of the demonic.  The first error is to see demonic attack everywhere.  Every unfortunate event that happens to us is because we are under attack.  If we don’t feel well, it’s because we are under attack.  If we are tired, it’s because we are being oppressed.  Every single temptation comes from the devil or one of his minions.  “The devil made me do it – or at least tried to make me do it” is their slogan.

The other common error is a pendulum swing in the other direction.  The error is to completely ignore the reality that there is a spiritual war raging around us.  If we are sick, it is because we spent time around sick people.  If we are tired, we are tired because we binge watched Netflix all night.  Christians in this error do not realize, or acknowledge, that they are involved in a war.  Or at the very least, they think they are a safe distance from the front lines, immune from any real danger.

I must confess that while not totally in that category, I lean toward the latter.  I will readily grant that a war is going on around us, but I never considered myself an important enough target to worry about any attack.  It was easy for me to explain away much of the negative events in my life as being the result of my own choices.  Doing so left me with the feeling of some control over my life.  If the bad in my life is due to my poor decisions, I can bring good into it by making good decisions.  Circumstances were under my control – not the enemy’s.

I also harbored a little fear about getting swallowed up in the whole spiritual warfare thing and drifting into the first category of error.  But a balanced and Biblical worldview must prevail.  There is a war going on.  The forces of the devil do not have free reign to do as they wish, but they do have some powers to attack.  Some struggle in life is due to their efforts.  Some temptations do come from their lies.  There is an enemy, and Jesus says to pray for protection from them.

So, I began to pray for this protection.  Like my experiences with praying for justice and unity, my prayers to start with are rather vague and general.  They are becoming a little more focused as I practice though.  I recognize that I have areas I struggle in.  It makes sense then to ask for extra protection from temptation in those areas.  I pray for protection for my family.  At the end of the week, it still feels a little odd, but I will press on with this.

After my first week of praying for protection, I can’t say I recognize any major changes in regards to spiritual warfare.  Many of those more practiced in spiritual warfare warn, however, to expect spiritual attack if you decide to take up arms this battle.  We will see.  And I will let you know.

A Great Start to the Experiment

The first week of the experiment is in the books.  I learned a ton.  I am being forced to grow in several different areas at once.  And that is exciting.

The post Tried It – Praying Regularly appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

The first form of prayer I am going to experiment with will, however, seem rather mundane.  The first form of prayer I am going to practice is simply going to be regular, daily prayer.

I am not currently in the habit of praying daily.  I will send up a short distress call when I am stressed, or I may send up a wish list when I want something.  But daily prayer that has no other goal than relationally connecting to God is not currently a part of my life.  Step one it seems, is simply to start praying, and start the process of making it a habit.

Discipline Required

A healthy dose of self-discipline is going to be required since daily prayer is not already a habit.  I think of people who want to lose weight and get in shape.  It is really no secret what it takes to accomplish this.  A person simply needs to eat fewer calories and exercise more.  We could spend hours figuring out what exactly that looks like in our lives and create detailed plans for our fitness journey.

But, nothing about our health will change until we actually start eating less and exercising more.  Lasting change will only come about when these two things are done regularly.  Making this a part of our lives, especially in the beginning, may not feel natural.  It may not even be fun.  Over time, momentum will build and it will become easier.  It will become fun.  A habit will be formed.

The habit will not form, however, without good old self-discipline.  I wish I could spiritualize it for us.  Create some kind of formula we could work through that would instantly change our desires and make this feel natural – or more “spiritual.”  But that is just not how it is.

Make it Easier on Ourselves

So, we need to be disciplined to create a habit of prayer.  At some point we need to make the decision to pray and then just do it.  We would be prudent however, to help ourselves out and make the process as easy on us as we can.  There are two significant strategies we can use to make this process easier.

Pick a Regular Time

There is a major difference between saying, “I will work out more” and saying, “I will work out on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 5 AM for 30 minutes.”  One statement is a wish.  The other statement is a plan.

For a prayer life to become a habit we need a plan.  We will never “just have” or “just find” time for meaningful prayer.  We must plan it into our lives by intentionally setting aside a regular time everyday to do nothing but pray.

Stop and think about your schedule and routines.  Try to find a time in which you are consistently free.  We must find a time when we do not regularly have appointments, phone calls, or other pressing responsibilities.  You must be available to pray.  Make sure this time we are trying to set aside will be a time when other events won’t spill over into your time.  This is the classic problem with lunch time prayer.  Long meetings, working lunches, or similar things often push lunch around.  Make sure to find a time that will not be subject to the intrusion of other events.

Also, make sure to pick out a time when you can truly be “disengaged from your day.”  This means we are able to stop our mind from running in a thousand directions and are able set aside the to-do list long enough to focus on talking with our Father.  I have found it difficult when I am in work mode to slow down my mind enough to thoughtfully engage in prayer.  It has been equally difficult for me spin my mind back up to work speed some days after I pray.

Be aware of how your mind works and how your day flows.  Pick out a time and if you need to, write it in your calendar.

Pick a Regular Place

The second part of a successful prayer plan is to pick a regular place to pray.  Just like a consistent time will make forming a habit of prayer easier, so will having a consistent place.

An ideal place to pray will have several characteristics.  All of them involve reducing distraction.  The first characteristic of a great place to pray is that it is a place where you can be alone.

Whether they intend to or not, people can be a distraction.  With just their presence, people can force us to be relationally “on,” meaning we are diverting attention towards them to be able to respond to them if the need arises.  Being by ourselves allows us to completely focus on God.

The second characteristic of a great place to pray is that it is quiet.  This one sounds obvious, but it bears repeating.  Trying to formulate a praise to God while taking heads debate the news on TV is going to be tough.  Resisting the urge to sing along with the radio makes it hard to listen for God’s guidance.  A place of quiet is a place free from distraction.

A third characteristic of a great place to pray is that the place is not inherently stressful to you.  This is a more subjective trait and will vary from person to person.  But in essence, if being in a place causes you stress, it will be prudent to find a different place to pray.  For example, don’t pray in a playroom cluttered with toys if the mess stresses you out.  Or, don’t pray at your desk if you are unable to temporarily put out of your mind the pile of work sitting in front of you.

Removing the Biggest Distraction of All

Our cell phones are amazing tools.  They allow incredible amounts of productivity and connectivity.  Our phones are also incredible distractions.  With constants ringing and alerts, they demand constant attention.  In addition, the ability to respond almost instantly seems to have created the expectation that we react almost instantly to anything our phone alerts us to.  In the pursuit of a distraction free environment, I will challenge all of us to put the phones away while we pray.  Turn it off.  Leave it in the other room.  We are on a more important call.

What (I Hope) Works for Me

For me, the time that works best is going to be in the morning.  I currently wake up early in the morning and work out in my garage.  When I begin the experiment, I will get up a little earlier, perform my workout, and then settle down and pray for 30 minutes.

This time meets all the criteria for me.  I am consistently free at 5:30 am.  Meetings or appointments never happen this early for me.  The phone is not ringing and the work emails are not rolling in yet.  The kids are all still asleep.  It is quiet, and I can be free from distraction.

Some of you might ask why I don’t pray first, then work out?  If prayer is so important – a priority – it seems that I should pray first, and then work out.  The answer goes back to knowing how my mind works.  My mind does not wake up so fast in the morning.  I have tried praying first thing in the morning in the past.  What usually happens is that after I crawl out of bed and go find a place to be still and quiet, my mind just wants to go back to sleep.  So, often after trying to pray in the morning I would be double frustrated.  First, I was frustrated because I did not actually spend 30 minutes connecting to God, I just wasted 30 minutes trying to stay awake.  Secondly, I accomplished nothing, and gave up 30 minutes of sleep.  I had neither slept nor connected to God.  Lose, lose situation.

What I have found, however, is that if I get up and do a short workout, it wakes my mind and my body.  The grogginess is gone.  My mind is fresh and alert.  I am able to focus on God and give Him my full attention.  So, I work out first and then pray second because it works for me.  It may take a few tries, but with a little effort, we will all find what works for us.

For me, the place to pray is going to be in the garage.  It meets all the criteria.  In the morning I have the garage all to myself.  I have tried to come inside in the mornings,

but our youngest is a light sleeper.  There is no distraction free prayer if there is a four-year-old boy awake and wanting to play.  So, I will simply stay in the garage after I work out.

The garage is also quiet in the mornings.  And it is a place free of inherent stress.  The garage is my place to pray.

Be Adaptable

It is vital to remind ourselves as we try to pick a time and place to pray to not get married to our first chosen time and place.  There is no Biblically correct time and place to pray.  We are simply commanded to pray.  The time and place are flexible and they are up to us.

Pick a time and place.  Give it a good try of at least a week.  After a week of consistently praying at the same time and place, we will know if it is working for us or not.  Be honest in our analysis.  If our chosen time and place are not working because we are simply being undisciplined and not doing it – that is not the fault of the time or the place.  Keep at it.

We may, however, after a good try, find that our chosen time and place are not working for us.  If that is the case, reassess and pick a new time and place to pray.  The answer is not always try harder.  The point of choosing a time and place is to make it easier for us to pray.  As you can tell from my experience, I have tried several different times and places in the past.

Keep trying until you find a time and place that works for you.  Then stick with it.  Until it doesn’t.  Then pick a new time and place.  Life happens.  Circumstances change.  Just keep adapting.  Just keep praying.

How I Will Pray

To start my fledgling daily prayer habit, I am going to start by praying in the way I wrote about in my post “How to Pray.”

In that post, we read the well-known Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6:9-13 and learned that Jesus was teaching us the essential components of a balanced and healthy prayer life:  praise, justice & unity, requests & thanks, confession, and protection from the enemy.

It is challenging, and instructive, to see how asking for things is only one part of proper prayer.  According to this outline, only one-fifth of my time in prayer should be spent running through my list.  I’ll bet that praying this way will be a lot more relational.

I am exited to start and find out.

Check out our PDF guide on choosing a time and place to place pray on our Toolbox Page.

It is a simple one-page guide that you can print out and use to help you when you are off line.

The post Praying Daily – The First Steps of Making Prayer a Habit appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

I like to be prepared.  My wife would say sometimes I like to be over prepared.  The words, “Just get on with it” have been launched my way more than once.  But before I launch out on this experiment I really want to get at least a few tracks to run on as to how to pray.  I know there are many techniques and strategies for prayer out there.  Where does one begin?

To anyone who knows me, they would not be surprised that I found the answer to this one in a book.  For a question this important, I went straight to the most important book on the subject:  the Bible.

In Matthew Chapter 6, Jesus instructs his disciples with the following words:

Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.  Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.  And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.  For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.  (Matthew 6:9-15, ESV)

This is the famous Lord’s Prayer.  Many people have heard it.  Many of us have prayed it.  I prayed it almost every night as a child.  It is familiar.  It is comforting.  But what many people don’t realize is that Jesus is not here giving us a prayer to recite, but a model for prayer.  The opening words clue us in to this.  Pray then like this.  Pray this way.  I like how the New International Version translates it as “This, then, is how you should pray . . .”  Jesus gives us, in the lines of this familiar prayer, an outline to guide us in our prayer.

The Essential Elements of a Healthy Prayer Life According to Jesus

Let’s work our way through this prayer, taking a look at each part and learning what our times of prayer need to include.

“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”

Hallowed is a word we don’t often use anymore.  As I think about it, the only time I have ever heard the word used was to refer to the hallowed halls of something or other.  The word was being used to indicate that this hall was special.  It was different from other halls.  Worthy of notice.

This usage is not far off from what Jesus is trying to teach us.  The word hallowed comes from a Greek word that means to make holy, or to set something apart as holy.  To recognize God as holy – or hallowed – is to recognize that He is something special.  To acknowledge that His name is distinct from and superior to all other names.

In prayer, this is simply praise to God.  To make hallowed his name is to praise him.  Lift him up.  Acknowledge his attributes.  Give glory to God.

Recognize however that praise is different from thanksgiving.  To give thanks to God is to express gratitude for what he has done.  “Thank you Lord for providing the money I needed to pay for the rent.”  To praise God is to extol him for who he is.  “God, you are a generous God who provides for his people exactly what they need.”

“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Jesus preached often about the Kingdom of God.  The Kingdom of God is the presence and rule of God.  In the kingdom, life is the way God intended it to be:  full of love, justice and peace.  The world clearly is not that way now.  This makes sense when we understand that the New Testament gives us a picture of the kingdom as one that has started, but has not yet been fully realized.  The kingdom of God has broken in to our world, but it does not yet encompass all.  The kingdom is present and it is growing.

Our prayers then need to be that the world will look increasingly like his kingdom.  We should pray that his people act more and more like citizens of this kingdom.  That his people do his will.  And we should pray that the world around us will see how we treat each other and join us in creating a place like the kingdom of God.

The prayer for the kingdom to come is where we pray for justice and unity.

“Give us this day our daily bread,”

Jesus tells us to ask for daily bread.  I need to eat to stay alive.  You probably do too.  Jesus acknowledges needs.  He knows we need food, water, heat, and shelter.  He knows we need money to pay the rent and buy medicine.  Jesus knows we have needs.  And he tells us to pray for them.  It is right to take our needs to God.

Ask God to supply what is needed.  Ask specifically.  If one needs $200 more to pay the rent, boldly pray for $200.  Pray confidently.  Wait patiently.

Before you start running through the want list with God though, we must make sure to discern between needs and wants.  A bigger TV is not a need.  Money to keep the heat on during an Upper Peninsula Michigan winter is a need.  Money to keep the cable TV going over those winter months is not.  Be discerning.  God promises to meet our needs.  He never promises to give us everything we want.  Remember, he is the sovereign God of the universe who is working out his plan.  He is not Santa Clause.

As we become practiced in praying, do not forget to recognize when God answers prayer.  I used to think God never answered many of my prayers.  Then I was given a challenge.  A mentor challenged me to write down what I prayed for and check the list every time I prayed.  Turns out, if I slowed down the rate of requests just enough to remember what I asked for, I started to see that God actually was answering prayers and working around me.  So, remember what you prayed for, and recognize the answered prayers.  Then express your gratitude.  Tell your generous Father in heaven “Thank You!”

“and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

Jesus tells us to ask God to forgive us our debts.  He is not telling us to ask God to get us out of financial trouble.  Nor is he telling us to ask him to make our credit card bills go away.  He is talking about the personal debts we owe to him.  These debts are the debts that accrue when we sin.

Every one of us has all sinned.  We can all think about something we should have done – but did not.  We can also probably remember something we should not have done – but did anyway.  This willful sin builds up a debt between us and our Heavenly Father.  This sin does not take away our salvation.  Our relationship with God is fixed and secure because of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.  Our fellowship with God, however, our ability to connect and enjoy our relationship with God, is disrupted by this sin.

The solution to this disruption is to ask God to forgive us our debts.  It is to confess to God our sins.  To confess our sin means to openly admit what we did and agree with God that is was wrong.  Then repent – commit to turn away from that sin.  After confessing any sin we are aware of, continue to commune with God with a clear conscience.

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

There is a war going on around us.  We cannot always see it.  Swirling around us is a violent conflict between Satan and his demons versus the Kingdom of God.  These enemies concentrate on wreaking havoc in the lives of believers.

Jesus tells us to pray for protection.  Pray that we will not be led into temptation.  Ask God for the wisdom to recognize a trap laid by the enemy.  Ask for the courage to walk away from the trap, regardless of how inviting it looks.  Pray that you don’t fall for the lies.

Jesus tells us also to pray for deliverance.  Our enemies will not only launch temptations at us, they may try to afflict us more directly.  Ask God to shield us from the assaults of the enemy.  Pray that God will keep the enemy at bay, at a great enough distance to not be able to harm you.

Be forewarned.  If you decide to embark on a prayer challenge of your own, if you decide to try to become a person of prayer, expect the attack to come.  Know the enemy does not want you to pray.  The enemy does not want us to feel close to or connected to God.  As we try to move closer to God, expect the enemy to try to move us apart.  So, make sure to pray for protection.

A Balanced Prayer Life

We are presented with the essential elements of a balanced prayer life in the Lord’s Prayer:  praise, justice and unity, personal requests, confession, and protection from the enemy. 

This understanding of prayer is so much more diverse and engaging than my early understanding of what prayer was.  Early on, I understood prayer as only making requests to God.  Honestly, I was dumbfounded when I heard about people who prayed for hours.  How could you spend hours just asking God for things?  It made no sense to me how anyone without an iron will would be able to that.  Or even desire to.  But expanding my understanding of prayer with all these different categories changes my expectations of prayer.  Praying like this can be a much more relational experience.  It can be a much more engaging experience.

As I look to renovate my prayer life, this outline presented by Jesus will serve as the tracks I run on.  I will strive to incorporate each of these components into my daily time of prayer.  And that 30 minutes figure seems a lot less daunting when I realize I only need to pray for six minutes in each one to reach my goal!

Go to our Tool Box page and download a simple one-page guide to praying the way Jesus showed us that you can print out and use to give you tracks to run on as you pray.

The post How to Pray | Jesus’ Guide to Prayer appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

It sounds like such a simple question.  The answer is often simply assumed.  But I think it is vital to clearly define what prayer is.

First of all, I am committing to doing it for 30 minutes everyday for the next year.  I need to make sure that what I spend my time doing really is prayer.  Good accountability depends on good definitions.  It is no different with prayer.  So before I pray for 182.5 hours and report back to you about it, let’s clearly define what prayer is.

Answering this question is also made difficult by the fact that there is no one passage in the Bible that clearly defines prayer.  We see the Word command us to pray, teach us how to pray and tell us about people praying.  Yet, there is nowhere in the text do we find a clear answer to the question of “what is prayer?”

We will use as a starting place the definition of prayer most people carry with them.

“Prayer is just talking to God”

The most common definition of prayer, and likely the first one in our heads, is that prayer is simply talking to God.  What I like about this definition is that it is so simple.  The practice of prayer really is summed up in that phrase – when we pray we talk to God.

This common definition however is a little bit reductionist.  It is a little one-directional.  “I” talk “to God.”  Someone else we only talk to comes to mind:  Santa Clause.  Who has ever stopped to listen to Santa Clause?  Has anyone ever asked Santa what he wanted for Christmas?  Do we know of anyone who has been encouraged by the man in red?  Or confronted by him for those acts that warrant the naughty list?  Such one-sided communication does not result in a relationship of any depth or meaning.

Aside from shallowness, the unfortunate reality seems to be that simply defining prayer as talking to God leads to two other problems.  First, practicing this definition of prayer can lead to one just rattling off our list of desires.  I do know what else to talk about, so I will just ask you for things.  That’s a prayer life that is hard to get excited about.  And one that is hard to sustain.  Especially if God is not granting all – or any – of your requests.

Second, putting this definition of prayer into practice can just lead to babbling.  We all have that friend who can talk for an hour and never talk about something substantive.  The same thing can happen with God.  Unsure what to say, but motivated, we just start talking.  God, let me tell you about my day . . . There is a time and place for processing your day with the Lord.  But words with out substance are just words.  Just like an hour with our babbling friend does not result in much of a relational connection, many words do not connect us to our Savior.

“Prayer is a conversation with God”

Bill Bright was the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, an international parachurch ministry now known as Cru.  In many of his discipleship writings he expanded the definition of prayer.  Bill Bright said prayer is having a conversation with God.  This is a wonderful expansion of the definition of prayer.  It strongly emphasizes the relational aspect of prayer.  Prayer now becomes a two-way exchange.  We communicate to God.  God communicates to us.  We have questions.  He can answer.  We seek guidance.  He can lead.

This definition makes it okay for us to have a tough day and tell him, “Lord, I have had a tough day.  Let me tell you about it . . .”  But after we have vented to him – because it is a conversation and not a monologue – God can respond.  He may speak words of hope and encouragement into our hearts.  He might remind us of the help he offers through the Holy Spirit.  The Lord might even speak conviction into your life.

As foreign as this may seem, a beautiful give and take can occur in our times of prayer.  Through conversations with our loved ones, we truly know and become known.  Through our conversations with our heavenly master, we become known by God and we know him.

Qualifiers not useful to the definition of payer

As we expand and refine the definition of prayer, there is a strong temptation to start adding other qualifiers to the definition.  Most of these qualifiers will take the form of a “how.”  We have conversations with God “by going into our room by ourselves and closing the door,” or by getting on our knees,” and so on.  The difficulty with these types of qualifiers is that it confuses the question of “what” with the question of “how.”  These are two very different questions.  Don’t fret, the church often struggles with sorting between these two.

Communication between two spouses is a great illustration.  The goal of communication is that thoughts, feelings and desires are shared between two people.  This is the “what.”  But let’s say we decide that we can only talk to our spouse in the early morning.  And we can only share with our spouse while on our knees.  This is a rather silly example, but it clearly illustrates the idea.  A husband can obviously share with his wife while he sits on the couch with her, while they hike in the forest, or while they ride in a car together.  Defining the “what” too narrowly with too many “how’s” is a mistake.  It excludes many legitimate expressions of communication.  So, we will not burden the definition of prayer with qualifiers that amount only to technique.

Qualifiers useful to the definition of prayer

A different type of qualifier, however, can be wise to include in the definition of prayer.  A qualifier that does not define techniques, but defines heart attitudes, is prudent to include in the definition of prayer.  Back to our married couple trying to communicate.  To say that communication is, “pausing from life to give our undivided attention to the other spouse and to share thoughts feelings and desires” is a strong, clear, and flexible definition.  Again, it allows our couple to talk while at dinner, in the car, or on the couch.  But it does not allow meaningful communication to happen while the husband is engrossed in the game on TV.  It does not allow it to occur when the wife is busy trying to get dinner on the table.  There are two such heart attitudes we think are important to include in our definition of prayer.

Authenticity

The first heart attitude that is vital to include in a definition of prayer is authenticity.  Some people are not honest when they talk to others.  Be it our of fear, mistrust, insecurity or whatever, these people cannot be honest with others.  People are the same way with God.  In their hearts they say, “I really feel this way _____, but God would not approve of that.  So, I will pray like everything is ok.”  Other times, in a group that prays together, we will listen to each other pray.  Then someone will pray, and we can tell when they are not trying to communicate with God, but instead are trying to impress everyone else in the room.  The fact is, God can detect a lack of authenticity.

God knows everything.  Including what we think and what we feel.  So be honest.  Job was a stellar example.  We will take a more in depth look at him later, but what impresses us is how he managed to spend a fair amount of time shaking his fist at God – but never pointing his finger at him.  He was able to be honest with God about his tough circumstances, but he did not go straight to angry accusations.  So be real.  Inauthentic prayer is a waste of everyone’s time.  It takes an intensely relational experience and hollows it out into mere ritual.

Enter into his presence

The other heart attitude that we will add is entering into his presence.  Many of us will hear this and think of the verse where Jesus told his listeners to go in to their room and close the door and pray in secret.  Some will cry foul and accuse me of trying to go against what I just said and include a technique in my definition:  solitude.  Going off by yourself can be a great help in prayer.  Solitude greatly reduces

distractions.  Solitude is an environment where it is easy to focus on God.  But, I will admit that many times I have set aside some time to be in a place all by myself to pray – and been totally distracted.  It just happens sometimes.  Life is stressful.  Deadlines pile up at work.  We fall behind at school.  The kids.  The bills.  Sitting by myself in a room and stressing – without really talking to the one who can do something about all of it – should not count as prayer.

In the same way, I have had times in other places where I have been able to clear my mind, focus clearly on God and have a wonderful time of connection with the Father.  I have had such times of prayer pedaling away on a road bike, zooming down the freeway, and sitting in a busy coffee shop.  Given these examples, it is clear then that solitude does not automatically equal quality prayer.  The ability to calm our mind and free ourselves from distraction is the key.  This is a heart issue.  We need to be able to trust God enough with our schedule and our needs that we are able to stop charging through life long enough to quietly and calmly just be with Him.

Our definition of prayer

Having worked through all these aspects of what it means to pray, we settle upon this definition of prayer:

Prayer is entering into God’s presence and having an authentic conversation with him.

When we sit down to pray, we must enter into his presence.  We must clear our mind of worry and distractions and clearly focus on communicating with the Father.  Once in his presence, we must talk to Him – honestly and openly.  From the heart.  And we must also pause to listen to him.

This definition sounds really cool.  It sounds like if I could learn to do this, my whole experience of the Christian walk would be radically different.  This definition also sounds challenging.  This does not sound like this is something we can figure out in a few days.  But I do think it will be worth it.  I hope it is.

Finding out is really what this experiment is about.

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