Prayer: Talking and Listening

"Now I lay me down to sleep..." goes the old childhood prayer.  That's  fine for two-year-olds, I guess, but the more we grow in Christ, the more we should know and practice deeper prayer.  Prayer is hard work, not an exercise in reciting some words or giving God our to-do list for his day! But good prayer, deep prayer, changes our own ideas and our lives. 

I wrote in January about my own feelings of not wanting to be threatened by being too close to God, in a post called "Half a Cup of Jesus".  It's common for us to ask for a few things from God, but not to get too close to him, because he might ask something of us that we don't want to do.  Even when confessing a sin or weakness, we can leave it at "God, I'm sorry this happened, help me not to do it again" without letting him show us our deeper motives that keep drawing us to that hurtful behavior. 

Some quote Jesus' words in Matt. 21:22, "You can pray for anything, and if you have faith, you will receive it" to prove that God is obligated to deliver whatever we ask for "in faith."  That idea turns God into a vending machine or a servant at our pleasure, which is backwards to our true relationship with him.  James reminds us in 4:2-3 "Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it. And even when you ask, you don’t get it because your motives are all wrong—you want only what will give you pleasure." And so Richard Foster explains "To 'ask rightly' involves transformed passions.  In prayer, real prayer, we begin to think God's thoughts after him: to desire the things he desires, to love the things he loves, to will the things he wills"  (Celebration of Discipline, p. 33).  That would have to involve focus: intently pursuing a problem, or a motive of ours, to inquire as to God's view on it; being willing to hear him tell us we've not been thinking, acting or speaking from love; and being ready to yield to his will even if it looks like a loss to our agenda. 

We could say that prayer is bending our bodies and our thoughts to God, in an exercise of the mind and will that works to transform us from self-centered to God-centered persons. Real prayer is work -- the hard work of facing ourselves and submitting to God -- not a relaxed little session of pleasant thoughts as an interlude to our otherwise 'busy' day.  We will still have requests of God, and we will still ask him to change the circumstances around us -- but as we grow up in prayer, our requests will come from a deeper sense of his love for us and others, and we may be surprised about how many answers we receive once our motives are the same as God's. 

And that will be worth all the effort.