Taming the Wandering Mind: how to pray for more than 30 seconds…
Steve Simala Grant - February 13, 2000
Has this ever happened to you? You get set to pray – you think “ok, I agreed to spend 15 minutes a day in quiet prayer with my Lord, now I’m going to do it.” You get set, find the spot, and start to pray. And it goes something like this:
“Dear Lord, I come before you with thanks for this day, and for all the things that you have in store for me today. Thank you for my job, even though I don’t always love it and I don’t always feel appreciated like yesterday when my boss didn’t even notice that I really put a lot into that project and didn’t even seem to care that I really put a lot of effort into that I wonder if I should say something today when I talk to him about that new project and oh yeah I better remember to phone John to get that information before I figure out how to tackle that project I wonder if I started with the timeline that would be best, but really I should start by figuring out what all the things I need to do are… OH YEAH I’M SUPPOSED TO BE PRAYING!!! umm, sorry God… please bless my job. I also want to pray for my family OH NO I FORGOT TO SIGN MY KIDS REPORT CARD I WONDER IF I CAN STILL CATCH HIM BEFORE HE GETS ON THE BUS…
and so on…
If you have ever had an experience like that, then you need to know that you are not alone. It happens to many of us, myself included. And if you’re like me, you feel so guilty! The thoughts come to us “how could I do that to GOD? I am awful, I started out wanting to talk with Him and my mind just went everywhere! I couldn’t even concentrate on Him for 15 minutes.” And we can feel defeated. We all need help in learning how to Tame The Wandering Mind. This morning I want to with you a few thoughts about concentrating in prayer, especially how to listen to God, and hopefully equip you to focus on your Lord as you carve out time in your day to spend with Him in prayer.
We forget as Christians that prayer is a learned thing. Jesus disciples approached Him in Luke 11:1, and they said “Lord, teach us to pray”. Teach us. Show us how; tell us what to do. Jesus’ response was a model prayer – the Lord’s Prayer as we know it today. And while we don’t have time to go through the model section by section, I encourage you to do that on your own this week, and we will conclude our service today reciting it together. It includes all the essential elements!
So let’s take some time today to learn together how to pray. We will start with the idea that prayer must be conversation, then talk about learning how to listen, and finally talk about praying with our whole selves.
1. communication vs conversation:
Prayer is not communication, it is conversation. it is dialogue, not diatribe. I need to speak and listen. With communication, the focus is one way – me to you, for example. I talk, you listen. Too often for us, that is how we pray: I speak, God listens. But when that is true of our prayer lives, we miss out tremendously. You see, we believe that God wants to speak to us. We believe that He does speak to us. And yet when we pray, we often only speak to him, and never take the time to learn to listen. We’ll come back to learning to listen later, suffice it to say right now that prayer needs to be two-way conversation, not one-way communication.
Let’s remember in this conversation who we are: we don’t come to prayer as bartering equals – when Scripture says we should come “boldly” it doesn’t mean that we march up to God’s throne and state our demands. We come instead as God’s children, adopted by Him and welcomed by Him, at His initiative. This leads us to the most basic, and also most frequent, type of prayer: what Richard Foster calls simple prayer. Simple prayer is exactly that – the conversation between a child and her father. It is where we come exactly as we are, knowing we are welcome and accepted by God, and we just share our concerns and cares and joys and ideas. And as we spend time with our Father, we allow Him to instruct us, to chide us, to mold us into who we need to become. This type of prayer has in it all the beauty and spontaneity of childhood, and all its simplicity.
I have the privilege each week of being with your children, and slipping into a class being taught by someone else and just spending time concentrating on individual kids. It struck me this week that I need to talk to God the same way they talk to adults like me – they get excited about their picture, or sometimes I notice they are sad or upset and when I ask them sometimes they just start talking and sharing. It struck me that that is how to talk to God.
And He asks us to listen to Him as well. Deut. chap 30 is Moses’ last speech to the Israelites before his death. vs 19-20 might be familiar to you:
This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
In John 10:2-4 Jesus describes Himself as a shepherd, and says
The man who enters by the gate is the shepherd of his sheep. 3 The watchman opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice.
Prayer needs to become conversation with God and not communication to God. Conversation, as we have said, needs to be two-way. So that brings the obvious question: how do we listen to God who is not physically present in the conversation?
LEARNING TO LISTEN
So how do we listen? That is one of the big questions. Let me give you two ideas – first it begins with silence, and second it involves knowing ourselves and the unique ways God speaks to us.
Begins with silence
Ps. 46:10 is a familiar verse: “Be still, and know that I am God.” But how?
Nouwen writes:
For many, silence is threatening. They don’t know what to do with it. If they leave the noise of the city behind and come upon a place where no cars are roaring, no ships tooting, no trains rumbling; where there is no hum of radio or television; where no records or tapes are playing; they feel their entire body gripped by an intense unrest. They feel like a fish which has been thrown on dry land. They have lost their bearings. Some people can’t study without a solid wall of music surrounding them. If they are forced to sit in a room without a constant flow of sound, they grow very nervous.
Thus, for many of us, silence has become a threat. There was a time when silence was normal and noise disturbing. But today, noise is the normal fare, and silence – strange as it may seem – has become the disturbance… It seems that we can’t stand the sound of silence.
Silence is hard for us as people who are so used to noise. But I believe that God’s voice is soft far more often than it is loud. Sometimes, as in the song we sing, we hear God’s voice “like thunder over the waters”. But for me, far more often, God’s voice is heard in the still, quiet place. And when we desire to hear Him speak to us in our daily lives we must get to that quiet place so we can hear Him.
Becoming comfortable with silence, and learning to hear God’s voice there, is a matter of practice. It starts with brief periods, and will grow to be such that you will be longing for more of it. For me, on occasion, God has been the one to end the time of quiet with a gentle admonition to get up and do what He has told me to do! But begin with a short amount of time, and let it grow as you become comfortable with quiet.
As you begin your time of silence, one thing that people throughout the centuries have found extremely helpful is to do an exercise to help focus and concentrate their entire being on God in the present moment. That is how we began corporate prayer today. The purpose is simply to focus – to give us time to wade through the numerous competing thoughts and center ourselves towards God. Most of these exercises allow us to get in touch with ourselves – our feelings, our present state, whatever is going on inside of us – then lead us to focus our entire being on God. So the one we did earlier is one example. Another example is to simply pay attention to your breathing, and to imagine breathing out the cares and worries, and breathing in the love and freedom of God. Another example is to use your imagination and picture yourself walking away from your home and all your cares, taking nothing with you, and meeting Jesus along the way, and then simply walking with Him and talking with Him. Banff train example… These aren’t mystical, new-age spiritual things – they are simply tools to help us concentrate fully on meeting God and talking with Him.
You might find that you don’t need such a thing; that you have no trouble entering into God’s presence and focussing your entire self on Him, and so you don’t need these types of helps. If so, great! Keep it up! But for the rest of us, anything that we can do to help us focus completely on God rather than on ourselves will help us learn to listen in prayer more effectively.
I’ve been asked a couple of times by people seeking to be quiet before the Lord how to stay focussed. Staying focussed in the midst of silence is hard for many of us – our minds wander and we end up like the prayer I began with. Let me give you a few really practical hints for dealing with the distractions that inevitably arise:
• give it time. start small and work your way into longer times
• don’t get discouraged. the mind is a muscle, as we practice we will learn how to concentrate better
• don’t fight the distractions. that may sound backward, but it works. See, as soon as we start to fight them we take our focus off of God and onto our distractions, and then we end up distracted further. Instead, acknowledge them, recognize them – and turn your focus back to God. For example, say you are trying to be quiet and suddenly you hear the garbage truck picking up your garbage. Recognize it, acknowledge it, and turn your focus back to God. Same with distracting thoughts – recognize them and turn your focus back to God. It might help here to keep a pen and paper with you, and just jot down the various things that come to mind for attention later.
• allow the time you set aside to liberate you from dealing with the flood of things that rush into your mind. You have chosen to set this time aside, let that liberate you from feeling like you have to stop and take care of the urgent things that jump to mind.
• if you find yourself really struggling with mentally meandering, set a timer to go off every couple of minutes as an external reminder of why you are sitting there in complete quiet.
• also, pick a time when you are mentally alert. For some, that is first thing in the morning but that is definitely not me!! However, when I first arrive in the office I am awake enough to be able to be quiet.
• for some people, turning the distractions into prayer items has proven powerful. Some people even find that this is how God leads them to pray! So if you get distracted about something at school, start to pray about that and let your prayers branch out from there.
It means knowing ourselves:
We need to ask God to speak to us. We need to ask that the Holy Spirit lead us and guide us as we pray. I know it is obvious, but it is certainly a very important step!!
A little while ago I was struggling with how God speaks. As I looked around, I saw some people to whom God talks to directly with words, sometimes audible, sometimes directly into their minds; others saw pictures in their minds; I know some who have dreams; some have really strong feelings; others hear God speak through children’s laughter or a natural phenomenon like a flock of birds dancing together in flight; still others heard God speak through their Bibles. And all of these people were excited about hearing God, and would tell others how much God wanted to say to them if they would just listen the way they listened. And I wrestled with this both for me personally and also for some people who asked me why God didn’t speak to them like He spoke to some of these other people.
And as I prayed this through, God spoke to me the way He often does – through an idea. The idea was this: God made each of us different – why wouldn’t He speak to us in different ways? And in that realization, I was suddenly free to let God speak to me in accordance with how He made me, not captive to a desire to hear God speak the way others did. And so for me, as a naturally reflective person who enjoys quiet, God speaks to me through ideas and insights. Others whom He made really emotional, He speaks to through feelings. To imaginative people, He might speak through dreams and pictures. Do you see? Answering the question “how did God make me” might naturally lead to understanding better how He wants to speak to you. I don’t have kids of my own, but even as I work with teens and kids here I recognize that I don’t speak to them all the same way. Some I am very gentle with, because I know they are sensitive and don’t need a big push to get the point; while others I know I need to be blunt and straightforward with or they will just be frustrated wondering what I am really trying to say. For some I might logically argue a point; others I might try to help them feel a truth. It is the same with God – He speaks to us in unique ways according to how He made us.
By far the biggest way God speaks to all of us is through His word, and anytime we feel God is saying something to us we MUST double check it against the Bible to determine its validity. God will say nothing that contradicts His word, or that contradicts the character of God as He has revealed Himself in His word. So I encourage you to pray with your Bible open. Pray through passages of Scripture. Open your Bible as you pray and seek to hear what God has to say to you as you read a few verses repeatedly, allowing one phrase to stick in your heart and mind.
A question I hear all the time is “how do I know when it’s me and when it’s God?” That is a huge question. Practice is the first answer. Jesus said in John 10 “my sheep know my voice” – and He contrasts a “stranger” with Himself. Getting to know someone’s voice is simply a matter of spending time with them listening to them. Don’t be afraid to try!! Second, sometimes it really doesn’t matter. For example, Russ walking an extra block; Joanne praying for someone. Third, discernment in community – this is why we have each other; eg. me and a million ideas. Especially critical if we feel God is telling us something for someone else, which, by the way, we should never assume to be given if we are not really adept at hearing God speak to us (whole recognizing the voice of God thing…) Finally, what is the result? What is the fruit??? That will certainly identify beyond doubt whether or not we heard correctly.
PRAYING WITH ALL OF OURSELVES
Prayer involves all of our faculties – physical, emotional, and spiritual. Do you pray with your mind only? Or do you pray with your feelings too? What about your body? How about what Paul says when he instructs us to “Pray in the Spirit on all occasions?” Scripture gives us numerous examples of the role of each of these as we pray – Isaiah 1:18 says “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord.” Lamentations 2:19 includes both the emotional and the physical: “Arise, cry out in the night, as the watches of the night begin; pour out your heart like water in the presence of the Lord. Lift up your hands to him…” The intellectual part we seldom have trouble with. But what about the emotional? Is it okay to pour out our feelings to God? Absolutely. We need to be honest before God about how we are feeling, and “pour our hearts” out to Him. What about the physical though? Is our posture part of our prayer anymore? We bow our heads – bowing is something we typically do to indicate subservience. Many people kneel – and in kneeling indicate submission. Sometimes we raise our hands – in praise and celebration. Scripture makes it clear that falling on our face – lying prostrate – is a very appropriate posture before almighty God. I sometimes like to stand. We joked at our last elders meeting “OK, everybody assume your favorite prayer posture”, and some knelt, some stood, some sat – and we prayed using our bodies as well. We hope you feel free enough during our worship services to sit, stand, kneel, whatever as we pray together.
There are a couple of prayer types that rely heavily on the physical – some call them “body prayers”. I want to teach you a couple that you can use in your own prayer life. Pastor Dave led us in one last Sunday, where we sat with our palms up and were open to receive from God. A variation of that is to begin with our palms down, concentrating on letting go and dropping the things we are holding on to that we need to get rid of, then turning our palms up to receive from God. Henri Nouwen talks about the clenched fist, and gradually opening and releasing to God in an amazing little book called “With Open Hands”. Let me teach you one more that I found quite meaningful:
Christ in my heart and in my loving
Christ in my life and in my living
Christ in my mouth and in my speaking
Christ in my eyes and in my seeing
Christ in my ears and in my hearing
Christ in my mind and in my understanding
Mind, emotions, body: what about spirit? How do we pray with our spirits, like Paul told us to do in Eph 6:18 when he says “Pray in the Spirit on all occasions”.
The key to praying “in the Spirit” is learning to adjust our whole mindset about prayer and how/when/why it is powerful. It is accomplished by our learning to listen first and talk second. Sometimes I think that we subconsciously see prayer as us giving God the information He needs so that He will do what we want. And so when we pray, we say “God, here’s what is happening, here is what you need to do.” We are so presumptuous! Praying in the Spirit is us learning to hear what God is saying and then pray that. It is us joining Him in what He is doing and what He desires to do. It is the heart of what Paul is saying in Rom. 8:26 “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” Prayer is powerful when we pray in agreement with God – when what we are asking is exactly what He desires for us or for the circumstance.
CONCLUSION:
So as you spend time in prayer this week, I encourage you to make it a conversation with God instead of a communication to God. I encourage you to practice listening to Him. And I encourage you to involve your whole self – not just your mind but your feelings and your body and your spirit. About three weeks ago we started really concentrating on prayer as a church – on seeking God together as His people. And though its only been about three weeks, it’s been quite a ride already! It is exciting to see God moving among us, answering our prayers and making us more like Him. I invite you to join the adventure – commit to spending time each day in prayer – and enjoy the ride!
To conclude our service, I’d like to ask you to stand and pray with me.
