THE PRAYING LIFE
Talking and Listening to God -- Part 1
Isaac Butterworth
November 21, 2010
Ephesians 6:18-20 (NIV)
18 And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people. 19 Pray also for me, that whenever I speak, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel, 20 for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it fearlessly, as I should.
Sheldon Kornpett was a quiet, reserved man with a successful dental practice in Manhattan, that is, until he met his future in-laws, Mr. and Mrs. Vince Ricardo. Sheldon’s daughter was soon to be married to their son, so Sheldon’s wife hosted a dinner party at their house to meet the parents of her daughter’s fiancé. This is the setup, of course, for the 1979 film, The In-Laws, in which Alan Arkin plays the docile, subdued dentist and Peter Falk plays the wild and goofy Vince Ricardo.
On the day after the party, Vince drops by Sheldon’s office and tells him that he is actually a CIA operative and that he has secretly robbed the U.S. Mint of a number of engraving plates. He explains that it was a necessary action if he was to crack a worldwide plot against the economy of the United States. He had to act on his own, he says, because the CIA wouldn’t go along with him. Not only that, Vince says, but he left one of the stolen engraving plates in Sheldon’s house the night before. As you might expect, when Sheldon arrives home that evening, the Feds are there to meet him.
But Sheldon doesn’t go into the house; he turns his car around and goes the other way. He calls Vince, and, before he knows it, he and his daughter’s future father-in-law are in a somewhat unstable plane, flying over a vast expanse of water, headed for Central America as part of Vince’s plan to save the United States from financial ruin.
When they arrive, they fall into disfavor with the local dictator, a General Garcia, and they wind up in front of a firing squad. The General enjoys having these Americans at his mercy, and he struts around in front of them, trying to torment them with their fate. This works with the dentist, of course, but the Peter Falk character isn’t shaken a bit. I remember the General, prancing in his black, high gloss, knee-high boots, wielding a riding crop in one hand -- I remember him walking up to the Alan Arkin character, tilting his head to capture his prisoner’s line of vision, and saying: ‘Tell me, sir: Are you a praying man?’
It’s the question I want us to consider today. Are you a praying man? Are you a woman who prays? Is prayer a part of your practice? In Ephesians, chapter 6, verse 18, the Apostle Paul instructs us to ‘pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind,’ he says, ‘be alert and always keep on praying.’ If you reflect but for a moment on Paul’s words, you get the idea that prayer isn’t something you do just once in a while; it is something you’re engaged in all the time. You ‘pray in the Spirit on all occasions,’ and you remain ‘alert and always keep on praying....’ What Paul is saying is that prayer is not just an act; it is a lifestyle. It’s not something we do now and again; it’s the program running in the background of all we do.
Today, we’re beginning a four-part series that I’m calling ‘Talking and Listening to God,’ and we’re going to start with prayer. That’s our focus today. The theme for the series is that your life and mine is a laboratory of faith, in which we discover the faithfulness of God and develop our own. And prayer is one of our lab projects. And what I want to suggest to you today is: that prayer is not just an isolated act that we perform from time to time; it is a lifestyle. Or, it could be; in fact, it should be. Prayer is a way of staying in continual communion with God; its the means of partnering with God in everything we do.
And if it’s to be that -- if it’s to be a lifestyle -- then three elements have to be in place. First of all, if prayer is to be more than a religious activity that you indulge in once in a while, you’re going to need a sense of being caught up in a cause so great that it dwarfs your own personal agenda in its shadow. You’re going to have to see that God is behind a monumental movement in this world and that it’s bigger than you are. That’s what Jesus meant when he showed up and started saying, ‘The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe...’ (Mark 1:15). The kingdom, as the Bible describes it, is not a place; it’s not heaven, although it includes heaven. The kingdom of God, though, is not a place. It’s a force; it’s a movement. And it’s moving toward a future in which the world is the way God wants it to be. And if prayer is to be more for you than just one more thing you do, you are going to have to be captivated by the priority and urgency of this movement.
You’re also going to need something else: You’re going to have to have in place a proper assessment of the opposition God’s great cause faces. And it does face opposition. God looks at our world, and he says, ‘There’s something not right about it; it needs changing.’ And he calls us to be his agents of change. But things are the way they are -- right or not -- because somebody wants them that way. And it’s to their advantage that things don’t change. There are forces in this world that are arrayed against God’s grand project to make things right. In fact, Paul addresses that earlier in chapter 6 of Ephesians. In verse 12, he talks about ‘our struggle....’ There is a struggle you see, but the battle’s not where you might think. ‘Our struggle,’ he says, ‘is not against flesh and blood.’ It’s not against people. It’s against -- and this is what Paul says -- our struggle is ‘against the spiritual forces of evil....’ The conflict in which we are engaged is fought on moral ground; it is a conflict against evil. And you and I cannot wage war against evil in our own strength. We need the power of God. And that’s why we become people of prayer. And we don’t just ‘say’ our prayers; when we’re up against this kind of opposition, we have to ‘live’ our prayers. Prayer is not just an act; it’s a lifestyle.
And that brings us to the third element that has to be in place if prayer is be more than a nice religious activity in which we involve ourselves from time to time. If prayer is to be a lifestyle -- if it is to be the mode by which we move through life -- we are going to need a profound awareness of our dependence upon God. We can’t do this without him! What was it that Luther said in his great hymn? ‘Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing.’ Is that true? Is even our best effort not enough without God’s help? Now, of course, if there’s nothing at stake -- if you and I are not caught up in God’s great cause and if we know nothing of the powers which have set themselves in opposition to it -- then all we need to ask God for is to help us find a handy parking space and to make our lives a bit smoother. But if we’re in the battle for the kingdom, then prayer is our supply line, and without it, we are handily defeated.
Prayer, then, is too important -- isn’t it? -- to relegate to the leftover minutes of our day or to reserve for those times when we sense we’re really in trouble. We need prayer, and we need to pray as if our lives depended on it, because they do. And since they do, we need to develop some skills. If prayer is to be a lifestyle, we need a growing ability to focus our minds. We need to learn how to attend to God.
Now, everybody is different when it comes to this. What works for one person may not work for another. I have found that I pray best when I am doing something else. Not just anything else, of course; I don’t mean that. But, for example, if I walk while I pray, I can attend to God’s presence better. I stay focused; I’m not nearly so distracted. So, when I can, I take prayer walks several times a week. I go over to the campus of MSU, and I pray as I walk. And it works better if I pray aloud. Of course, sometimes, people overhear me, and I’m sure they think I’m strange. I can just imagine people thinking, ‘There goes that old man, talking to himself!’ So, when I know they’re there, I tone it down. I whisper, or I wait until they pass me by. But sometimes it’s too late. And I don’t know which is worse: if they think I’m talking to myself or if they think I’m talking to God! But for me, walking is kind of like ‘white noise.’ You know what I mean? White noise is the background noise that masks other noises and helps you to ignore them. Walking does that for me, as does writing. Another thing that helps me is to write out my prayers. The pencil or the pen or the computer keyboard enable me to stay focused on God and to attend to his presence.
Now, of course, prayer is not just talking to God. It is also listening to God. And that’s another skill we need to develop. If prayer is to be a lifestyle, we need to learn how to hear God’s voice. We’re going to talk about that a little more next week, but let me just say this now: Prayer is not an assault on heaven to wrest from God favors he is reluctant to give me. And it’s not this either: It’s not an effort to get God to align his will with mine. It is, rather, an effort to align my will with his. That’s why I need to learn how to listen to God. Prayer doesn’t change God; it changes me. That’s a critical understanding of prayer.
And if we’re going to be changed -- if our lifestyle is to be shaped by prayer -- prayer is going to have to be a part of our daily routine. We need to be in prayer every day. Every single day. We need a place where we’re not likely to be disturbed. We need a regular time that works for our schedule. And we need a way of organizing that time. We need to know what we’re going to do when we pray. What are we going to say?
Now, if you already have a plan in place -- if you already know what to do with the time set aside for prayer and that’s working for you -- don’t change a thing. But if you don’t have a plan, you might consider the Lord’s Prayer as a model. You might follow it’s outline and weave your conversation with God around its seven petitions.
Begin with reminding yourself of your position before God. You are a child of the Father. And so, when you pray, ‘Our Father, who art in heaven,’ remember that he welcomes you into his presence just like a loving father welcomes a child. Then move on to the next petition, which is one of praise. ‘Hallow’ God’s name; declare his holiness. Praise him with whatever words you have. Sing a song to him, if you like, or use a Psalm or another ascription of praise from the Bible. Next is the petition, ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth.’ Remember how we said that God’s kingdom is a force, a movement, in which God is making right everything that is wrong? We yield to that movement when we submit to God’s will in our own lives. So, spend some time reviewing your life and submitting every aspect of it to God’s purposes. Use prayer to set your priorities so that they match God’s priorities.
Then ask for his provision. Ask for what you need for yourself and for others. ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ we pray. And it is right to do so. Scripture, in fact, says: ‘Present your requests to God’ (Phil. 4:6). And then, seek his pardon. ‘Forgive us...as we forgive....’ You know this part of the prayer. And it is a good reminder that receiving forgiveness leads to offering it. We need to be as generous with others as God is with us. We need to commit ourselves to the ministry of reconciliation. Protection, too, is vital. Since we are in a spiritual battle against spiritual forces -- against evil, didn’t we say? -- we ask God to ‘deliver us from evil.’ And then we end on the promise of God’s perfect future -- when the kingdom shall come in all its fullness, when Christ ‘hands over the kingdom to God the Father’ (1 Cor. 15:24) and all that has been wrong will be made right and God’s dream for his creation will come true. We pray for this when we say, ‘Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever.’
‘Pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests,’ Paul says. And what we have seen is that there is more to this than working in a little time for prayer here and there. Prayer is not just an isolated act; it is a lifestyle. It is a way of living.
