Introduction.
This series on Prayer is based on Richard Foster’s BRILLIANT book simply called "Prayer". If you want to study Prayer seriously it is a book you must read.
Story: This series of studies came out a time of retreat at Mariastein, near Basle in Switzerland in October last year (2007)
I went for a retreat for 4 days and took this book and half a dozen other theological tomes with me
Yet the only book I read was Richard Foster’s book on Prayer. It was so rich – and so thought provoking
I don’t know if you are anything like me – but I feel a real beginner in prayer. Yet Richard Foster’s book opened me to dimensions that I didn’t even think COULD be prayer.
As you can see, I can really commend it to you!
I am going to use some of the titles he uses – because I find them so helpful
Tonight I’d like to look at two areas
1. Simple Prayer
2. Praying the Ordinary
1. Simple Prayer
Strange title – what is simple prayer.
Dom Chapman summed it up well when he said: “Pray as you can, not as you can’t”
Many people think you can’t pray until you have the right MOTIVATION and SERIOUS and IMPORTANT THINGS to trouble God about.
But simple prayer is childlike prayer
We all come to God with mixed motives
As Richard Foster puts it
“The Truth of the matter is, we all come to prayer with a tangled mass of motives – altruistic and selfish, merciful and hateful, loving and bitter. Frankly this side of eternity we will never unravel the good from the bad…”
For me that was a real eye opener – because God loves us because we are his children. He knows our motives – we can’t kid him – and all he wants us to do is to come to him!!
I am not a great fan of the Psalms – I always had trouble with Psalm 137 verses 8 and 9 which read
O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us
He who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks (Ps 137 8-9)
But it suddenly dawned on me how real this prayer was – however horrible it sounds to 21st Century ears. The Jews were in captivity – they were Babylonian slaves with no rights – and this is a prayer from the heart. THAT is how the Psalmist felt.
And I realised that God wants us to pray what is in our hearts and not “superspiritual” and lets face it so often unreal prayer as to where we are at
Many of the great saints of old riled against God in their darker moments.
Take Moses in Numbers 11
Moses said to GOD, "Why are you treating me this way? What did I ever do to you to deserve this? Did I conceive them? Was I their mother? So why dump the responsibility of this people on me? Why tell me to carry them around like a nursing mother, carry them all the way to the land you promised to their ancestors? Where am I supposed to get meat for all these people who are whining to me, 'Give us meat; we want meat.' I can't do this by myself—it's too much, all these people. If this is how you intend to treat me, do me a favour and kill me. I've seen enough; I've had enough. (The Message)
Let me out of here."
You can almost feel the prophet Jeremiah shaking his fist at God when he said, in Jeremiah 20:7-10:
You pushed me into this, God, and I let you do it.
You were too much for me.
And now I'm a public joke. They all poke fun at me.
Every time I open my mouth
I'm shouting, "Murder!" or "Rape!"
And all I get for my God-warnings
are insults and contempt.
But if I say, "Forget it!
No more God-Messages from me!"
The words are fire in my belly,
a burning in my bones.
I'm worn out trying to hold it in.
I can't do it any longer!
Then I hear whispering behind my back:
"There he goes crying “Wolf” all the time.” Shut him up! Report him!"
Old friends watch, hoping I'll fall flat on my face:
"One more mistake and we'll have him.
We'll get rid of him for good!" (slightly modified version of the Message)
God takes it too – he allows us to be disrespectful!
Because he wants us to tell him of our fears and hurts, our pains and disappointments
Because he is the God who wants to heal!
One of God’s names in the Old Testament is Jehovah rophe (rophay): Jehovah heals
The term rophe means to restore, heals, cure - not just in physical sense but in moral sense too.
Those of us with children – how would we respond to our angry child – we’d listen and try and help. How much more the Father heart of God
"If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?" (Lk 11:13)
Simple prayer is just that – we talk to him like we do our best friend
Richard Foster puts it like this: “ The Bruised and broken enter Simple prayer as freely as the healthy and wealthy.”
Foster also counsel us not to give up because of our lack of prayer. Even in our prayerlessness we hunger for God
Mary Vincent writes: “The desire for prayer is prayer – the prayer of desire.”
And the other side of the coin is trying too hard to pray so we get spiritual indigestion.
Story: When I went off to Mariastein – I started to pray – and immediately felt drowsy – so I lay down on my bed and slept for a time - and then came back to prayer refreshed.
Don’t beat yourself up if you can’t pray long – just do what you can do.
Foster gives good advice: Don’t give up praying because you are struggling with evil, anger hurt etc. Rather pray while you are struggling with evil.
Simple prayer can also be self centred prayer – a conversation of the heart.
Foster writes this: In the beginning we are indeed the subject and centre of our prayers. But in God’s time and in God’s way a “Copernican revolution takes place. Slowly, almost imperceptibly there is a shift in our centre of gravity. We pass from thinking of God as part of our life to the realisation that we are part of his life.”
2. Praying the Ordinary
This was for me the most extraordinary chapter of Richard Foster’s book
Praying the Ordinary
Let me start by asking how much time in the week do we think we pray:
1%, 5%, 10%, 30%, 50%.......
Let me allow Foster to introduce this section on praying the Ordinary. He writes:
Many of us live in a kind of inner apartheid. We segregate out a small corner of pious activities and then make no spiritual sense out of the rest of our lives. We become so accustomed to this way of living that we fail to see the contradiction in it. The scandal of Christianity in our day is the heresy of a 5% spirituality. We overcome this modern heresy by Praying the Ordinary.
Story:
Richard Foster tells us of his mother living and dying an ordinary death. You can read that story in the book
I would like to tell you a similar story of an old beautiful Christian lady who Maddy and I went to visit when we were living in Leven (1998/1999).
The Vicar, Martyn Dunning had asked us to visit Mary because she was housebound and unable to come to church.
She had one son who did not visit her. However, her ex- daughter in law (for her son had got divorced) did come over regularly and some friends from Church too.
We started having a Bible Study together and she picked the book of Isaiah!
We also learnt her story – how she was suffering from arthritis and a weak heart. Her husband Larry had died a good number of years earlier
But she did not moan – rather she was such an encouragement to us.
She would tell you she was in pain if you asked how she was - but she didn’t dwell on it
And slowly she went down hill – and died just after we had left the village. Martyn rang us up to tell us that Mary had gone to be with her Lord.
She lived an ordinary life and died an ordinary death. She accepted her deterioration with grace and gentleness – and still had a concern for those in the old people’s home - Abbeyfield House who did not know the Lord.
The point is that God lies in the daily things and the ordinary and not in the spectacular and heroic.
God is with us while we are cooking, hovering (excuse the misuse of the trademark), washing up – emptying the dustbin
Foster says this: “If we cannot find God in the routines of home and shop, then we will not find him at all. Ours is a symphonic peity in which all activities of work and play and sex and sleep are holy habitats”
Most of Jesus life was tried up with the ordinary – growing from childhood to manhood in the Carpenter’s shop – and the Gospel really only record the last 3 years of his life – his ministry years.
I remember thinking – when I was a patent lawyer that if I became a vicar I would have all the time in the world to pray and spend time with God!
Who am I kidding – I am busier in my vocation than ever I was as a lay person.
In praying the Ordinary – my vocation is part of my Prayer of the Ordinary
The secret is learning to pray in our work. We cook to the glory of God, we wash up to the glory of God – and in the example Foster uses you dig ditches to the glory of God
Metropolitan Anthony Bloom once said: A prayer makes sense only if it is lived”
It is not difficult to see how being a Billy Graham or an Archbishop can give glory to God in their Godly vocations – the trouble comes in seeking cleaning out the bog as to the glory of God!
But is precisely when we do the jobs we hate that we find God in them.
All work is pleasing to our heavenly Father
He values the Ordinary.
We’re not just pushing the Protestant work ethic here – we glorify God in our labours
We pray the Ordinary
We also pray the ordinary when we enage in the “Prayer of Action” as Jean-Nicholas Grou – a French Jesuit Priest and Author who lived from 1731-1803 - calls it.
Grou said:” Every action performed in the sight of God because it is the Will of God and in the manner God wills is a prayer and indeed a better prayer than could be made in words at such times.”
Do you remember Jesus parables about two brothers who were asked to go out into the field and work. The elder one said yes and didn’t go. The younger one said no, but then relented and went and did what his father had asked him
“Which one” Jesus asked “did his father’s will?.” Mt 21:28-32
James in Jas 2:14-18 writes this
Dear friends, do you think you'll get anywhere in this if you learn all the right words but never do anything? Does merely talking about faith indicate that a person really has it? For instance, you come upon an old friend dressed in rags and half-starved and say, "Good morning, friend! Be clothed in Christ! Be filled with the Holy Spirit!" and walk off without providing so much as a coat or a cup of soup—where does that get you? Isn't it obvious that God-talk without God-acts is outrageous nonsense?
18 I can already hear one of you agreeing by saying, "Sounds good. You take care of the faith department, I'll handle the works department."
Not so fast. You can no more show me your works apart from your faith than I can show you my faith apart from my works. Faith and works, works and faith, fit together hand in glove.
Ignatius of Loyola once said: “Everything that turns in the direction of God is prayer”
Waiting is part of ordinary time – we discover God in our waiting – at the checkout queue, in a traffic jam, waiting for that promotion, or to retire
St Benedict criterion for allowing a visitor to stay in a Benedictine monastery was that “he is content with the life as he finds it and does not make excessive demands …but is simply content with what he finds.
“Contentment without excessive demands” is certainly worth a second thought – especially in a society which is “Winning by intimidation.
Praying the ordinary is also when we pray or bless the ordinary experiences of life
St Paul in Romans gave thanks for the Church in Rome
And God, whom I so love to worship and serve by spreading the good news of his Son—the Message!—knows that every time I think of you in my prayers, which is practically all the time, I ask him to clear the way for me to come and see you. The longer this waiting goes on, the deeper the ache. I so want to be there to deliver God's gift in person and watch you grow stronger right before my eyes! But don't think I'm not expecting to get something out of this, too! You have as much to give me as I do to you. (Rom 1:8-11)
Can we bless those awkward people we meet in life – for that is part of Praying the Ordinary
Story: When I was in Sandoz I had a colleague who was a real pain in the neck to me, Dr Zaugg. We called him the poisonous dwarf.
One day we had a B/S in my office and we speaking about blessing those who hate us – and someone – bless him – said “Well what about Zaugg then?”
Talk about hoisted by your own petard.
So every day when I went in – I passed Zaugg’s office and I’d ask the Lord to bless him.
Within a couple of months, my attitude to Zaugg changed and when he retired a year later, I could genuine say “Dr Zaugg I am going to miss you” – and I meant it
Praying the Ordinary includes prayers arising out of the context of the family.
Praying for our children,
prayer for protection in times of dangers, prayer for a safe journey…the list goes on.
Story: Maddy’s parents have a “family altar” at mealtimes - where her parents still read a Bible passage and the "Losungen" – a Mennonite “Word for Today” in German. There is an English translation of the Losungen that I can thoroughly recommend (published by the Herrenhut Community if memory serves)
But we mustn’t get a guilt complex when we can’t do that – because by and large it represents a change in cultural patterns rather than a lack of piety. In farming communities – and Maddy’s father was a farmer – such family gatherings
We all share in the “common ventures of life” - birth marriage, work and death and Jesus gave a sacramental meaning to all of these – a joining of the common with the sacred.
Praying the Ordinary reminds us that God is in all aspects of our life, not just when we are on our knees. We can speak to him - share with him through all the common tasks in life
May I ask you the question again – how much time do you devote to prayer – 5%, 10% 30%, 50% or even more?
