Tag Archives: batterson

Prayer (week 4)

16 Aug

Mark Batterson starts the third part of his book “Circle Maker” off with a story that challenges us to ‘think long’. He alludes to the biblical metaphor of planting/sowing. We live in a time where we want instant results and we get them. If I want to know who won the Braves game or how many people live in India, the answer is at my fingertips. If I want a car at this moment, I can go and take out a loan and ‘buy’ it (although ‘borrow’ would be a more correct term). Our society demands instant gratification. We bring this demand into our spiritual life. We say a prayer and expect that if God is truly God he will answer it immediately. God is not google. There are times when He instantly answers a prayer. But this is not the norm. Prayer is not a formula for getting results. Batterson alludes to Daniel who prayed fervently when he knew the answer was 70 years away. We don’t like to think that prayer can be long and boring. We like mountaintop experiences–when heaven invades earth and we feel the rush of God’s presence. We are addicted to “fits and starts” as Eugene Peterson says. In light of this, he titled his book on discipleship, “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.” If that is true of our apprenticeship to Jesus then it is certainly true of prayer. All we can do is be faithful to pray in the direction of the result we seek.

I was talking with someone from Center City last week about the tension of not being where you want to be. He is in a spot where he can clearly define what success is and pray for it specifically. But right now he is fighting to get to the mountaintop that seems so close, yet so far. I told him to imagine there are 2 guys that want to get the summit of Mt. Everest. One guy trains for 2 years to prepare his body. He spends thousands of hours training and preparing for the climb. He then starts the impossibly difficult journey to the top. He fights weather conditions that are unspeakable. He has to postpone portions of the climb due to storms. Then one day he makes it to the top–the highest point on earth. The other guy is incredibly wealthy and pays for someone to helicopter him to the top (this is impossible but go with me–it’s a story). He too stands on the summit with guy #1. Who get’s more satisfaction out of the experience? Who does it mean more to? The answer is obvious. The “destination” or answer to prayer is often our focal point. Batterson says in several of his other books, “God cares less about where you’re going than who you’re becoming.” The destination means nothing without the journey. Is there something that you’ve been praying for for a long time and haven’t gotten the answer yet? Join the club. Keep praying. God is taking you on a journey and the vehicle is prayer. The moment you stop praying you halt the process. God uses prayer to stitch our hearts to his. It is a moment by moment tuning of our consciousness to God. As we pray we realize we are a part of God’s universe–He is not a nice part of ours. We are caught up in His story (I purposefully refrained from using HIS-tory). Our story is a subplot in his narrative. Keep praying toward the result you seek but know that by the time you get there you’ll be a different person–and that’s the point.

“Prayer isn’t something we do with our eyes closed; we pray with our eyes wide-open. Prayer isn’t a sentence that begins with ‘Dear Jesus’ and ends with ‘Amen’…All of life is meant to be a prayer, just as all of life is meant to be an act of worship.” (Batterson)

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Prayer (Week 3)

8 Aug

We are continuing to go through Mark Batterson’s book “The Circle Maker.” In the second section of the book Batterson says that prayer is a habit to be cultivated, a discipline to be developed, and a skill to be practiced. Habits, disciplines, and skills take real effort. That pursuit starts with this prayer…

“The prayer preceding all prayer is ‘May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.'” (C.S. Lewis)

There are two questions to ask yourself in prayer. First, ‘is it I that am praying?’ or ‘is it a carefully scripted version of myself that I believe God approves of?’ And second, ‘am I praying to God or a sanitized version of Him that I approve of?’

Real I
There are generally two versions of ourself that the world sees. There is the public persona that work colleagues, drive through workers, and acquaintances see. Then there is the more personal version that our close friends and family sees. However, as Philip Yancey notes, there is your true self that no one sees–all those secret things you live with. Those motives. Those thoughts. That past guilt. That hurt. These are the things that often go unsaid to the public and, sadly, to God. We are good at repressing those things and treating God as if he were a general acquaintance. We make awkward small talk with Him and never go further. Some move past that and let God in a little closer and give him access to our frustrations, joys, and daily life the way we would with a family member. But very few interact with God as their true self. We approach God with carefully rehearsed sincerity but never from a place of purity. This is a tragedy. Often we complain about not feeling God’s presence. I wonder if God too longs for our true presence. I wonder if God is waiting to heal the broken places in our soul but we don’t give him access. True prayer happens when you get honest with God. The posture of prayer is helplessness. Everyone has dark corners of the soul. God wants admittance into those areas to mend that which is broken. (Read Psalm 139)

Real Thou
Blaise Pascal said, “God made man in His own image and man returned the compliment.” Last week we talked about the importance of your view of God. If we have a misconception of God, our prayer will be greatly impacted. If we believe God to be a malevolent dictator in the sky that issues punishment with calloused anger, our prayers will be shaped by that. The “real thou” that Lewis speaks of will not be boxed in. He can not be contained and will not fit any mold we put him him. I believe one of the major problems in prayer is doubt. We don’t trust that God is what the Bible says He is. We doubt even his existence. The problem is that this feeling is tucked away in that dark corner of the soul that we don’t give God access to. Yancey says that he often challenges atheists and agnostics to come up with a doubt that they can’t find in the pages of the Bible. So many great biblical characters wrestle with doubt. The difference between their doubt and ours is that they voice theirs in the form of prayer. They pray to the God they feel is absent or silent. They persist. God loves their prayer because it is real. (Read Psalm 13)

Batterson challenges us to persist in prayer. He says the only way to lose is to stop praying. Pray to God as you are. Pray to God as He is.

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Prayer (Week 2)

30 Jul

Center City is corporately focusing on the topic of prayer this month and reading Mark Batterson’s “The Circle Maker.” In the first section of Batterson’s book he challenges us to dream big. In order to dream big we must first understand the complete “otherness” of God. He is far above and beyond anything we can fathom. He warns us against being prisoners of our left brain (the side that focuses on all things rational and logical). The reality of this God-saturated universe requires much use of our right brain (the seat of our imagination and dreaming). One of my favorite professors from Southeastern, Dr. Waddell, says that the moment you’ve figured out God, he’s no longer God. We have to relentlessly free God from the boxes we’ve put him in. A.W. Tozer was fascinated with this idea. He says that the most important thing about us is what comes to mind when we think about God. Our thoughts about God are of infinite importance. Batterson, paraphrasing Tozer, says that a higher view of God is the solution to ten thousand problems. When we get a fresh revelation of the “otherness” of God, his omnipotent power, and his divine love it will greatly impact our prayer life.

There are so many questions surrounding the topic of prayer. Doubt creeps in regularly. Philip Yancey writes, “Why pray? I have asked myself that question almost every day of my Christian life, especially when God’s presence seems far off and I wonder if prayer is a pious form of talking to myself.” I have asked myself at times “What if prayer doesn’t change anything?” But as Dallas Willard puts it, you should always doubt your doubt. What if prayer does change things? What if God does hear and respond to us? All of this is a mystery. Batterson says that we will not always know the will of God and we can’t be sure God will answer our prayer. What is most important is that we pray and believe that He is ABLE.

But what does this mean in practice? Richard Foster has a wonderful first chapter in his book “Prayer” about simple prayer. He says that we often have a love/hate relationship with the practice of prayer. This tension is usually because we are trying to pray perfectly. We attempt to pray with perfect theology, without any hint of cloudy motives, and with rigid discipline. Foster says, “…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, the pure from the impure. But what I have come to see is that God is big enough to receive us with all our mixture.” C.S. Lewis encourages us to “lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.” There is no pretension in prayer. God sees us for who we are. We don’t have to come to God as a blameless over-achiever. He frees us to come to him as we are–sinners and sons.

We must re-define prayer. Prayer is not simply an act of language. Prayer is a turning of our attention toward the Creator-God. Thus, prayer is not defined by the words we speak but the posture of our heart. Our desire to pray may in fact be prayer. Desire should give birth to action. Foster says we should not seek any ecstatic experience in prayer. We need only to come to God with simple faith knowing we are his beloved children.

“My heart is not proud, O Lord,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother,
like a weaned child is my soul within me.”
Psalm 131:1-2

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