The articles in the Mind Field, both since the resumption of publication with
Volume VI and in the earlier issues, have dealt largely with our ways of understanding the
world. They might be accused of being rather theoretical, perhaps to philosophical.
The next three issues will attempt to deal with some practical matters: prayer, worship
and witness. Because of space limitations, they will be merely some reflections on these
topics in the light of a Christian worldview.
It is well to remember, however, that theory and practice can never, as Biblically
defined, be separated. Truth, in Christian perspective, must be done to be known (1 John
1:6). The truth isn’t something we say; it is something we do. A lie is not something
we tell, but something we practice (Revelation 22:15). So theory and practice should not
really be separated; we only understand theory when we put it into practice.
Our difficulty in realizing their close relationship is related to our modern pride in
objectifying things and in being "objective." When we objectify things, we stand
at a distance from them and assert control (mental or physical) over them without any
sense of obligation to them. A rock is a rock and I don’t need to bother my head
about responding to it. If I can classify a person as a fundamentalist or liberal, I have
put him or her into a pigeon hole and have absolved myself of the need to love and respect
him or her as a fellow image-bearer of Almighty God. This is part of the deadly poison of
modernity with its fact/value split and its denial of meaning in creation.
The Bible says that the creation is charged with meaning. It is "booby trapped"
with the Presence of God (Romans 1:20; Psalm 19; Isaiah 6:3; etc.). Truth is not facts,
but a Person, Jesus Christ (John 14:6). Since He reveals Himself to us in all of creation,
we must respond to Him in our handling it. We may not "thingify" the creation
(remember how Jesus talked to the wind and the waves in the storm on the lake?), and we
surely may not "thingify" people, who bear the Image. To do so is to deny their
and our own created nature in the likeness of God.
So here is a "practical" essay on prayer. You mustn’t be surprised if it
mixes in a measure of theory!
THE CHRISTIAN MIND AT PRAYER
There could hardly be an activity more out of touch with the modern mind than prayer.
In a day when the evidence of the senses is the only way to establish the validity of a
view or an action, prayer simply doesn’t "add up." It is directed to a
Being whose existence is categorically denied by modern, thinking people. The connection
between prayer and any occurrence in ordinary life, from the provision of a job to the
healing of a cancer, simply cannot be proved in the one way - the scientific method -
which modern people have accepted as the criterion of truth or facility.
Yet the Bible places prayer very near the center of the only life worth living. Christ
warned his disciples against meaningless and professional praying, but that was because in
his day prayer was regarded as important and consequently had developed some forms that
didn’t involve the heart. Christ also taught his disciples to pray, practiced a life
of prayer before them and commanded them to pray. His apostles, writing in the New
Testament, reiterated the importance of prayer. Paul even enjoined his converts to
"pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17 cf. Eph. 6:18). The volumes written
and the sermons preached on prayer down through the centuries are ample evidence that the
church has taken our Lord’s admonition seriously.
Here is one place, then, where the Christian mind is out of step with the 20th century worldview. It is a place where Christians are particularly vulnerable to
the tendency to live divided lives, seeing prayer as an important element in their
spiritual lives but dispensable in the "natural" or "secular"
activities, which seem to operate according to inviolable, natural laws anyway. The topic
deserves our attention. We will talk briefly about what prayer is, some varieties of
prayer, and how we ought to pray.
What Prayer Is
Probably the most common understanding of prayer is that it means asking God for
something. It’s like a child’s request or a parent cashing a check on our
account in the Bank of Heaven the quality of requests for prayer in church meetings attest
to the prevalence of this concept of prayer.
Unquestionably petition is an important kind of prayer. Examples of it are frequent in
Scripture, church history, and Christian experience. The problem is that if we see this as
the core definition of prayer, we miss a great deal of prayer’s real meaning.
A deeper and more demanding definition is that prayer is a form - perhaps the form - of
human intercourse or communion with god. God has His own ways of making us aware of His
presence with us; prayer is our way of communicating with Him. Done in faith and love and
in the power of the Holy Spirit, prayer is our means of making contact with the Lord.
Seen in this light, prayer suddenly becomes of primary importance. To know God is to enjoy
eternal life (John 17:3). Knowledge of another person implies communication with that
person, an exchange whereby we give of ourselves and receive of the other. If prayer means
by which we give ourselves to God, then it becomes a very important part of our lives.
Money-making, career development, even family building, pale like an overexposed
photograph in comparison with the living God through which Jesus Christ and the Holy
Spirit.
Taking the thought one step farther, prayer is actually a way of living. This seems a far
cry from the request-and-answer type of prayer, but it is much nearer to the Biblical
picture. Henri Nouwen in Reaching Out describes the three stages of the spiritual
life. In relation to ourselves (the first stage), we move from loneliness to solitude. We
can enjoy being alone because being alone with God is not lonely. In relation to others
(second stage), we move from hostility to hospitality. And in relation to God we move from
illusion to prayer. Our lives are often illusory even if we don’t watch the
"soaps". Lamenting failed projects, hoping for present ones, or planning for
future ones occupy much of our time and provide the support for our lives. When we realize
how ephemeral these projects are (James 4:13-17), we suddenly sense that the gospel offers
a radically different way to live - the way of "all prayer." Abiding in Christ
(John 15) is a way of life and a form of prayer.
But the question persists, what does it mean to live a life of prayer? We can’t
always be on our knees or saying prayers. We have work to do which demands careful
concentration. How can we do this and pray at the same time? The next section will make
some suggestions while discussing various types of prayer.
Some Kinds of Prayer
1. Repentance and confession.
The charged atmosphere of the delivery room awaiting the first gasping breath of a
newborn baby is a figure of the joy in heaven over one sinner that repents (Luke 15:7).
And the first cry of a newborn soul is the publican’s prayer, "Lord be merciful
to me, a sinner." Repentance and confession are foundational parts of our
conversation with God and so a basic form of prayer.
Repentance means more than saying, "I am sorry for my sins." Etymologically the
word has the meaning of a change of mind. When Romans 12:1-2 urges us to be transformed by
the renewing of our minds, it is calling for repentance. The realization that creation
does not continue because of impersonal natural laws but because of the awesome power of
the Word of the living God is a giant step toward a new, repentant way of seeing what we
have learned to call "nature". Learning that God is talking to us in the
ordinary affairs of each day (Psalm 19; Job 42:5-6; Romans 1:20) is a kind of repentance.
Beginning to see all people worthy of respect and love because they bear the image of God
will literally turn our human relations upside down. Grasping the Biblical revelation that
truth does not consist of "facts" but is a Person who calls on us to respond to
Him in all our knowledge of His world and its events will produce a change of mind indeed.
These kinds of repentance are thus forms of prayer.
However, knowing something in the Biblical sense involves more than storing information in
our heads. We must do the truth in order to claim that we know (1 John 1:6). And that
involves us in confession. Confession is more than words even though Romans 10:10 speaks
of it as done with our lips. Confession is active, It is something we do in our lives, and
it shows what we think in our hearts. The ways we use our time, our energy, and our
possessions makes a confession. If our minds are renewed, our actions will change, and we
will begin to develop a life which is prayer rather than illusion.
2. Thanksgiving, faith, and commitment in love.
Repentance and confession are not once only experiences. The Bible speaks of our
"being saved" day by day, and this involves an ongoing process of repentance and
confession. One of the old Puritan writers, commenting on blind Samson turning the mill
stone, said that his hair began to grow again and his repentance grew with his hair!
As this happens and the joyous awareness of God’s forgiveness and loves settles on
the heart as mysteriously as the dew forms on the night-time grass and the heart cannot
hold back its expression of thanksgiving, of trust, and of deepening commitment. They
aren’t all they could be, and we know God knows that, too. But He accepts, forgives,
and loves us anyway. So our hearts overflow.
As we grow in our realization that common things are holy things and that God is as much
involved in our "natural" lives as He is in our "spiritual" live,
thanksgiving and commitment begin to well up in the most unexpected places. We begin to
realize, as Schmemman suggests, that breathing can be communion with God. Eating and
drinking, sleeping and waking, loving and laughing, all become aspects of the creation
which we, God’s priests in the world, can take into our lives and give back to Him in
the glad celebration of a renewed mind. This too, is a form of prayer.
3. Praise and adoration
Another kind of prayer is praise and adoration. In Chapter 17 of Letters to Malcolm,
Chiefly on Prayer, C.S. Lewis treats this topic in an immensely helpful way. He
suggests that to praise God we do not need to begin only from our theological confession.
We can start with ordinary things. He speaks of the pleasure, while hiking, of washing
one’s hot, sweaty face in the waterfall. This pleasure, he asserts, is a "shaft
of the glory touching our sensibilities." Only God creates pleasure (Psalm 16:11;
James 1:17) and every pleasure we have comes from the Lord. It is shaft of His glory
touching us.
Lewis deals with the problem of "bad pleasures" by calling them the pleasures
snatched by unlawful acts, but then he goes on to suggest that we can learn to
"read" our pleasures. Just as we do not hear a bird’s song as a mere sound
but as a bird, or see the word in a love letter as mere lines on a page, but as words so
we can see our pleasures as shafts of God’s glory. We do not even need to say a
prayer of thanks afterwards, as good as it is to do that; our very recognition of the
source of our pleasures becomes a prayer in itself.
This is God’s world (Psalm 8:1) and it is full of His glory (Isaiah 6:3). As we come
more and more into the grip of God’s Word (Hebrews 4:12; John 5:38), this realization
grows on us, and prayer wells up from our hearts irresistibly. This is probably what
Hebrews 13:15 means by the "sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the
fruit of lips that make confession to his name." So the common things of life become
doorways into a deepening experience of prayer as adoration and praise.
4. Petition
Last, but not least in a list that is by no means exhaustive, we ask God for things for
ourselves and for others. Does this exercise change too, as we are transformed by the
renewing of our minds? Indeed it does.
One way in which our petitions change as we grow in a Christian mind is that they become
less prescriptive. Hallesby, in his book, Prayer quotes Mary’s prayer at the
Cana wedding as a model prayer. She simply said to Jesus, "They’re out of
wine." She left it there. She didn’t tell him what to do; she simply told the
servants to obey his orders. We do not know how God can best answer our prayers; we bring
our needs to Him, and by our praying we opened the faucet of His gracious power. He will
do what is best. There may be times when we are so clearly guided that we can make
prescriptive requests. These are probably the exception rather than the rule.
Another way of saying this is to say that we will hold lightly to our ideas of what needs
to be done. We will recognize that, while we must plan for the future, we must not let our
planned programs become idols. Programs are dispensable. We may very well have
misunderstood what God wants done. So we need to hold our guidance lightly and do our
praying accordingly.
A third way to say it is to say that our petitions must be always with the plea, "Not
my will, but thine be done." The conditions in Gethsemane under which these words
were spoken were so far more tempting for prescriptive prayer than any situation in which
we may be involved that it seems not only safe but necessary to suggest that they should
always qualify our petitions.
How We Ought To Pray
How to pray sounds like a question of technique. As such, it is open to both of a
negative and a positive answer. On the negative side, the problem with technique is that
it is one of the major idols of our time. People think that there is one set technique for
solving a particular problem. All we need to do is find and use it, like a repairman
fixing a dishwasher. This attitude is one of the consequences of the Enlightenment
thinking, with its affinity for the natural sciences - where the techniques do work well
with physical things - and its assumption that human problems are susceptible to the same
sort of treatment. That Christians are not immune to it is evidenced by the prevalence of
"how to do it" books in Christian bookstores. But there is no one set technique
for praying, because prayer is a matter of communion with God. That can’t be reduced
to a form without reducing its reality.
Yet, on the other hand, the Lord Himself answered the question, "Lord, teach us to
pray," with a specific response. He taught us that incomparable collection of seven
petitions which we often call "the Lord’s Prayer" (Matthew 6:9-13). That
isn’t a technique but a pattern. If we study and use it as a pattern, and not as a
rote formula, we shall undoubtedly learn how to pray.
So our praying will become our living. Of course we shall have specific times of
concentrated praying, both alone and with others. But these will be depend and intensified
as we learn to live in the reality of God’s nearness in our ordinary experiences.
That is what a Christian mind will lead us to realize. "In Him we live and move and
have our being" (Acts 17:28). Life will become more and more an experience of
touching God and less the illusion which suffocates so many in the world today.
Editor: Al Greene
Alta Vista College
