As Christians it’s common to think we’re not allowed to pray for ourselves and, even worse, we sometimes think our prayers are always supposed to be upbeat, thankful and grateful.
David knew better. He understood that prayer is supposed to be a raw form of communication with God, stripped of all pretense, and accordingly, he made good use of the ancient Jewish practice of lament. Consider Psalm 6:
1O LORD, do not rebuke me in your anger
or discipline me in your wrath.
2 Be merciful to me, LORD, for I am faint;
O LORD, heal me, for my bones are in agony.
3 My soul is in anguish.
How long, O LORD, how long?
4 Turn, O LORD, and deliver me;
save me because of your unfailing love.
5 No one remembers you when he is dead.
Who praises you from the grave?
6 I am worn out from groaning;
all night long I flood my bed with weeping
and drench my couch with tears.
7 My eyes grow weak with sorrow;
they fail because of all my foes.
8 Away from me, all you who do evil,
for the LORD has heard my weeping.
9 The LORD has heard my cry for mercy;
the LORD accepts my prayer.
10 All my enemies will be ashamed and dismayed;
they will turn back in sudden disgrace.
This is a classic prayer of lament. It taps into a tradition of that goes deeper than mere cathartic self-expression, rather it dares to remind Yahweh of his own oligation to be faithful. Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggeman notes:
“As doxology celebrates the peculiar character of Yahweh as faithful, so complaints [or lament] insists upon Yahweh’s faithfulness and protest against Yahweh’s refusal to be visibly and effectively faithful.”
Lament gives a necessary voice to the pent-up frustration of a world gone mad, or the exhaustion of a life lived in senseless trial and suffering. Against such atrocities as war, exploitation, slavery, and rape the reverent prayer of assent (“thy will be done”) is often an affront to the God whose main attribute is hesed, or “lovingkindness.” Unto a God who claims to be the source of extravagant mercy, grace, and love, only a passionate plea for vindication is appropriate in certain circumstances.
These are bold and courageous prayers, the kind that take chances and risk disappointment, but which acknowledge the the Old Testament God who is moved by reminders of his own character and covenant promises.
Prayer Exercise
What do you need to lament? Set aside enough time alone to pray through the frustrations you have using Psalm 6 as a outline and touch-point, much like we’ve learned to do with the Lord’s prayer.
Our final week of the prayer series will focus on learning to pray from the Psalms.
Today, read Psalm 19.
This psalm is a celebration of a God who speaks in both the skies (1-6) and the Scriptures (7-14). Most of us today can get our heads around the fact that God speaks through creation. But I would be surprised if many of us could really relate to David’s breathless praise for the Bible in these verses. More precious than gold? Sweeter than honey? Really?
Maybe you can relate to John Bunyan, who seemed to have had a kind of bi-polar relationship with Scripture: “Sometimes there has been more in a line of Scripture than I could bear to stand under. Other times, the Bible has been to me as dry as a stick.” It’s good to know we’re in good company when we find the Bible boring, dry, uninteresting, and hard to read. It’s a common experience.
But we shouldn’t become apathetic about it, either. If prayer is a two-way conversation with God about what we are doing together, then the Scriptures are a critical part of it, because they make up the main part of God’s side of the conversation! I want to be moving toward a place where I can pray Psalm 19 with David and deeply mean every word of it.
Prayer exercise
This exercise is taken from God’s Prayer Book, by Ben Patterson (an excellent resource on learning to pray the Psalms, by the way).
Read the following sections of Psalm 19 again do the exercises:
- Ask yourself, How would I act if I believed there is treasure hidden in the Bible? If you had in your hands a map showing you where you could find great material treasure, wouldn’t you apply yourself diligently to crack any code or language and overcome any mountain, weather, or foe to find the treasure?
- Now turn your face heavenward. Open your mouth to the Lord and say, “Lord, let me taste the sweetness of your Word.”
How can I know all the sins lurking in my heart? Cleanse me from these hidden faults. Keep your servant from deliberate sins! Don’t let them control me. Then I will be free of guilt and innocent of great sin. (12-13)
- Ask yourself, Do I really expect, or want, to meet God when I read the Bible? “It’s not what I don’t understand in the Bible that worries me,” wrote Mark Twain. “It’s what I do understand.” If you need to, confess your apathy toward the Bible. Perhaps it is a smoke screen to hid your fear of exposure.
- Look at the words David uses for the power and deceit of sin: lurking, hidden, deliberate–all controlling your will and desires. Cry out to God, “Don’t let them do this to me!”
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. (14)
- Ask the Lord to so fill you with the purity and sweetness of his law (like fine gold and honey) that your interior life will be transformed, that your every thought will reflect his character.
Today we visit Jesus again in the garden (Matt 26:39-44), only this time we zoom out from his admonition to Peter and view, instead, with the wide lens that gives us a brief peek into his own prayer life:
Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”
Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. “Could you men not keep watch with me for one hour?” he asked Peter. 41“Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak.”
He went away a second time and prayed, “My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.”
When he came back, he again found them sleeping, because their eyes were heavy. So he left them and went away once more and prayed the third time, saying the same thing.
There three things about Jesus’ prayer that I envy: The first is that he is persistent. Three times he prays the same prayer, urgently petitioning God to give him relief. Frankly, I rarely do more than utter a half-hearted plea.
The second is related to the first: I envy Jesus’ passion. I don’t mean merely his urgency – no doubt if I was convinced of my impending death I would be rather urgent as well – rather, I’m talking about the sense that Jesus really seemed to believe in the nearness of his hearer. We speak differently to people we know are listening, and even more differently when we know a person of means is listening. That is the passion I hear in Jesus’ voice. He knew God was listening and could do something about it. On my bad days I think I may have given up on that.
Lastly, I envy Jesus’ submission. As paradoxical as it might seem, I somehow manage to lack persistence and passion, yet overflow abundantly in obstinacy. Like some dumb animal I just can’t see it any way other than my own.
Like most good things, these three traits aren’t skills that can be taught by instruction, they’re character traits that must be caught by practice. Like the father who said to Jesus, “Lord, I believe! Help my unbelief!”(Mk 9:24) we may need to say, “Lord I pray. Help me to learn to pray!”
Prayer Exercise
This prayer exercise is a bit different because it doesn’t actually involve praying. At least, not at first. Your task this week is to find someone older who you believe has a good prayer life and interview them. It doesn’t have to be formal, they don’t even need to know you’re “interviewing” them. Just find a way to ask them some questions about prayer. What have they learned? Why do they pray? What does it help? Think about the questions you really want to know about prayer, and ask their perspective. Then come back here and share what you learned.
Then go pray.
There is perhaps no greater example of Jesus in prayer than the lengthy, swirling “high-priestly prayer” recorded in John 17.
One of the striking things about this passage is that although Jesus is God in the flesh, he seems to rely heavily on prayer as a means of accomplishing God’s will. He doesn’t simply teach his disciples what the right way is or “fix” them in some “supernatural” way. He spends time praying to God the Father on their behalf, here in John 17 and many other places. The New Testament is also clear that the risen and ascended Jesus continues to pray for us (Rom 8:34; 1 John 2:1). Prayer is apparently still the way that God’s work gets done.
One example of this can be found in In Luke 22:31-32. Jesus foresees that Simon will be tested severely. Though Simon thinks he is ready to die with Jesus, he will find out that when it comes down to it, he will quickly, easily deny that he even knows Jesus. You would think Jesus would want to secure the future of the church by perhaps re-wiring Simon’s brain so that he responds differently, to somehow guarantee his eventual success. But he doesn’t. Instead, Jesus says, “Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.” One would imagine that Jesus desperately wants Simon to pass the test, but instead of trying to engineer the outcome, he simply prays for him. It speaks volumes about Jesus’ trust in God that he sees prayer as the best thing he can do for Simon in this very crucial, dangerous time.
Looking at Jesus in prayer teaches us that it really is a powerful tool for seeing God’s will done on earth as it is in heaven. Of course it always must be married to faith-filled action, but action without prayer is powerless to effect real transformation and belies a subtle form of unbelief where we think nothing of value can come from people simply praying. The life of Jesus and the Scriptures indicate otherwise: “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective” (James 5:16).
Prayer Exercise:
Set aside 20-30 minutes to think about the following questions:
+ When you want to see transformation happen in those you love, is your first instinct to pray for them?
+ Or do you first begin strategizing about how you could steer them toward change?
+ Do you perhaps trust more in your own persuasive abilities than in God’s Spirit?
+ How would you like your prayer life to change based on your answers to these questions?
Now read John 17 slowly, meditating on the fact that Jesus is praying for you right now.
Ever have something so important to do that you worked straight through lunch? That happens to me all the time. Actually, most of the people I know skip at least one meal a day because they’re so focused on something. In some ways that’s the climate of our culture.
Ever skip eating all day because you’re so busy? That happens less often, but still, my guess is you know what it’s like to go a whole day without really eating because something is so important – or distressing – that you just didn’t think about anything else.
What about all night?
One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God.
That’s from Luke 6:12, and what we see here is Jesus pulling an “all-nighter.” You probably done that before too. Maybe it was in high school or college and you had an important test the next morning or a twenty page paper due. When something is really critical to us we’re willing to put off all kinds of normally important things – like food and sleep – so we can focus on it.
This is the spirit of fasting and prayer. Not some Herculean religious effort, but zeal so fervent that you skip eating in order to finish something important – you stay up all night to finish what’s really important.
Exercise
You can’t really fake a prayer “all nighter,” so I won’t ask you to stay up all night in prayer like Jesus does here. But stop and consider what things in your life are serious enough to require intensive prayer. Make a list. Now, pick something that really needs your prayer attention and plan to spend an unusually long amount of time praying about. Maybe for you that’s 30 minutes, or maybe it is all night. If it helps, ask someone to join you. Now the only question left is, do you really believe prayer can be the kind of work that “get’s the job done?”
Following from yesterday’s exercise of making time and space for the kind of prayer Jesus seemed to have engaged in often, today we continue to look at Jesus in prayer.
Read Luke 4:1-2:
“Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.”
Larry Bird was a freakishly good NBA basketball player who played mainly during the 1980s. Many people still refer to him as the “Basketball Jesus.” There was one stretch during the ’86 season when he was actually bored by how good he was, so he started using his left hand more, just for a challenge. During one game, he only took left-handed shots during the first half. He did this kind of thing often, experimenting with all the different ways he could beat a defender in the low post, seeing how many times he and Bill Walton could run the backdoor play in one game, etc. He intentionally weakened his game just to feel challenged and make it fun again.
It’s tempting (no pun intended) to see Jesus’ wilderness temptation in the same way. We oftentimes assume that the fasting depleted Jesus of spiritual power, so the devil could tempt him when he was at his “weakest,” like Superman trying to save the world with kryptonite in his pocket, or like Larry Bird only taking left-handed shots.
Indeed, fasting for forty days does make one hungry, but when you compare this passage to others that feature a fasting Jesus, an interesting picture starts to emerge. It seems that Jesus didn’t spend forty days in solitude and fasting in order to weaken himself, but to strengthen himself and prepare him for the severe testing ahead. Fasting and solitude seem to be more of a spiritual training regimen than a way to weaken oneself.
In John 4, when the disciples rejoin Jesus after his conversation with a woman at a well in Samaria, they urge him to eat something, and Jesus responds, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” He explains, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.” Fasting in an opportunity to feast more fully on the sustenance that comes directly from God in the kingdom. Like the Israelites in the desert fed by manna, the “bread of heaven,” fasting from normal food for awhile has a tendency to tune us in more fully to the “spiritual food” that God provides. Fasting turns into feasting on the presence of God. It’s not just something for monks and pastors, it’s for all of us who want to more fully experience the bread that God provides in the kingdom.
Exercise:
Most of us don’t think about fasting very much, and if we do it’s normally thought of as a strange, archaic custom like self-flagellation or sitting in mud or something. Take some time to simply write down on a page all your qualms, questions, and thoughts about fasting. Take these to God in prayer (during one of those 3 times per week you’ve carved out!). Listen to what God may say to you. Perhaps you’ll want to plan a day in the coming week to intentionally fast one meal and spend that time in prayer.
For further exploration, read and take notes on either Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline (the chapter on fasting) or Scot McKnight’s Fasting. Plan a time to experiment (safely) with fasting, perhaps one meal per week for several weeks.
Jesus didn’t just teach about prayer, he also prayed! This week we continue our prayer series by looking at examples of Jesus in prayer. We can learn much from seeing what his own prayer time looked like. Today we begin with a short glimpse into Jesus’ prayer life from Mark 1:35-37:
Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!”
The most obvious thing to notice about this passage is that Jesus took time, early in the day, to find solitude in prayer. So what’s so hard about that?
Time and solitude. That’s what’s hard.
We live in a society and in an era when these two resources might be more scarce than ever. We have more distractions and more commitments than we’ve ever had in human history. Just as yourself, “When do you have a significant amount of free time to spend alone?” If you’re like most people I know, the answer is, “almost never.” The thing we often miss about this passage is that Jesus was very busy too! Go ahead, read the whole chapter and ask yourself if you’ve ever been that busy! Jesus was so busy, in fact, that he had to get up early to pray alone.
Martin Luther is known to have said, “I have so much to do (today) that I should spend the first three hours in prayer.” The busier we are, the more we need prayer to keep us sane.
I think we have two choices. We either accept these limitations or we make a change in our own lives. We either continue with the pace of life that is distracted to us by a modern society obsessed with busyness, money, entertainment, and noise or we find something, somewhere to reject in order to live a more sane and sustainable life.
Here’s the thing, if you can’t even find a little time in your day (or week!) to pray alone then is that a sustainable lifestyle? How long can you realistically keep that up? If Jesus needed time alone to maintain a life of spirit, what makes us think we can do without it?
This isn’t about performance. This isn’t about merit. This is about nourishment. Prayer is the feasting of the soul on God. How long have you been starving yourself?
Exercise
There’s only one exercise today: Sit down with your calendar and make some changes to accommodate private, solitary prayer at least 3 times per week. Cut something out. Give something up. Be ruthless. If you already do that, great! Take this time to pray like Jesus did.
his is the final exercise for our week of looking at what Jesus taught about prayer. Read Mark 9:14-29.
There is an inherent sadness in this account, it seems. Demonic forces are causing horrible suffering to a boy and his family, and the disciples are unable to do anything about it. In his commentary on Mark, William Lane remarks that this scene “exhibits the disaster which occurs when men from whom the power of faith may be expected are proven to be void of power when it is needed.” The disciples were “void of power,” unable to drive out the demon, unable to join God in his kingdom work in this instance.
Jesus himself drives out the demon, and afterward he withdraws with his disciples to a house for a time of debriefing. “Why couldn’t we drive it out?” they ask. Perhaps they were wondering if their technique was wrong, or if they said the wrong words, or in the wrong order. Maybe they didn’t ask the right questions or perform the right gestures. Or perhaps they were simply trying to follow Jesus and were discouraged that they didn’t seem to be able to do it. Why didn’t it work?
Jesus’ response has baffled many commentators and theologians: “This kind can only come out by prayer.”
What Jesus seems to be indicating is that prayer is a kind of training ground or practice field for ministry in the kingdom. There is a difference between the “in the moment” crisis of ministry and the “behind the scenes” training for ministry.
Just like an firefighter cannot expect to perform well “in the moment” simply because she wants to fight fires, we cannot expect to function effectively as agents of God’s kingdom “in the moment” just because we want to. Training is needed, for firefighters and exorcists. The training that firefighters undergo is meant to help them to automatically function well “in the moment.” Likewise, a consistent and deep life of prayer will help us function effectively “in the moment,” when kingdom breakthrough is needed.
The feeling the disciples had of being “void of power” is one I have felt many times: I encounter a situation into which I would love to bring a token of the kingdom, only to find myself powerless to do so. The good news is that the disciples, although they couldn’t do anything about this situation in Mark 9, are eventually able to do the kinds of things we see in Acts, presumably because they stuck with a long-term training regimen of disciples to Jesus and prayer.
This is also the good news for us. Although we may have squandered many opportunities in the past because of a lack of prayer, God’s forgiveness is available to us, and we can begin training today for greater kingdom effectiveness through prayer.
Prayer exercise
Write down your normal prayer rhythms, however scrawny they may be. What kinds of prayer… what times… how much time… don’t shy away from being brutally honest with yourself and God about how much time you actually spend at the “spiritual gym” of prayer.
Offer this rhythm to God in prayer and ask him to show you where you need to change your “workout.” You might need a little tweak here or there. You might need a complete overhaul. Just like with a physical workout, be careful not to push yourself too hard too quickly. Ask someone wiser to help you craft a “prayer workout” that will move you toward greater spiritual power and kingdom effectiveness.
Take a few moments and read Luke 18:1-8.
Sometimes people are taken aback that Jesus compares God to a disrespectful, unjust judge. But the point of parables is never one-to-one correspondence. The point Jesus is trying to make is spelled out pretty explicitly by Luke in the first verse: “Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up.” Thanks Luke! That’s really helpful.
Jesus is informing his disciples that they can expect bad treatment, injustice, etc (refer to Luke 17 for this context). Like the widow, they are to be persistent in their prayers for deliverance and justice, because if an unjust judge will eventually give her justice, how much more will God do the same for those he loves? It’s the same kind of thing when Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good gifts to those who ask him?”
Again Jesus seems to be placing a lot of emphasis on the character of God, the essential goodness of the One we are praying to. Of course God will eventually vindicate, of course he will bring justice, because of who He is. It seems this is the first thing we doubt when our prayers aren’t answered according to the timetable we set up. It’s remarkable how quickly we begin to suspect God’s motives when our prayers aren’t answered immediately.
The call to action in this parable is for us to “pray and not give up,” to maintain a tenacious, faithful persistence in prayer, especially as we pray for justice. The basis of this kind of persistence is an unshakable belief in the goodness of God and the certainty of his deliverance.
The Psalms are stuffed with prayers for God’s deliverance to come to those who are suffering. Praying the Psalms is a very ancient Christian practice that has helped many people give words to their “groanings.” Today we tend to stick with the “happy” Psalms, but the darker ones can really help us give utterance to our emotions and stay tenacious in prayer.
Is there a difficult situation or relationship that you have given up praying about?
Perhaps when the prayer wasn’t answered in a timely manner, you began to doubt his goodness. Perhaps you doubted God’s ability to bring justice or truth. Regardless, this prayer exercise is designed to help you start become more tenacious and faithful in “crying out day and night” to God.
The exercise is simply to read Psalm 13: out loud, slowly, at least seven times. Jot down your reactions and responses. Leave a comment about what happened.
There comes a time in every kind of training when your body hits the wall. It doesn’t matter how bad you want it on the inside, you just can’t keep going. This is one of the best examples of how our spirits and our bodies are intimately connected.
Jesus’ best friends had this problem at the worst possible time. At the cusp of his betrayal, public shame, and impending death sentence, Jesus took his closest partners on the greatest revolution of man and headed into the grove of olive trees at the garden of gethsemane for one reason: to pray. Jesus was on the verge of personal breakdown, beseeching God to change the course of history – if possible – and sweating blood in anxiety. He asked Peter, James, and John, his closest friends, to pray.
“Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. “Simon,” he said to Peter, “are you asleep? Could you not keep watch for one hour? Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak” (Mark 14:37-38).”
They fell asleep.
I’m fascinated by this passage, mostly because of what Jesus is teaching about prayer, but partly because pf what we can infer.
Prayer is “watching”
Jesus talks about “seeing” in spiritual terms quite frequently, and here he seems to indicate that prayer is a kind of watchfulness that will actually make a difference. It’s important enough that he wakes them up to continue. I wonder how many of us feel that same sense of urgency about active prayer? Do we really think prayer will reveal anything? Do we think it matters?
The watchfulness of prayer guards us against temptation
Being watchful apparently had something to do with guarding against temptation. But what temptation? Usually when we hear that word we think of personal seduction – lust, greed, lying, etc. – but this isn’t the setting for those sorts of sins. It’s the middle of the night in an olive grove! I’m reminded of Jesus’ words in John 5, “I can only do what I see the father doing.” Perhaps Jesus is tying prayer to the ability to recognize what God is doing, and the inability to recognize God at work causes us to be tempted to resist it. After all, it was immediately after this that Peter tries to resist Jesus’ arrest with the sword, cutting off a soldiers ear. Jesus prayed, and recognized the work of God. Peter didn’t, and resisted it. Was that his “temptation?” If so, how often do we miss the move of God in our own midst because we’re not “watchful” in prayer?
Prayer is rigorous
Most disturbing, how often do we miss God’s move because we’re simply to spiritually “flabby” to keep up the pace? Jesus makes it clear that his three best friends don’t fail for lack of sincerity, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Jesus is a seasoned veteran, able to keep long watch and run the spiritual race to completion, but the boys – being still only a few years into their training – are simply unable to keep up. Prayer is far more than an occasional therapy session with God that comes along whenever we feel the urge. Done properly, it is a rigorous endeavor that taxes the body as well as the mind, just like any other serious discipline. Only those who train accordingly, like Jesus, will persevere to see the prize that can only be recognized in prayer.
Prayer Exercise:
Time to stretch your limits. If you were training to run, you would add a little distance or a steeper incline. Let’s do the same. You’ve learned the Lord’s prayer as an outline for coming before God, now use it to push yourself. However long you normally pray, set aside a longer session. If you typically pray 10 minutes, set aside 30. If 30, set aside, 45, and so on. Now use each line of the Lord’s prayer as a point of meditation to walk yourself through a prayer that moves from reverence, to intimacy, to petition, confession, forgiveness, etc.
A word of caution: the point of this exercise is not length, it’s depth. Don’t go babbling on just for the sake of stretching it out (we’ve already learned about that, remember?). We need to learn to plumb the depth of our hearts, our world, and our God with our imagination in prayer. This is one way the Spirit get deep into us through prayer and begins to reveal to us what God is doing. This is how we learn to see.
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