The Great Mystery of Prayer, Part I

I'm currently reading Paul Miller's new book (2009) A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a distracting world. I've been challenged on multiple fronts. I'm going to post a few reflections from the book thus far.

Although I don't embrace every single jot and tittle, nevertheless, I have benefited immensely. I have found my communion in prayer with my Father up by 500 percent. Seriously. It has affected me! Mainly he has caused me to move my focus from the task of "praying" to the object of my communion (the Heavenly Father).

Prayer has turned out, for me at least, to be a lot like joy. John Piper, in his recent biographical message on C.S. Lewis, talked about the nature of joy/desire. It is a strange thing. If you are in the middle of an experience of joy and delight, the second you take your focus off whatever is delighting you and you begin to think about your joy itself, you lose it! So if you want to experience joy in the Lord, it's not the joy you pursue, but rather the Lord.

Prayer has been just like that. I regularly feel a deep-seated guilt at my prayerlessness. I beat myself up (with the rod of the Law) for not praying as I know I ought. I will make a concerted effort to pray more, but as Law-motivation works every time, it soon fades as quickly as it came. (Check out Romans 7 for more on this.)

This is all wrong. It's wrong because prayer isn't about praying. And I can't believe I've made it that. I wonder how many times I've preached about people abstracting prayer and faith from their objects (i.e. God). It's a strange thing, isn't it? We speak about "faith" and "the power of faith". We talk about "prayer" and the "power of prayer". What does that mean? Faith and prayer are nothing! If something happens as a result of prayer, it's not because prayer is powerful. It's because the God you spoke to (which we call prayer) is an amazingly powerful, sovereign, merciful God. The power is in the God you asked, not in your task of praying.

I know that. But in my life, I have done the very thing I hate. I have abstracted prayer from God. I think to myself, "I should pray more." And, "You're a pastor and this is how little you pray?" And, "You should be ashamed of how little you pray." And, "Things would be different if you prayed more."

You see what I've done? I've divorced prayer from God. But what is prayer without God? I'll tell you what it is: it's paranoid schizophrenia. Apart from God, prayer is talking to nothingness. A belief that you are speaking to a being that is not there. Wouldn't we commit someone to Bellevue for such things?

Beloved, learn from my fleshly foolishness. Hickory Hill Baptist Church, I love you. I want you to be a people of prayer. But not because I care two licks about "prayer". I don't. Rather, it's because I care about the God we're praying to. (Just like I don't care about reading, I care about reading the Word, I don't care about praying, I care about praying to the Father.)

I am praying (and yes, I really mean it this time) that God would do a gracious work in our hearts collectively to spur us to pray. And I pray that we would be driven to our knees, not out of a deep guilt from prayerlessness, but rather out of a deep desire to know, honor, trust, depend on, and share life with our God who has drawn near to us in Jesus.