Prayer - Lesson 3

Professor James Houston

Prayer

th732-03

Realities of Prayer

Lesson Transcript

Charles Spurgeon, at the end of the 19th Century, recommended to his congregation of Baptists the Godly advice of the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, Bishop Ryle, and said here's a man who can teach you about prayer. He says first of all that prayer is absolutely needful for a man's salvation, that it's absolutely central to everything about being a Christian. Well, we've already emphasised that. Then secondly, the habit of prayer is the surest mark of being a real Christian. And during the 19th century, starting with William Wilberforce, there was this quest of 'Who is a real Christian?' Well, says Ryle, 'It's prayer.'

Thirdly, there's no duty so neglected as private prayer. And so he was seeing, even in his generation of pious Victorian households, that private prayer was slipping away. There might be family prayers, there might be public prayer, but where was private prayer? And fourthly, that prayer is that act that is the greatest encouragement to our growth in our faith, so never neglect it. And fifthly, diligence in prayer is the secret of holiness. And sixthly, the neglect of prayer is the great cause of backsliding, that once you began to get cold in your prayer life, you then begin to slip away from your relationship and your faith with the Lord. And seventhly, he says that prayer is the greatest way for us to have happiness and contentment of life. Each of these was like a punch that was knocking us down as it knocked his congregation down when he reflected on it with them.

So as we've emphasised already, simply to make prayer one of the agenda of our spiritual life is a fallacy. Everything about the Christian life is prayer. And so when we want to neatly compartmentalise the different activities that we should be doing as a Christian, we’re overlooking the centrality that is so essential. In other words, prayer is a new attitude. It's a new posture. It's the healing of relationships. It's a radical change of our emotional life. No wonder it's difficult.

So let’s examine then what are some of the realities then of prayer as being so basic. We've already mentioned its essential centrality. But then also it's a healing of relationships. It's a change of our emotional direction. And fourthly, the more we desire to pray, the more sensitivity we will have to sin. To put it around the other way, the less prayerful we are, the less sensitive we are to sin. Prayerlessness in scripture is a hardening of the heart. It's an indifference to the ways of God. It's an insensitivity to the need of His communion and so it's so easy for our consciences to be seared and hardened and deadened by being away from Him. So the more complacent we are about our inner lives and the more insensitive we are to the reality of sin, then the less there will be this mark of prayer in our lives. The awareness then of God's presence is to create more sense of sin. That’s why Paul, who was living in the presence of the Lord all the time or most of the time, is not using hyperbole when he says he's the chief of sinners. He's got hypersensitivity to what sin is in one's life.

When we enter more deeply then into a life of devotion and prayer, we feel we’re going backwards instead of forwards. It's as if we’re seeing greater ugliness in ourselves. This beating of our breasts is a very positive thing. The sense of brokenness that perhaps God is giving to us we need and that’s good. But, of course, there has to be a balance between genuine guilt and neurotic guilt. Genuine guilt is guilt before God. Neurotic guilt is the heritage of our own parental background. So this means that we have to balance in our sense of consciousness because it can be one or the other.

One of the things also we discover - and we might call this our fifth point - is that our prayerful life seems to slow down the expectations in our life. We discover that the changes we're going to find in our life when we're prayerful are far more radical than we've ever conceived were necessary to anticipate in our change of person. We discover then that growth in prayer is the slowest process of growth and change within us. I used to tell my students that on one occasion I was sawing a branch of a tree in our garden with a mechanical saw and it suddenly slipped and I already, in a flash of the moment, imagined that the saw had already reached the bone of my finger. And it was only then that I quickly was able to withdraw it from further damage. In other words, thought is moving faster than any reflex action. It's amazing. But what we discover is that emotional change is far slower than mental change. And what we’re saying is that spiritual change is the slowest change we can make. The lowest speed of change is in godliness and therefore the lowest change in our prayer life is a corollary of that. That’s sometimes why we get impatient about our devotional life. We have so many emotional hang-ups and weaknesses that we have to overcome or allow the Lord rather to overcome for us.

What we therefore have to recognise is so essential is to say that if I'm going to be a man/a woman of prayer, that means I have to be willing to be a transformed person. I'm not the same person again. There's a far greater range of radical demands that are made upon us when we enter into a life of prayer. Our whole life then has to change if we’re going to become prayerful. No wonder we have such struggle. No wonder it's radical. Because what we’re facing are all the cultural pressures of our society that we have to become counter-cultural to. We have to realise that all their value system is something that we're now denying.

And so one of the ready escapes for us as Christians is to have Christian ministry. Christian ministry is a cop-out from a Christian prayer life. We’re so busy about this and so busy about that: oh, the Lord will understand I'm just busy. Well, he doesn’t. It's an escape. And so even the Desert Fathers observed that busy-ness is acedia. Busy-ness is moral sloth. This frenetic energising activity of activism keeps us from really understanding the right priorities for our life. And of course, we find that in our society as well there are many people who are into good causes, like setting up a charitable foundation, for example, and doing other good, charitable things for society. But doing things for society is another cop-out from having a true relationship. So again, we can relate to our parents functionally instead of relationally. And this one of the traits, of course, that we find in filial piety.

In China, you see, it's all about the physicality of 'Don’t I give you good food?' That’s friendship - good food. Well yes, we like good food, but friendship is much more than that. And filial piety can be a bondage, but again it's physicality. It's not a loving relationship. So it's so natural to the fallen human condition to allow function to take over from relationship. George Herbert was one of the great teachers on prayer. And I would recommend that anyone who wants to deepen and enrich their prayer life read the poems by George Herbert called The Temple. And what may surprise you is although he was exercising, of course, Anglican worship and the use of the Anglican prayer book, that two thirds of the poems are really about his own prayer life.

In one of these poems, The Break of Day, he says, 'Must business thee from hence remove? O, that’s the worst disease of love.' Busy-ness is the worst disease of love. 'The poor, the foul, the false, love can admit, but not the busied man.' Isn't that a challenge to us? Does our busy-ness for God actually remove us from God? Are we so encumbered like Martha with many cares? That, says Herbert, is the worst disease that love can have. So this obstacle of activism is a very real obstacle of our prayer life. You see, what needs to be stripped off in our busy-ness is our self-importance. That’s why I feeding my busy-ness to gain more self-importance. It's I who's in the centre. It's not Christ.

Another cultural obstacle that we have is utilitarianism. And with utilitarianism, pragmatism. This is a focus on our usefulness. And so we’re often brought up as children in our family to this kind of relationship. We’re brought up to be the good girl and the good boy; in other words, what our parents expect of us. But that distances us from a true relationship when it comes to prayer. And then there's another obstacle: rationalism. We've already emphasised that our Western civilisation places so much merit and importance on the intellect that we have to have knowhow. We have to learn to know how to pray. Well, there again, in an Australian film called The Last Wake, the hero is a young attorney and he's surprised that before the storm has hit this particular area where he's vacationing, all the local Aborigines have mysteriously disappeared. They’ve left. Why? Because they had a premonition of what was to come. It was something profoundly spiritual within themselves. And so in the film, he turns to his stepfather, who is the local church vicar, and he says why didn’t you tell me that there was mystery in the world? And the priest replies my dear boy, I mention it every sermon that I speak. No, you don’t, said the son. You simply explain it all away.

And so one of the things that again is part of our rationalism and pragmatism is explanation. Saul Bellow, as one of the poet laureates of the last generation in literature, makes this point in most of his novels. He's protesting against explanation as explaining everything away. And so in his novel Mr Sammler's Planet, the hero is a typical 20th century rationalist who's become merely an explaining creature. 'Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul, explained. The root of this, the causes of the other, the source of events, the history, the structure, the reasons why. For the most part, in one ear and out the other.' The soul gets what it wants, but, he says, 'unhappily on the superstructures of explanation' is like a 'poor bird' sitting on a fence 'not knowing which way to fly.' When life is all this, all question and answer, from the top of the intellect to the bottom, it's really a state of singular and dirty misery Mr Sammler came to believe. When it's all question and answer it has no charm. The thing works both ways. The questions are bad. The answers are horrible. There's poverty of soul. Its abstract state, you see it in the faces on the street. This disease he sees as so crippling to our soul.

And then for the other pressures of moralism. In Rousseau's Emil - the novel that I refer you to was so revolutionary for the French Revolution and for the emancipation of the colonists in America - the question is asked: what am I to ask God for? That’s the kind of question that we all ask when religion becomes a restricted territory, a very restricted territory, in our souls. Is it simply the prayer for the ability to be good? Do we merely pray because it makes us feel good? And so to be good is perhaps one of the subtle, moralistic temptations that we have because what else is religion for but just to be good? It's somehow suspended, stranded within a great, secular perspective. And, of course, we play so many games of moralism in our prayer life as well. It's a form of escapism from a real relationship with the Lord.

One of the things that I've got so upset in my past life about is how in Christian ministry today we use the prayer letter for fundraising: will you pray for me, pray for my ministry? You're not really saying that; you’re saying, 'Will you give me funds?' So you see how at the heart of our life we can be so destructive of what should be our true relationship with God.

And so another thing that we have to be so vigilant about is is prayer a cop-out from action? Somebody asks you that they need help or they need money or they need assistance in something and you sort of as a cop-out say, 'Oh well, I'll pray about it.' What does praying about it mean? It's a way of escape. It's not really being honest about what you're supposed to be doing. And then, of course, there's the prayer which is lack of discerning. Again, you say, 'Well, I'll have to pray about it.' Well, what you're really saying is I really don’t discern the situation. I'm rather clueless about this. That can be honest, but it also can be a kind of escape. You know, one of the things that has so impressed me is that in the upper room and the intimacy that Jesus is sharing with his disciple that’s leaning on his bosom, that as we’re introduced into the mystery of the Trinity of the Father in dialogue and discourse with the Son and the Father and the Son united in the Holy Spirit, that in the middle of that prayer Jesus is praying Father, keep them from the evil one. There's no place that is safe. There's no intimacy that is safe enough for us not to find that things get polluted or that the satanic is attacking us.