Prayer - Lesson 7

Professor James Houston

Prayer

th732-07

Prayer, Temperament and Personality

Lesson Transcript

In this our second lecture, we’re going to explore the relationship between prayer, temperament and personality. One of the things that we learn as teenagers is the herd instinct. We learn that we’re out of popularity if we’re not with the others of our teammates or classmates and so it's in that generation that we begin to have guilt if we're not with the herd. And it's a profound emotion that affects us so much for the rest of our life.

So for example, I was just asked recently by someone what about youth today who are talking about God as their buddy. How should we respond to that? Well, the answer is that to call God as your buddy is something that is private. It's something to say yes, He's as intimate to me as any friend could be and because I am a young person, being a friend is being a buddy. But the problem is that we then want to publicise that and then the result is that when we publicise something, we then begin to institionalise that something and that’s how we get quickly into heresy. And so really what heresy is is an exaggerated truth. There's an insight that is true about it, but to intensify and publicise that insight then can be very easily a heresy.

And so when we look at the history of heresies in the life of the Church, we find that somebody may have said things that were intuitively true for that person, but then he expresses it and others may protest and say oh, but you’ve gone too far. And then, of course, you compound that with pride: I'm not going to repent. And so then you exaggerate it even worse and then you very quickly find that you've bred something from a personal truth into something that now becomes a public heresy. And it all starts because in youth we all hang together and we want to be popular and we want to be able to say the things that other people are saying. And we’re sometimes unreflective about it and that’s how heresy so easily arises. It's like the parable that we used to have as children that it was for the loss of the horseshoe nail that the kingdom was lost. But it was a process. It was the horseshoe that was lost and then it was the horse that stumbled with its rider that was lost. And then, of course, it was the leader that was lost and so the battle was lost. And ultimately then, the kingdom is lost. That’s what happens. And so that’s how we so often, even in the realm of prayer, creates something that becomes heretical. What we have to realise is that we have to resist this herd instinct. We have to resist this sense of belonging to each other. It's very natural, but it's also very mischievous, especially in the light of some of the serious heresies that have been generated in the life of the Church.

And so we’re emphasising this next lecture that our narratives are all different. And because our narratives are all uniquely different, it means then we should not be afraid to realise that the way we pray is not necessarily the same as other people. But we get guilty if we’re not the same as somebody else, but this guilt is what we might call neurotic guilt or temperamental guilt. It's a phony kind of guilt because it's the guilt of not belonging, or it's what you find in Asian cultures as a shame culture that they’re not doing what other people are doing. And so the tyranny of a shame culture is exactly the same, East or West. In the West, we call it conscience or in the East they call it loss of face, but it's the same thing.

And so in some cultures like the pantheistic cultures of Asia then, of course, to be distinctive as an individual is impossible. As we've said, it's like atoms in the sea: you all belong to the same oceanic consciousness of together. We in the West, of course, have become much more individualistic and that’s not the same thing as having our own unique narrative. It's our rebellion to the herd instinct, but it's not an emancipation from the herd instinct. And so this is often a real problem and stumbling block for people in prayer. Don’t start imitating somebody else's prayer life. Be inspired that they pray, but have your own prayer life. As we've said in our previous address, let it be your own fingerprints.

And so there are people that we might call the Franciscan type of prayer. They're spontaneous about their prayer. They see the birds singing and they sing too. And he birds stop and they stop too. And so for a Franciscan to pray, ten minutes is about as much as you can do at a time. You get exhausted after that. All you can do is praise the Lord. That’s your prayer as a Franciscan. And then you go off skipping and half a day later you remember something else you have to be exuberant about and so you dance again and have another spontaneous prayer like these arrow prayers that we were mentioning before.

But if you're one of those highly cognitive, scholastic types like Thomas Aquinas or John Calvin then your prayer in the morning is nothing less than three hours because in the middle of your prayer life you're composing the sermon as well for the next Sunday's congregation. And so you can't be satisfied with more than writing a miniature treatise while you're having your quiet time. These two kinds of temperament are totally opposite from each other, as obviously you can see. But what you have to remember is that prayer is like our faith: a personal relationship with God. It has to be intimately your own and nobody else's. And as I've recently been reflecting, how do we celebrate the presence of God? Well, we celebrate the presence of God very differently from each other. It's all related to our narrative. It's all related to the whole story of our life.

So I've been meditating on how is the presence of God experienced in the four gospels. Very different. In Matthew his purpose is to teach the Jews that their Messiah has come and that they have to have new teaching that we might a revision of messianic teaching. The Messiah is not yet far away. He's come. So Matthew has to do a lot of explanation, so Matthew does a lot of teaching. And it's significant that even prayer has to be taught. And so when Matthew is being questioned or he's reporting that Jesus is being questioned in Matthew 5, 'Lord, teach us to pray,' then there's a lot of teaching about prayer. We have this wonderful, amazing prayer that we can reflect on later: the Lord's Prayer. So he's teaching. He's not, in a sense, experiencing a celebration of presence so much as he's teaching about presence. And he's even teaching we have to become as little children, but it's again teaching.

When we come to Mark, it's almost empty of presence. It's all about action. It's the kind of thing that we've been indicting about activism. [Mark 00:10:25] starts with a bang, with action. And if this is the kind of temperament of Simon Peter that as Mark as the reporter of Peter's life and actions, because that's what it is - Peter lies behind all the actions of Mark - well, we know what Peter is. He's a very impetuous guy. He's going to swear that he'll never forsake his Lord and he's full of promises and full of activity. But how he collapses when he denies his Lord. So likewise, the whole weakness of Peter as a disciple is that he's not experiencing much presence. Even in the recording of our Lord's Prayer in Gethsemane, are they aware of the presence of God? No, they're asleep. There's no sense of presence. They hear Jesus murmuring, but presence is not their consciousness.

Now, Luke is very different. Luke's always in the presence of the Lord. All the ministry that Luke is recording, even though he's a historian and describing actual scenes of actual events, Luke is full of prayer. And so when he narrates the Lord's Prayer, it's because it's because it's the presence of Jesus that they are therefore recording His prayer. They're recording the presence that is so vital. And of course, living in the presence of prayer is to be ready for Pentecost. It's to be ready for the next series of actions that Luke is talking about, which is that here we have a unique document that unites the Gospel of Luke with its postlude, which is on the Acts of the Apostles, but the Acts of the Apostles are all about prayer. It was the act of martyrdom that we find that Stephen is the first martyr, he looked into the presence of the Eternal God as his act of giving up his own life.

It was while they were waiting upon the Lord's presence to come back to them that they received the Pentecostal Blessing at the end of chapter two. And whenever we have Luke recording the events of the Acts of the Apostles, you might say they're not so much the acts of the apostles, they're the responses of being in the presence of God that is their responses. So this whole charismatic emphasis that we find in the Acts of the Apostles is all relating to the fact that you don’t need signs and wonders when you're in His presence. There may be signs and wonders as a result of being in His presence, but it's not action. It's communion.

When we come to John's Gospel, we have yet a very different kind of temperament. Here we find an unknown disciple - we really can't identify him - that's called John the Evangelist. And John the Evangelist was always in the carving of the pulpits in the Middle Ages, always the eagle and the eagle is soaring high with a perception of the eternal. And so we find that in John's Gospel, it's the disciple whom Jesus loves who's writing it. And the first narrative is that this unknown disciple was with Andrew and they're saying, as the Greeks were asking for, 'Master, where do you dwell?' and the answer is, 'Come and see.' And so they came and saw where he abided. Well, the abiding that John enters into is not just simply the house where Jesus was, it was abiding in Jesus' bosom. And so when we come to the Upper Room, this beloved disciple that is nameless, he's not named like the other disciples, he's simply named incognito because you don’t need to have an identity when you live in the presence of the Lord. That the Lord knows you is far more important than to know yourself. It's far more significant than letting others know who you are. There can be no higher prerogative of our identity than simply being the disciple whom Jesus loves. So he lies on the bosom of Jesus.

And in the 12th century when Bernard of Clairvaux was meditating about the disciple whom Jesus loves, he says when you dwell on the bosom of Christ, He has two breasts and the first breast is His grace. It's the reconciliation for all of eternity between a sinner and God. It's no longer having to cry out, 'Depart from me for I'm a sinful man, O God.' His breast invites us to abide there forever. And the other breast, says Bernard, is the breast of His mercy. And the mercies are new every morning. Every day we stumble and we fall and we ask Lord, forgive me. So there's that eternal rest and there's that daily restoration of friendship that we have with our Lord. These are the two breasts. And when you abide on the two breasts of Jesus then Bernard of Clairvaux gives us a wonderful meditation of what that means.

He says we go through a process of four stages of love. We start, as we all do, with loving ourselves for our own sake. That’s the most instinctive thing about being a sinner: I love myself. I need to be emancipated from that thraldom of that narcissistic temperament that I have. The second stage is looking off and finding how different God is. So now I begin to say I need to love God for His own sake. And because it's His love that frees me from my fears then I can begin to see that I should exchange my love of myself for my love of God. Very noble. Very freeing. But it's only the second stage. How can I love God for His own sake? Can I do it? No. so the third stage is I need to love God with His own love for His own sake. That’s number three. Now we’re getting somewhere. And you say can you go any further than that? Yes. We’re to love not only our neighbour, but to love ourself. And we cannot love our neighbour without loving ourself in the conjunction that Jesus gives to the disciples. So the fourth stage is loving ourselves as God loves us with His own love. That’s the resolution to all our emotional barriers that keep us from being on the breast of Jesus.

And so then we can understand how John is then able to explore the murmuring of Jesus with His own Father. Now, this seems very high and exalted as it is. It's profoundly entering into Heaven itself. So I want us to come to something that seems more immediately practical and personal for us, though these are huge principles that we've just been elaborating. I love Jonathan Edwards. He's so human. And nothing is more human about Jonathan Edwards than his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. We could call him the first postmodern because he was disenchanted with rationalism and he anticipated that now was the rise of the Enlightenment taking place in America as it had been going on in Europe and that therefore your emotions matter as well as your mind.

I used to say to my friend John Stott, who was very cognitive - he wrote a little treatise called Your Mind Matters - oh yes, John, your mind matters, but your affections, your emotions, matter more. Edwards recognised this. He says how in the world could we ever live without our emotions. Take away all love and hatred, all hope and fear, all anger, zeal and affection and desire and the world would be in great measure motionless and dead. It would be a dead world without human emotions. And so he adds what we have forgotten in our evangelical heritage, that he that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only - as we've seen with these theologians at the end of our first lecture: theological theorising, in other words - to do that without affection is never to be engaged in the true business of religion or the true sphere of the religious life, we might say.

So why is it that we have this ignorance about our own emotional life? And, of course, the answer is that every generation and every culture has its own context by which we have to understand the answer to this question. We could say that in the last two or three centuries we've gone from being rational man to being psychological man or emotional man, to now becoming spiritual man, but all of these things are fakes. And so yes, of course, every age has its challenge. And Edwards was aware that there was a transition that was taking place between being so essentially rational, to now to explore what was more emotional, less detached and more involved with our world.

What the ideological world of the 20th century in all its abstraction of ideology and rationalism has done is simply to populate our inner world with concepts, but very few people. It's like Kafka, who writes on the top of a hill, looking down upon humanity like beetles in the valley below. It's a posture that is so easy for all of us to have in viewing others in abstraction. It's one of the most absurd things to say I love the world, but I don’t love my neighbour. It's God's prerogative to love the world. It's our prerogative in the concreteness and the contingency of space and time to love the person next to me.

And then, of course, another strong reason for this cognitive bias in our culture is the very nature of our sinfulness is to be self-wilful. I want to be in control. And my mind matters because I'm in control of my mind and nobody else. There's no more effective way of being in control than being rational. If you can give a rational explanation of life, as we've seen with Saul Bellow protesting against, then you’re the dictator of your own world. And so the role of the ego for self-mastery, self-wilfulness, self-controlling, is obvious. We see it all around us.

A third reason is that we think that thought is vastly superior to our emotions. That’s why today cognitive therapy is so popular. If you think you're right and if you think positively then obviously you're in control: you're in the driver's seat. And at one level it is, it's true, but it's the exaggeration of this that is so faulty. And then fourthly, we realise that culturally the intellectual life does bring great dividends to us. After all, aren't the great rewards that we get from society in passing our exams of scholarship, of professional training, of academic competence - these are the things that bring us rewards. So rational man is very much on the throne in our culture. In fact, we couldn’t imagine our culture operating without it. But inhabiting all these different realms, we find that this cognitive realm is not the realm for prayer. We don’t think about God. We celebrate God. He's not an abstraction. He's closer to us than hands or feet, much closer to us than our minds.

But then beyond the cognitive, there's also what we might call the conative sphere. And the conative sphere is the realm of desire, the realm of will, that links thinking and feeling together. So yes, the conative sphere is the sphere where we’re getting closer to prayer. And so we also have to reflect on how much is my prayer the result of desire, a desire for God. So our prayer life is deeply involved in all four realms and we cannot ignore any of these realms when we exercise the life of prayer. And that’s why I'm recommending that you read Jonathan Edwards' Religious Affections because he's focusing about what is true spiritual vitality: what is the mark of a genuine revival of God's people?