There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful than that of a continual conversation with God.1
—BROTHER LAWRENCE
My journey toward learning more about prayer really began with my disillusionment with it. Fresh out of a fraternity at Clemson University and new to the Christian scene, I often found myself annoyed by Christian behaviors.
The way people prayed in groups always had a strange, inauthentic feeling. For example, leaders would say, “Pray for the person on your left,” or, “Pray for the person across from you.” And when prayer requests were taken, they began to sound like an infirmary report: “God, please heal my cold. Lord, please help Aunt Mildred’s big toe.”
Then there was the felt performance or audition aspect to prayer. This was exemplified during and after one of the first times I prayed aloud in a group setting (among the full staff at a Christian camp). As I prayed, there were all sorts of “Mmms,” “ahs,” and “amens.” Afterward, the camp cook put her arms around me and said, “What a beautiful prayer.” The old janitor said, “That was powerful and deep,” and there was more of the like. Their comments were well-intentioned, but had the effect of tuning my thoughts more to the affirmation of friends than to the conversation with Christ.
There was also the problem of my attention span. It took me years to find out that I’m not the only person who falls asleep during other people’s lengthy, verbose prayers, or who begins to think about football or movies.
My mind also wandered to analyzing people’s motives, as it often seemed as if there was an ulterior motive behind the prayer or that it was being used as a tool to get the attention of someone else in the room (which seemed to happen a lot when it was single guys who were praying).
I thought these were normal prayer experiences, what Christians—and the Bible—meant by “prayer.” I hadn’t yet learned that prayer could actually mean the powerful thing that happened when I was alone with God.
My first year as a Christian was a particularly difficult one, as I lost most of my friends at the university because of my newly professed commitment to follow Jesus. I would be in my dorm room at the fraternity hall late into the night, waiting for the noise of guys coming home from the bars at 2 a.m.—there was no point in going to sleep any earlier. In that solitary space, filled with many questions and much confusion, I read, talked to God, searched the Scriptures, wrote in a journal, and went to sleep picturing myself being close to the One who refers to Himself as a rock and a strong tower.
In private, my communication with God grew to be very conversational and intimate. God sustained me in times of struggle, and reminded me of things I needed to know in times of challenge. All of this was very different from what went on in public and from what I had thought was meant by prayer.
The experience that collapsed the divide between public and private prayer occurred when I was sitting at an In-N-Out Burger in Southern California in the spring of 1999. I had started eating my usual Double-Double when out of the corner of my eye I spotted some folks from church at another table. Quickly, I bowed my head and assumed the prescribed posture for praying over my meal, not wanting these other Christians to think I had neglected the ritual.
Immediately the hypocrisy hit me. At home alone, I had no difficulty talking to God before, during, and after a meal, with little regard for what anyone else thought. But simply because of the presence of other Christians in a public setting, all of a sudden I was contorting my body to look like I was praying.
A passage from the Gospels came to mind, in which Jesus said that when we pray we’re supposed to go into a closet so as not to be seen by men. We’re not to be like the religious leaders who prayed publicly and ceremonially with the desire to be noticed (receiving accolades from the janitor or hugs from the camp cook).2
I decided right then and there to take a break—what I called a prayer fast—from all public prayer. In group settings, I refrained from praying, instead reading from the Psalms. When the staff at the church where I worked would gather for staff prayer, I’d go find a hidden corner in my office and spend the time fully alone with God, saying nothing to be heard by human ears and doing my best to listen for the rhythm of the conversation that God wanted to have.
I began to drive to places in Los Angeles to spend the day in solitude, trying to allow my prayer life to reflect the nature of the prayer life Jesus exemplified with His Father. At first I’d only be able to take the quiet and solitude for an hour or so before my mind would whirl with other things and the stresses of the day. But before long I would spend the better part of the day at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, stilling my heart before God and learning to tune my ear to His voice.
Eventually, spending time during the day once or twice a week wasn’t enough, and I began getting in my car late at night to drive the Southern California freeways with my window down and sunroof open, with no destination in mind and no other purpose than spending that time alone with God.
I believe I experienced something like what Paul envisioned when he told the young believers at Thessalonica to “pray without ceasing,” or when he wrote of the “fellowship of the Holy Spirit.”3
In my experience, public prayer is fraught with potential problems that obscure the conversational nature of true prayer. Of course, public corporate prayer does have a place. Acts 12:5 describes how the believers in Jerusalem gathered together to pray earnestly for Peter when he was in prison (and later verses describe how God answered those prayers). There are many other instances like this described in the New Testament. But the nature of such corporate prayer is often starkly different from our modern version of it.
The early church sometimes expressed their prayers in a song; at other times, the whole congregation beseeched God while flat on their faces in repentance or anguish. These and other New Testament examples seem in stark contrast to finding myself in a plush living room praying for the person on my left or for the greater comfort of the privileged 1 percent of humanity living in the developed world.
True prayer—whether done publicly or privately—is about conversing with and paying attention to God from a posture of humility and with a willingness to listen. There is a natural rhythm to prayer reflected in the Psalms. The psalmist intimately cried out to God about the broad state of his emotions, almost always with a remembrance of God’s great works and faithfulness in the past and from a position of confidence in His great works and faithfulness to come.
The Bible certainly encourages sharing our concerns with our Maker; Paul told the Philippians, “Present your requests to God,” and Jesus commended persistence in His parable of the widow before the judge.4 But Scripture knows nothing of long, endless lists of wants, wishes, and needs put before God as if He were a Santa Claus who is open for business all year.
Jesus admonished that “when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”5 When I come to God in prayer, I have to remind myself that He knows me better than I know Him, that He understands my emotional state better than I do.
When I only think I know what is best, He knows what is best and how to lead me to it.
Gratitude and humility are largely absent from a lot of prayer displayed in much of the church today. The great privilege of having direct access to God in prayer was bought for us at a very great price—the excruciating and humiliating death of Jesus on a Roman cross.
Before that event, access to God was extremely limited. For God’s own people, direct contact with God was mediated through a high priest, who could only come before him in the holiest place of the temple once a year. And while we find the prayers of the prophets and psalmists recorded in the Old Testament, for the most part it was God who initiated communication (as with Abraham, Moses, the prophets, and the judges).
Are we sufficiently appreciative of this? As the writer of Hebrews wrote, we can come boldly before the throne of God, and as Jesus prayed, we can cry out to God as our “Abba” (Father), a term of familiarity and intimacy.6
As followers of Christ, we do well to acknowledge that in Him we are adopted as sons and daughters, and Jesus calls us “friends.”7
And yet, do we appropriate this wonderful privileged status with a proper sense of awe, worship, and humility? When God spoke to Moses, he took off his sandals and hid his face in fear; Isaiah declared himself “undone” and “unclean” in the face of God’s holiness.8
As we enter into the presence of God as adopted sons and daughters, by His grace and through His encouragement, our boldness should be tempered with humility, and we should never forget the holiness and power of the One with whom we are communicating.
HEARING GOD
The paradox of faith is answered in our willingness to walk into our greatest fears and uncertainties with confidence in Christ. Conversational prayer that orients us to God—rather than prayer that tries to get God to orient Himself to us—informs our faith and makes it possible. To put it another way, our ability to embrace a life of bold and dynamic faith is closely tied to having confidence in what God is telling us.
One follower of Christ who did this very successfully was Brother Lawrence (1611–1691), who, as a kitchen worker in a Carmelite lay community, became widely known for his perpetual intimacy with God. His own account of this intimacy—written in Medieval French and translated into English as The Practice of the Presence of God—has been, for generations, one of the classic Christian treatises on the devotional life.
Asked by others how they could experience this same intimacy with God, Brother Lawrence replied:
Stop putting your trust in human rules, devotional exercises and acts of penance. Instead, exercise a living, obedient faith in God. Live as though he were beside you and with you all the time—as indeed he is. Seek to do what he wants, as and when he commands it, and make his command your joy and chief pleasure. The man who lives like that will be fully human, completely Christian and genuinely happy.9
When understood this way, what’s really at issue here is not limited to our prayer life but extends to our entire mental life. Think about it: God has just as much access to all our other thoughts as He does to those specifically directed to Him in the form of prayers.
So, the questions naturally surface, “How do I hear God? How do we know when He speaks?”
The answer has several facets. Though there is no magic formula (contrary to the prevailing pop-Christian message), there are certainly things that help set us up for better hearing the voice of God as He is leading us.
SETTING THE STAGE
A true prerequisite to hearing God’s voice is obedience.
Matthew 5:8 says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” Similarly, Psalm 24:3–4 says:
Who may ascend the mountain of the LORD?
Who may stand in his holy place?
The one who has clean hands and a pure heart,
who does not trust in an idol
or swear by a false god.
Sin disrupts our relationship with God. As an affair damages the relationship with a spouse and robs it of the joy that could be, sin causes a breach in our relationship with God that robs us of the joy that He wants us to have in community with Him. This naturally has an impact on our ability to hear and understand God.
Proverbs 15:29 says, “The LORD is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayer of the righteous.” It stands to reason that if we find ourselves out of step with God, we must repent. We must come back into alignment with God by accepting responsibility for the breach in relationship and turning back to Him in purity of heart.
Practically, it is when we are in right relationship with God that we hear Him best.
WHERE IS GOD ALREADY SPEAKING?
God is already speaking in certain areas, and as Elijah learned, God is often in the still, small voice and not always in the thunder.10 Where do we go to hear that clear but quiet voice?
First, God speaks in nature. Psalm 19:1 tells us, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” When we are out in God’s creation, we open ourselves to an awareness of His power, His glory, His faithfulness, and His love. When we remove ourselves from the noise and clutter of our urban settings, our offices, and our devices, we carve out the space and solitude to meet God in the place He created and called “good” (see Genesis 1). Incidentally, we are thereby aligning ourselves with God’s people throughout the ages, for whom creation served as the holy place where they found God and where He spoke to them.
Second, God clearly speaks in Scripture. Psalm 119:9–10 says, “How can a young man keep his way pure? By living according to your word. I seek you with all my heart.” Hebrews 4:12 teaches us that “the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”
Through reading and diligent study of the Bible, we find that God makes Himself, His ways, and His thoughts known to us. His Spirit inside us has a miraculous way of tying the propositional truths of His revelation in Scripture to our lives and helping us know how to act and respond in the various situations we face.
What if we so immersed ourselves in knowledge of God’s Word that we saw the world and all it contains through a biblical lens? Our interaction with Scripture ought to be the main thing that colors and shapes all of our paradigms.
One day I had to get all the tires on both our cars replaced because someone had come through our neighborhood and slashed them—all eight. I spent the entire day with a guy from our local tire store, and he knew everything you could want to know about tires.
As Chet was shuttling me back to my house and cars were passing by, I asked if all he sees are tires. He said that he did indeed notice every tire in a parking lot. He admitted to wanting to leave notes on people’s cars telling them that they have the wrong tires or that they really need an alignment or to have their tires rotated.
If we immerse ourselves in the words of Scripture, they become a lens through which we can’t help but see the world, just as Chet can’t help but see cars through the lens of his experience with tires.
When we don’t read Scripture, we can feel that God is absent from our lives—we don’t hear a voice and we feel alone. But when we read our Bible daily and study it, we begin to hear God speaking to us in everything. There is something powerful about the way God works in us through Scripture reading.
Praying without ceasing is a discipline. Growing in our prayer lives requires a lifelong commitment. Availing ourselves of the precious privilege of gaining wisdom and direction from the Creator of the universe involves the work of establishing a focused and intentional pattern of communication with Him. If we desire to know God’s will and feel His presence in the critical moments of our lives, standing at crossroads or enduring dark nights of crisis, then we need to have established a natural and ongoing dialogue.
One of my professors at Talbot School of Theology told a small group of us a story about an evening when God spoke to him while he was in his hot tub. As clear as any voice, he heard God say, “Ask anything for your daughter.” He began to cry, and he prayed to God to have his daughter’s best friend reach out and connect with her. Their family had relocated for work, and his daughter hadn’t heard from her best friend in two years. The very next day his daughter received a call from her.
A noted Christian philosopher once told us a story about how God told him to pull over and pray for his son. At that very moment his son had been in a serious car crash and was fighting for his life.
When we hear stories like that, it’s easy to think, I want that. But while these stories of unbelievable intimacy with God are exciting, and we want to have that same experience ourselves, what we need to understand is that these moments of urgent clarity are the fruit of a disciplined life of ongoing prayer.
Moments like the ones I just described were exceptions, not the everyday norm; they were the result of an intimacy built up over time. The fruit of prayer is dependent on deep roots, and the more we cultivate and nurture our prayer life, the more we can expect to experience the blessed fruit of clear communication with God.
We must hunger and thirst for such intimacy with God in prayer. We must make it a pattern for our lives. This is why the psalmist could write, “May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer” (Psalm 19:14; emphasis added). It is also why Paul wrote and elaborated to the church in Philippi what sorts of things to think about—“whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable.”11
WHEN WISDOM IS FOLLY
In the paradoxical walk of faith, developing a discipline of close communication with God is critical, and here’s why: to the Christian, there are two kinds of wisdom available, and one can look like foolishness from the outside.
Part of God’s common grace, available to every human, is the wisdom that comes from reason and experience. As rational beings, we can gather evidence, seek counsel from others, weigh options and likely outcomes, and determine the wisest decision. In this the follower of Christ is on much the same footing as the unbeliever (who is also a rational creature because he is created in God’s image). But for those of us who, by entering into the abundant life offered by Christ, have access to communication with our Creator, there may be times when He calls us to something radical and important, something that runs counter to that which normal wisdom would dictate.
When we follow this second form of wisdom, the specific direction from God that only faith can comprehend, our choice may look like folly, as did Abraham’s decision to sacrifice his son. At times like that, we must be certain we are hearing God aright; certainty comes from having established the discipline of communicating with Him.
As we run hard after our relationship with God, we are able to grow in wisdom and in our ability to navigate the pitfalls of life. In addition, we are ready and able to hear the occasional call or receive the specific direction that would have us make a radical and disjunctive break from the normal flow of our life, relationships, or conception of our future. As with Abraham, this can only be done in full reliance upon God’s trustworthiness and promises of deliverance.
FORWARD IN FAITH OR BACK IN WISDOM
Several years ago I had an adult student at Kilns College who relocated from Idaho to Bend. He and his family moved in the midst of an economic downturn and had left behind a house that continued to sit on the market. As time progressed and they were losing money by paying their mortgage in Idaho and rent in Bend, he began to question whether they should move back to their previous home.
His story is a perfect example of a common scenario in the life of a believer. In the midst of complicated realities, we’re left wondering how to analyze our decisions from a biblical standpoint. Generally in these cases, we can either safely move forward in faith or back in wisdom—and we can be obeying God in either option.
Wisdom can mean following natural and spiritual principles that have been proven over time. The reasonableness of some actions or decisions is proven by past experience, one’s own and that of others. In other times, when clearly called to do so, we can and should step out in faith, safe with God, by living into the absurdity of trust.
Had God called my friend to Bend? And if so, for what reason? If the Lord had spoken clearly to him on that matter, then it would have been obedient to grab hold of that guidance and step forward in faith. If he hadn’t received such specific direction, wisdom and reason might dictate that he consider the complexity of the financial situation, and obedience could mean moving back to the house that hadn’t sold.
There is a tension to such discernment and decision making. That which calls us to act rationally can be the voice of God, which we need to obey, or it can be the voice of folly, tempting us to remain safe while ignoring God’s trustworthy call to step out in faith. Sometimes when we step out in faith, it flies in the face of wisdom. The art of distinguishing between the two is developed in the steadfast discipline of continuous communication with God.
Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.
—ROMANS 12:12