"A Praying Life" (chapters 30-31)

A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World
By Paul E. Miller

“Prayer Work” - Chapter 30

• How often do we pray for difficult people?
• We do our best to “live at peace with all men” and be kind to them, but have we ever prayed that God would change them?
• Do we believe that God is in the business of changing lives?
• We could write up a prayer card with the name of a person that is particularly hard on us and pray the Scriptures over that person. Then we wait and see what God does!
• If we pray for God to “soften” someone or give someone patience or to humble them, God may answer our prayer by bringing difficulty and suffering into that person’s life.
• If Satan’s basic game plan is pride, seeking to draw us into his life of arrogance, then God’s basic game plan is humility, drawing us into the life of his Son.
• The Father can’t think of anything better to give us than his Son.
• Suffering invites us to join his Son’s life, death, and resurrection. Once you see that, suffering is no longer strange.

Working Your Prayers

• If God does answer our prayers for that person by humbling them through suffering, are we ready to roll up our sleeves to serve them?
• God will often provide opportunities for us to “work” our prayer request.
• God may involve us personally in our own prayers, often in a physical and humbling way – teaching us to be a servant.
• God told his disciples to pray that the Lord of the harvest would send out laborers, then he sent out the ones he just told to pray! (Matt. 9:37ff.)
• In Jesus’ parable of the growing seed, there is a three-step pattern:
  
  • Planting
  • Waiting
  • Working the harvest
• It doesn’t occur to us that our prayers may follow the same pattern.
• First, it doesn’t occur to us to plant the seed of thoughtful praying because we may think that difficult people don’t change.
• Second, if we do pray, we don’t watch and wait. We want the answer now.
• Third, we don’t recognize the harvest when it comes, and we forget that reaping the harvest involves our participation.
• Too often we end up reversing the pattern and attack the problem first.
• We confront the person over their behavior, then the relationship disintegrates, then we pray after nothing else has worked.
• By then we’ve often concluded that the person can’t change, and prayer doesn’t work.
• But what really doesn’t work is us.
• Our “prayer doesn’t work” often means “you didn’t do my will, in my way, in my time.”
• Only by praying and watching do we realize the unlikely connections God makes in the kingdom.
• God may answer our prayers for another person by involving us in their lives as a humble servant in the midst of their suffering.
• Suffering opens the door to love. Suffering reaps a harvest of real change.

“Listening to God” - Chapter 31

• How do we discern the leading of God or the guidance of the Holy Spirit in our lives?
• When we commune with God in prayer are we sensing God’s direction or just our own thoughts?

Two Dangers

• “Word Only” – Not listening to the Spirit.
  
  • If we focus exclusively on God’s written Word when looking for God’s activity in our lives but don’t watch and pray, we’ll miss the unfolding story of his work.
  • We’ll miss the patterns of the Divine Artist etching the character of his Son on our hearts.
  • The Spirit personalizes the Word.
  • If we believe Scripture only applies to people in general, then we can miss how God intimately personalizes his counsel to us as individuals.
  • We can become deists, removing God from our lives.
  • But everywhere in Scripture we see God speaking to us with a personal touch, prompting us to obey and love.
  • Seeing the finger of God in our circumstances, creation, other Christians, and the Word keeps us from elevating our thoughts to a unique status. God is continually speaking to each of us, but not just through our intuition.
  • Seeing God’s activity in the details of our lives enhances the application of God’s Word. We actually undermine the impact of God’s Word if we define God’s speaking too narrowly.
  • What is at stake here is developing an eye for the Shepherd.
  • We need to tune in to our Father’s voice above the noise of our own hearts and the surrounding world—what C. S. Lewis called “the Kingdom of Noise.”
  • “Watch and Pray.”
  • Don’t pray in a fog. Pray with your eyes open. Look for the patterns God is weaving in your life.
• “Spirit Only” – Elevating Human Intuition
  
  • There is a danger in thinking we hear God speak.
  • When people call their own thoughts or feelings “God’s voice,” it puts them in control of God and ultimately undermines God’s Word by elevating human intuition to the status of divine revelation.
  • Unless Scripture guards and directs our intuitions, we can easily run amok and baptize our selfish desires with religious language.
  • The danger is in elevating our own thoughts (what we can mistakenly think is the leading of the Spirit) to the level of biblical authority.
  • The problem is that the Holy Spirit comes in on the same channel as the world, the flesh, the Devil.
  • The Lord does lead—we just need to be careful that we aren’t using the Lord as a cover for our own desires. If we frequently interpret random thoughts and desires as “God speaking,” we can end up with some very unbiblical and immoral plans – not God’s will at all.
  • An overly mystical view of God speaking to us can end up with us just listening to the darkness of our own hearts.
• To correctly discern when God is speaking to us, we need to keep the Word and the Spirit together.
• The Spirit personalizes and applies the written Word of God to our lives.
• Without the written word, “being led by the Spirit of God” can turn into us doing what we want to do. What they “hear” from God might be masking their self-will.
• Without the Spirit, the written Word can become dry and impersonal, with no personal application leading to a life of listening and repentance.
• Listening to and obeying God are so intertwined in biblical thought that in the Hebrew they are one word, shamar.
• Under the cover of being obedient to the Word, Word Only folks can be rigid.
• We need to guard against rationalism as much as we need to guard against emotionalism.
• The Word provides the structure, the vocabulary. The Spirit personalizes it to our life.
• Keeping the Word and the Spirit together guards us from the danger of God-talk becoming a cover for our own desires and the danger of lives isolated from God.

Cultivate a Listening Heart

• There is nothing secret about communion with God. If we live a holy life before God, broken of our pride and self-will, crying out for grace, then we will be in communion with God. It is really that simple.
• You can’t listen to God if you are isolated from a life of surrender that draws you into his story for your life.
• There is a tendency among Christians to get excited about “listening to God” as if they are discovering a hidden way of communicating with God that will revolutionize their prayer lives.
• This subtly elevates an experience with God instead of God himself. Without realizing it, we can look at the windshield instead of through it.
• The problem isn’t the activity of listening, but my listening heart. Am I attentive to God? Is my heart soft and teachable?
• The means of communication is secondary to a surrendered heart. Our responsibility is to cultivate a listening heart in the midst of the noise from our own hearts and from the world, not to mention the Devil.
• The interaction between the Divine Spirit and my own spirit is mysterious.
  David captures this mystery in Psalm 16:7—“I bless the LORD who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me.”
• Is David’s heart talking to him, or is God giving him counsel? The two are impossible to separate.
• Tuning in to your Father’s voice has a hard-to-pin-down-but-nevertheless-real quality.
• We don’t have the capacity to analyze this interaction.
• The counsel God gave David is inseparable from David’s active pursuit of God: “I have set the LORD always before me” (16:8).
• The counsel from God doesn’t function like a fortune teller; it is inseparable from a humble seeking after God.