Season 5, Episode 8: How to Pray

This episode is all about how to pray. To be honest, I find it really weird to hear teaching or myself to teach on the subject of prayer because when you perceive prayer as simply a conversation, the question of how to pray is like asking “how do you have a conversation?”

Even if you could work out a way to teach someone how to have a conversation. How exactly does that transfer to our relationship with God? And is it really this simple?

If we continue with this idea that prayer is communication, surely we would all agree that there are barriers to communication.

The first barrier we see finds its origins in the Tower of Babel, which is language. Even if we speak the same language, we all have different ways of perceiving a word and words have a way of changing over time.

Consider words like control. 50 years ago, the word control was in no way a negative thing, whereas now there are negative connotations to the word. Even in legislation, the first section of that act will define the terms being used to ensure that everybody's on the same page before the specifics of the legislation are made. And even then, people still disagree on how [00:02:00] legislation should be interpreted. If you think about it that way, it's actually not really such a surprise that we interpret things in the Bible so differently from one person to the next, just simply because of our understanding of words.

Then there is the fact that good communication hinges on the assumption that we are self-aware enough to adequately identify what is needed to say about us or our situation or someone else for that matter. Furthermore, it assumes we know how to adequately express whatever it is that we have been able to understand about us. Then as the recipients of communication, there is the assumption that we are able to adequately interpret what one is saying, assuming they've adequately expressed what they've determined is the most needed thing to say, and every part of this process assumes that there are no inconsistencies between what we express verbally and physically through our body language.

When we think about it that way, with all of these assumptions, it's amazing that we're able to communicate adequately at [00:03:00] all and that it doesn't go wrong more often. The awesome thing though, when it comes to God is that the complexities are reduced because he's fully able to comprehend and understand us because he sees the intricacies of the inner workings of our hearts and minds.

We have a God who is able to interpret our communication even if we don't understand what is in us. In that way, we don't have to be experts at communication to be understood by God. However, there are still things that we can grow in to improve how we communicate with God.

So let's start at purpose. What is the goal of prayer? What exactly are we trying to do?

The way I used to pray when I was younger, I could safely say that I saw prayer as the opportunity to get what I want. I'd be as specific as possible so that I wouldn't be disappointed. Now, it's not to say that bringing our needs to God is not a critical part of prayer. It is. The Lord's Prayer shows us that we are to ask for the provision of our daily bread. If we have needs, we are meant to bring it to God. But the goal of prayer is not just about our needs. The goal of prayer is to develop a loving relationship with God. It is one of the paths by which we grow in the depth of our love for him, which is why it can't be a transactional list of wants and solutions.

When we pray there is far more to it than that. Through this [00:05:00] relationship, prayer, this space of loving exchange becomes a vital part of our transformation in his presence. As long as we are allowing ourselves to be fully present with him also, the exposure to God's goodness changes us.

Prayer is far more powerful than simply talking through a list.

So what is needed if we are to develop this relationship with God? Well, there are some key relationship builders that are evident in the Psalms, especially. The most critical quality that enhances our relationship with God in prayer is honesty. Have a think about the relationships you have, which are the closest, and how honest are you able to be in those relationships?

I would hazard a guess that they are the relationships you were the most grateful for. This is a principle of life. Honesty connects us, but it's even more important in our relationship with God. The funny thing about God is that we often aren't so honest with him, but the fact is God already knows what we think and feel.

The Psalms tell [00:06:00] us that, that he is able to see our thoughts. He's able to understand the deep inner workings of our. We aren't effectively hiding anything from him, but I don't know if that is always what we're trying to do when we guard the truth anyway. I think what we are really trying to achieve is hiding the truth from ourselves. But we not only shortchange ourselves, the chance to feel that connection with God through being honest, which is, as I mentioned, a hallmark of our closest relationships, but we miss out on the healing that comes from seeing the truth for ourselves.

We also can't invite God into anything that we aren't willing to be open to ourselves.

Let me explain it this way.

Imagine I own a property, but in one section of the property is a garden that is so inconspicuous that you've never even known that it was there before. consequently it is completely overgrown and in need of lots of attention and maintenance. Every Saturday you go about cleaning your home just as you ordinarily would, but the garden is never attended to. Now imagine [00:07:00] those are the recesses of your heart that God is unable to access at the moment. How can you invite him into a place that you don't even know exists? God doesn't have access because you don't have.

Now the way we gain access is by being honest. When we begin being honest, we often find a lot more pours out of us than what we are expecting. Things we didn't realize we felt, end up coming out. This is one of the biggest advantages to journaling.

Obviously the Psalms repeatedly demonstrate that kind of honesty that we are at times even uncomfortable with. David is often asking God to destroy his [00:08:00] enemies. We might not like someone, but in prayer we would rarely say it the way David says it.

The thing I find so absurd is that God calls David a man after his own heart, and yet some of the things that David says, we would simply never associate with good moral Christian attitudes. But I think that's kind of the point. David shares the most intimate and even ugly thoughts, at least in our cultural tradition, with God in his presence.

Is this not what God is like with us? God is honest, at times brutally honest, everything we need to know about God and the way he thinks is revealed in scripture, despite the fact that there is much in scripture that could make God look bad. For example, the potential sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham or the final plague over the Egyptians. God himself, despite all of this, never restricts the truth or even defends his actions. He is honest in his actions and words that applies to his love for us and his abhorrence of evil. He doesn't hold back.

So [00:09:00] let's talk about some practical things when it comes to honesty, the number one prayer point I have prayed for the last 20 plus years of my life is this: I pray for my relationship with him.

Now, I have to say that I've never received this advice, nor have I seen this advice been given myself. So why do I do this? The simple answer is I reasoned many, many years ago that my relationship with God is the most important thing in my life and for my future, and those around me.

Therefore it make sense for me to pray for it. I've prayed for many things about my relationship with God. I pray that I would have a deeper faith and love for him. That's probably the most consistent thing I pray for. I pray that he would reveal himself to me. And that prayer point is only ever about me and God. It's never about ministry or my responsibilities. It's just simply about how I relate and the experience of my relationship with him. That is the first point that relates to honesty. In truthfulness, there was a time where I was finding it really [00:10:00] hard to read the Bible. So I decided that I wasn't gonna read the Bible unless I actually felt like it. There are some people who would freak out by that statement because, oh, you'll never feel like it. But to ensure that I had a growing desire, I just prayed for one thing every day: I prayed that God would give me a desire, a real desire, a love desire to wanna read his word. I did that for about six months. But after that six months, I never needed a streak in an app to tell me that I hadn't read the Bible. I had the [00:11:00] love in my heart and the desire in my heart to wanna do it myself. The desire was born of the Holy Spirit. And so now if I don't read the Bible, or I don't spend time in prayer, I feel weird. I don't feel like myself. It’s not driven by guilt or condemnation or even duty, which duty is not all that bad, but still not as effective as desire.

Now I've had people say to me that they feel guilty about praying about themselves because they think it's being selfish. I can't think of anything more absurd. At the end of this life, our relationship with him is all we have. It's the only thing that carries us through the many trials, that secures our salvation.

I don't think we can afford to not pray for our relationship with God.

The second offshoot of honesty that extends from this idea of just being fully open with God is to try and not draw conclusions about [00:12:00] yourself when you hear what comes out of your mouth. When you're being honest with God, we have this terrible little habit in the western world of allowing an inner voice to judge every little thing we say and do.

It's often referred to as the inner critic. I'm sure at times it's actually the devil who puts these thoughts into our heads or encourages us to be this condemning of ourselves. After all, he is the accuser. But I think a lot of the time we also just participate in this behaviour ourselves because we're insecure.

The point is, oftentimes we aren't honest with ourselves because we are so judgmental of what comes out of our mouths and our thoughts. We have a tendency to label those expressions. “We say, oh, that's so selfish!” “Oh, that's so ungrateful!” “Oh, that's not being faithful!” An additional thought here, I often can tell that inner voice is present when someone talks to me by the prefacing statements. For instance, they’ll say, “So I don't wanna sound awful…” which means they've already [00:13:00] pre-judged what they're about to say as awful. That's why they're prefacing you because they don't want you to judge them, but they don't realise they've already judged themselves for the statement they are about to say.

Or they might say, “I shouldn't say it but…” Why? Why shouldn't you say it? You've already pre-judged that this is not an appropriate thing to say. Sometimes in relationships, I think it probably demonstrates for us that we are a lot of the time trying to manage people's reactions to us.

But in God's presence, they're not things that we need to be saying. We don't need to preface. We don't need to filter. We don't need to worry about his reaction to us because he is already told us ahead of time that his reaction is love.

And of course the truth is that God is not actually labelling us in this way, especially not in prayer where we're invited to be completely ourselves and invited to be completely honest. Take the example of David in the Psalms. There's no suggestion there that God was ever discouraging this kind of [00:14:00] conversation from David, or that he was judging or labelling him for making those comments that would make us blush. So the idea that your prayers are a place where you'll be judged or labeled by God is something we can just reject. And therefore, we should also reject the voice that tells us we need to curtail ourselves in God's presence.

Now the challenge I've had to this is that being honest with God is not necessarily reverent. I do tend to think that in our own private prayerful relationship with God honesty is far more important than ensuring that what we say fully comprehends his magnitude. Even when you look at the Lord's Prayer, this is clearly a corporate prayer, and so it's less personal in nature, particularly if you compare it to some of the Psalms.

But I think it's more accurate to say that honesty and reverence are not necessarily opposing ideas. We can actually do both. I can still be honest with my husband without being disrespectful. So try and switch off that part of your mind that is judging the thoughts and expressions you have when you are praying. You can truthfully be completely yourself without judgment in your times of prayer. This is how prayer will become a place of trust and safety for you, which is an absolute priority.

Now, this next point doesn't quite relate strongly to honesty. It's something I'm just chucking in here. But it's a helpful point and it certainly makes for a great experience when you do pray

Make prayer a restful activity. When we think of prayer as something we simply have to get done like a task, it loses the sentiment of sanctuary. David refers to God often as sanctuary. A sanctuary is a safe and restful place. It's a place that you [00:16:00] escape to. It's the place that you run to. It's the safest place you could be in.

Now, I have the capacity to do this these days because I homeschool my daughter, but I will have to reevaluate next year when she returns to high school and I start working.

But these days after we've homeschooled and I've had lunch, I go upstairs and I spend time in prayer and read the Bible. I also lie in bed when I do this. Which I know some people would say, “no, I can't do that 'cause I'd fall straight asleep”. I get that, but because I sometimes have sleep problems, I'm totally okay with the occasional falling asleep.

But it is the most restful part of my day, and I look forward to it. It has really become my sanctuary. Now, I know that for some of [00:17:00] you, it might seem like a practical impossibility to find that time of quiet. But the truth is, I've modified my time and place for prayer when my circumstances have changed.

When I was interning at my church 1 day a week, was working part-time and had a child under 1-year-old, it was a very, very busy time of life. I used to wake up every morning at 5:00 AM and spend that time in prayer and devotion.

Now I'm a morning person. But I do not have the opinion that you must, must, must, do your devotional time and prayer in the morning. That's just what worked for me at the time. And it was mainly because it was the only time that the house was genuinely quiet and that I could have that time to myself.

In another season of my life, I would spend time with God at 8pm after my daughter had gone to sleep. The critical factor here is quiet and [00:18:00] restful.

I think we sometimes forget that our spiritual ancestors didn't have electricity, which would no doubt have affected the types of activities they could do at nighttime. Early morning would've been the best time for people to pray.

But let's remove as many barriers to prayer as we possibly can.

Now I am gonna talk briefly about the Lord's Prayer. Just because it is exactly what the Lord Jesus taught us when asked how to pray. But I just wanna make one final point before we move on to that. Many years ago now, I was struggling to find the time to spend in prayer and in truth, it's probably because I was pretty stressed by my life and lifestyle and responsibilities at the time that I found it really hard to fathom making the time.

You might fit into that category right now. In fact, I think a lot of people probably fit into [00:20:00] that category right now. It's something you feel guilty about but it just feels like it's not really possible, and so it just becomes this vicious cycle of guilt tripping, right.

I was feeling like I had all these things that I wanted to bring to God, and I was feeling guilty about not making that space. So I asked myself this question, if I could only pray for like one to three things right now, what would they be? I wrote those down and I began to do what I called a one minute prayer.

I had an alarm every day and I put a timer on for one minute, and I prayed for those three things. Now I think God had mercy on me because he could see I was just doing my best at the time with the resources I had emotionally and otherwise to deal with my level of responsibility. But I saw so much happen in that time, and the answer to those prayers cleared some of the overwhelm I was feeling too that eventually led me to be able to have a lot [00:21:00] more space in my life.

Again, sometimes our needs are really high and that's why our prayers are full of requests. Don't feel guilty about that. God has never turned us away in our need, and Jesus never turned away a person who came to him with needs.

Let's talk about the Lords Prayer.

Matthew 6:9-13.

“This then is how you should pray.

Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

[00:23:00] Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil.”

Now if you were to open your Bible and look at this passage, you will see that it is formatted differently. And same with the version in Luke 11. This format is used to indicate that it is to be viewed poetically rather than prose. This is likely because it was intended for recitation and even memorization.

We need to remember that the original hearers were most likely illiterate, and so they needed these rhythmic patterns, and poetic devices. Which is why it's fluttered throughout the Bible, chiasms and all sorts of poetic techniques because it helps memorise and it helps with recitation, which is another reason this particular prayer is for public or corporate worship.

But of course, it still does show us a few things about prayer. Most [00:24:00] of all, it shows us what God expects we would pray about and what he encourages us to pray regularly about.

So here are some things that we can take away from this passage.

1. When we approach God, we ought to approach him with an awareness of who he is.

The first part reminds us that God is our creator and the creator of the universe. This isn't meant to scare us or to restrict what we share. In fact, I would argue that this is the reason for us to share more openly since he understands his own creation even more than we understand ourselves. But having an awareness is more about recognising that we aren’t just having a conversation with ourselves, or us simply having some kind of internal dialogue. We're actually approaching our mighty Father, who so graciously cares and intimately knows us. He is big, and it's good to keep this bigness in mind when we're speaking to him. This is a God with great capacity. [00:25:00]

2. His will is meant to be our priority.

I think this part of the Lord's Prayer is our protection against our prayer life becoming focused on what we want.

I understand how this happens. If you had an audience with the king, or if you had an audience with the President or the Prime Minister, what would you talk to them about? Because you'd want to make your words count, right? Most of us would talk about the issue we would like to see change the most.

So it's understandable that we transfer this same kind of thinking automatically over to God. But God's will, which is perfect, loving and holy is of a much greater priority than simply what we want. Praying that his will come to pass focuses us on his will coming to pass rather than ours.

3. It is okay to ask for our needs to be met. In fact, it's expected.

As a society, we are generally not comfortable with needs. The proof of this is that we are often painfully independent and won't ask others for help, and the fact that when we call someone needy, it's never seen as positive. But God is not uncomfortable with our needs. In fact, I think he would prefer neediness rather than independence. That's certainly what the Bible tells us.

When Paul talks about some of the struggles that he had in Asia Minor, he says that this was done so that he would become more reliant and dependent on God. Consider that Jesus encourages us to approach the kingdom like children. What is the biggest distinction between children and adults? Reliance!

So come to God with your neediness. The passage shows that God expects that we will. So obviously when I'm talking [00:27:00] about this, I'm presuming that Daily Bread is talking about our needs and provision. And if we go with this definition, then we must state the obvious: A need is not the same as a want.

See, I think Jesus knew what he was doing right? Of course, he knew what he was doing! By praying this regularly, we are reminding ourselves to be content with what we have and simultaneously ask and trust God to provide for the things we really need. Our daily bread, our food, our shelter.

It should trigger us to be grateful and put the things that we want in perspective. Jesus was intentional with the words that he uses in this passage, because of the fact that this prayer becomes a reminder to us.

As we pray and we approach God, we can see the transformative work at like play in this.

4. Confess your sins and keep a short [00:29:00] account of your shortcomings.

Often when we sin, we can be so guilt-ridden and we feel ashamed about what we have done, that we avoid bringing that to God. This prayer presumes that we will need to confess our sins, but furthermore, it encourages us to do it regularly. Sometimes we are uncomfortable with that because we think we've gotten off too easy, so we shame ourselves and guilt trip ourselves until we think we deserve to be given mercy. The reality is that it is just a form of self punishment. [00:30:00]

God is not interested in us doing that. He is not doing it to us. He would rather us give a regular account of our sin and keep coming to him with these sins. This is what helps us stay humble.

Whenever we confess our sins, we are reminded that we are merely human and that God is supremely gracious. It's never been because of our behaviour. It's never been because we didn't do shameful things. It's actually his incredible grace.

5. Ask for help with staying on the path of holy living.

The hardest thing we will ever do on this earth is not having children, it's not running big companies or running nations. It's resisting the evil one and living a holy life. It's actually so hard that so many of us will never try, and so many of us in this world will give up.

That's why it makes sense to ask God for help resisting temptation and being delivered from the evil one. We aren't nearly as great at detecting the enemy's plots as we would like to believe we are, and at the end of the day, we just absolutely need help. We can't live a holy life without God's help. If we had any chance of living a holy life without God, Christ wouldn't have needed to die on the cross.

In general, the Lord's Prayer is not a prayer that is recited in my own church tradition. [00:32:00] I've actually never been in a church that recites this every week. And so for me, I am actually deliberate to pray this personally.

This is something new that I've really just started actually, but I'm deliberately praying this prayer to keep me centered on what is important.

That's it for this month's episode. It was a shorter one, which I love. I hope that this has been useful and that by implementing whatever appealed to you from this episode that you experience the kind of relationship with God that you have been hoping to experience.

I'd love to hear your feedback, but with all of that, God bless.