Last week I wrote about the gift of helplessness. I ended by saying, The very thing we often times try to escape, our own helplessness, becomes the launch pad to prayer and then to God's help and grace.
I pray allot in my life. I do this not because I am highly disciplined but because I am highly needy. It is because I am aware and in touch with the poverty within my own soul, realizing that I cannot do anything in life without the help of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
I am very thankful that as I have learned to pray over the years I have discovered that the more that I seem to know God, the more mature I may become, the stronger I may seem to be to others, I also pray more because I realize how truly weak that I really am. My weakness has become a channel whereby I access the amazing grace of God.
As we grow as Christians, we become more and more aware of who we really are in our sinful natures, but at the same time we see more and more of Jesus (2 Corinthians 3:16-18). This seeing of myself and this seeing of Jesus causes me to truly see my need for more moment by moment grace.
When I was a younger Christian, if you could picture this in your mind, my view of Bill was much larger and my view of Jesus was much smaller. I had a small view of my sin and a large view of me. As I have grown my view is now of a small Bill with big sin and a huge, powerful, amazing, beautiful, and wonderful Jesus so overflowingly "full of grace and truth" (John 1:14.)
That is why I felt not the need to pray as much. I can say that because I spent little time in prayer. I was a doer, way to busy to pray. I had God's work to do. I had a church to build. I had people to see, places to go, and things to do that were really important. When I used to look at my heart I did not see most of what I see now. I felt that I was strong, wise, able, disciplined, godly, and mature. I was wrong!
Now I understand that spiritual growth manifests itself in surprising ways: humility, brokenness, neediness, desperateness, insatiable desire,and a can't do mindset. It agrees with Jesus when He says in John 15:5, "Apart from Me you can do nothing." I realize that all the things that I have done without Jesus are NOTHING and have become NOTHING.
Jesus my Lord lived in total dependency to the Father. "The son can do nothing by himself; he can only do what he sees the Father doing." (John 5:19), "By myself I can do nothing; I judge only as I hear." (John 5:30), "My teaching is not my own. It comes from Him who sent me." (John 7:16). Jesus modeled a life we as his followers are to imitate. If the Son of God had to learn dependence on the Father, then so must we.
Jesus asks us to do what He did; live a life of total and helpless dependence upon His heavenly Father. Be encouraged dear reader, if you feel helpless, if you feel weak, if you are desperate, if you feel increasingly unable to do life; then you are entering into His life, the life that He calls "the abundant life" (John 10:10).
If you think that you can do life on your own, you will not enter into a lifestyle of prayer. Prayer will never be the default response to life. It will be the last resort after we have tried all that we "can do". At best when we are drawn in our attention to our own lack of prayer, our lack of prayer will feel to us like something else-a lack of discipline, another duty or obligation to us, not being spiritual enough, too busy, too many obligations, or not enough time for it.
The secret of prayer is thinking that you cannot do life on your own. Jesus calls it "poverty of spirit"(Matthew 5:3). Poverty of our Spirit makes room for God's Spirit. With that attitude and view of life, yourself, and God, you don't need to feel duty, discipline, or obligation to pray. Prayer becomes your default response to your life. It can become a simple prayer like Jesus who frequently cried out "Abba, Father". I have prayed frequently the Psalms and specifically many of the two or three word prayers of the Psalmist, such as Help me, deliver me, save me, empower me, heal me, teach me, show me, guide me, forgive me, show me, or fill me. It helps me because I frequently do not or have much more to say at any given moment than to simply cry these things out to God.
I Often times pray a simple prayer from the 5th century called "The Jesus Prayer". It is based upon Luke 18:38 where a blind beggar called out to Jesus as He was passing by, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" If you add Paul's statement from Philippians 2:11, "confess that Jesus Christ is Lord", you have the Jesus Prayer. Here it is, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner."
My dear brother Pastor Ed Piorik taught me a couple of other simple things that I cry out that make my address to God very trinitarian in focus. I simply plea, "Holy Spirit Come." or "Abba, Father, find me in your love." Sometimes all I pray is to cry out in shorter cries such as "Father" or "Jesus" or "help!"
I think I am finally beginning to understand what it means to "Pray unceasingly". Paul speaks of this in many ways in (Romans 1:9-10; 1 Corinthians 1:4;Ephesians 1:16; 6:18; Colossians 1:9; 4:12; 1 Thessalonians 1:2;2:13;3:10; 2 Thessalonians 1:11; 2 Timothy 1:3; Romans 12:12; 1 Thessalonians 5;17). Unceasing prayer means simply living a lifestyle of dependence and need upon God alone. Like Paul we develop a 2 Corinthians 1:9 perspective on our selves,
"Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead." NIV
So I encourage you to see that a praying life isn't a set prayer time (though there is nothing wrong with that as I wrote last year on taking Sabbath breaks throughout the day); it is slipping into prayer at any moment when you are in touch with your own poverty of spirit, realizing that you cannot even walk through a grocery store or your neighborhood without the help of Jesus.
Learning in my helplessness to pray,
Bill
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