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A pray from the song, “O Love that will not let me go” by George Matheson…

O Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in Thee;
I give Thee back the life I owe,
That in Thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

As we’ve all quickly come to realize, the act of praying is a difficult one, especially as we come face-to-face with an acute inability to harness in words the great strainings of our hearts and minds. We know that we want to pray the stirring and powerful litanies of the biblical heroes, but the harder we try the more we find that we don’t know what to say, how to say them, or how to keep them sounding sincere. Perhaps this is the great problem of human nature: the impulse to impose our will upon others, to elicit through the precise persuasion of words the desired, predetermined ends that we deem best in a given situation. Given the facts we will always assume that we are able to deduce the best possible outcome for a situation, no matter how finite our understanding or how near-sighted is our omniscience. But prayer is that medium that thwarts us in our eloquence and shies away from our most pointed rhetoric. We can pretend to comprehend it and to diagram its sundry parts, but in the end we contain prayer only as well as we can cup water in our hands. We can tighten every muscle in our palms but the water will always slip between our fingers and away from us. It’s scope is ultimately beyond us, but yet in a way that humbles us mightily its power already resides within us. We simply must concede that perhaps we don’t and can never know everything, nor can we possibly grasp the great interconnectivity that binds human to human and human to God. In the end our eloquence and rhetoric break apart into a confused and clumsy babble, and in that great interface between desiring the intervention of change and seeking its fruition before God the full breadth of our verbal sophistication meets a sobering inefficacy.

But if we notice, the most acclaimed and most enduring prayers of Yahwistic history are not ones of elaborate wordiness or refined persuasion but of release and self-abandon to the Lord. Even among David’s most tormented psalms, in which he calls down divine wrath upon his enemies, his cries nevertheless give way to quiet surrender, acquiescing that despite the urgency of his present circumstances, his own longings should never be expected to trump things about which he knows little. And so I would like us to simultaneously expand upon prayers of intercession and revisit the prayers of presence from the first week. We discussed in our meeting yesterday that perhaps prayers of intercession are less about praying for specific things that we would want to see happen but about gaining a more godly perspective in order to frame such a prayer with more centered priorities. For instance, if Q is sick, it may be helpful to pray that Q regains health, but we could also refocus that prayer that through this sickness Q may develop a ministry or posture that is able to bring glory to God, a better relationship may develop between people around Q, or something else more relevant to Q may occur. Here we aren’t placing the majority of our prayer on Q actually recovering from the illness but rather expanding the arena for God’s work to be displayed more holistically. But not only are we through prayer refusing to limit the space for God to work in, we are also learning to trust our first impulses less. Rather than leading God to our conclusions through prayer we are instead offering up to God the fragrance of our concern, compassion, and empathy for others and, in a vastly different approach, laying these requests in God’s hands for his supervision and decision-making. In this way our prayers employ far fewer words and poise in favor of listening for the desires and will of God in these situations, imploring us to orient our hearts and minds around what God wants and about what God cares.

And so this week we will integrate concepts from both the prayers of presence and of intercession to engage what I’ll call the prayer of the heart. As the Spirit intercedes on behalf of our groanings and soulful sighs, let us pare down our prayer thoughts to something much more visceral. Enter into a time of prayer with God during which you mentally or verbally say nothing. Simply dedicate the ensuing thoughts to God as a way of laying out the conversation before him, whether what follows be joy, sadness, anger and frustration, or thanksgiving. By removing our “opinioned” side of the dialogue we leave more room for the voice of God to resonate, letting his will be heard more clearly over our own. But more than merely entering into this period of verbal silence passively, be active in listening, weighing the words, thoughts, and images that drift toward you for the clarion wisdom of God. Let images of family, friends, situations, emotions, and whatever else float up to the surface of your thoughts and spend time dwelling on them but without formulating words or thoughts to describe them. Let us trust that God knows each of these images as intimately as we do and that he seeks to insert his wisdom into each. With out human tendencies to suppress, amplify, or even omit different aspects of a situation, it’s probably safe to say that he knows these things better then we do and how best to resolve each. And as we pray, let us be aware of the peace that pervades our prayers as, through this type of prayer, we are able to more fully communicate the depths of our concern in ways that words alone could never convey. In the prayer of Soren Kierkegaard,

So let us be active in praying and allowing the flood of concerns we might have to spill over the narrow siphon of verbal output. This prayer confounds our insistences to qualify an effective prayer as one that can be spoken coherently and challenges us to trust the Spirit of God to pray for us with more sophistication than we might expect. And with this newfound freedom, let us be people who pray without ceasing, who can engage God more fluidly without tripping over our own words and lack of clarity to trip us up. To conclude, a repost of a passage from Henri Nouwen’s The Way of the Heart:

A prayer from New Seeds of Contemplation (p 44-45) by Thomas Merton:

“Justify my soul, O God, but also from Your fountains fill my will with your fire. Shine in my mind, although perhaps this means “be darkness to my experience,” but occupy my heart with Your tremendous Life. Let my eyes see nothing in the world but Your glory, and let my hands touch nothing that is not for Your service.

Let my tongue taste no bread that does not strengthen me to praise Your great mercy. I will hear Your voice and I will hear all harmonies You have created, singing Your hymns. Sheep’s wool and cotton from the field shall warm me enough that I may live in Your service; I will give the rest to Your poor. Let me use all things for one sole reason: to find my joy in giving You glory.

Therefore keep me, above all things, from sin. Keep me from the death of deadly sin which puts hell in my soul. Keep me from the murder of lust that blinds and poisons my heart. Keep me from the sins that eat a man’s flesh with irresistible fire until he is devoured. Keep me from loving money in which is hatred, from avarice and ambition that suffocate my life. Keep me from the dead works of vanity and the thankless labor in which artists destroy themselves for pride and money and reputation, and saints are smothered under the avalanche of their own importunate zeal. Stanch in me the rank wound of covetousness and the hungers that exhaust my nature with their bleeding. Stamp out the serpent envy that stings love with poison and kills all joy.

Untie my hands and deliver my heart from sloth. Set me free from the laziness that goes about disguised as activity when activity is not required of me, and from the cowardice that does what is not demanded, in order to escape sacrifice.

But give me the strength that waits upon You in silence and peace. Give me humility in which alone is rest, and deliver me from pride which is the heaviest of burdens. And possess my whole heart and soul with the simplicity of love. Occupy my whole life with the one thought and the one desire of love, that I may love not for the sake of merit, not for the sake of perfection, not for the sake of virtue, not for the sake of sanctity, but for You alone.

For there is only one thing that can satisfy love and reward it, and that is You alone.”

Now this type of prayer will probably feel for us the most familiar since it comes as more or less a ‘verbal’ conservation with God. And as this prayer is typically utilized, we tend to relegate prayers to praying on behalf of the sick or hospitalized, needs related to one’s job, security, and future, or encompassing prayers for the poor, sick, and marginalized. And we usually temper these prayers with a conciliatory “if it be your will,” to allow for the possibility that our specific request may or may not be the kind of action God was leading toward in that situation. On a theological level, though, this kind of intercessory prayer often situates God behind a great cosmic desk across which we float our requests and appeals for his consideration, to which he may or may not attend based on the contours of the divine will that already contains and has effectively answered the outcomes of each of our requests. Thus, in the traditional framing of intercessory prayer, events of the universe have already been determined and sorted out and we humans with our limited vision can only play very minor roles in the decision-making process.

I would challenge us, then, to take on intercessory prayer truly and as its name implies: as interceding before God on behalf of the world. To put it bluntly, it is more than playing “clean-up” for a world that we find already in disarray but is a deliberate re-visioning of how things ought to be, how they can be when the people of God raise their voices and calls for revolution to the one who seeks to make all things new. Intercessory prayer is refusing to accept the gradual breakdown of order and taking proactive steps in bringing about redemption for the lives and events that inhabit this world. In this prayerful intervention we take our very cue from Jesus himself, “who died, yes, who was raised to life, who is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us” (Romans 8:34). It would seem, then, that at the very center of the divine life is an ongoing conversation of advocacy, in which those who are attuned to the rhythms of God’s heart speak for those who cannot always speak adequately for themselves. Those whose vision is obscured by unbelief, seemingly impossible situations, or hesitancy toward the efficacy of prayer yearn for the kind of intercession that true prayer harbors in order to rescue them otherwise dire circumstances. The created world groans under the yoke of its material exhaustion for release. The principalities of evil tear across the face of the earth with almost unchecked freedom over against the cries of the redeemed. The cosmos cries out for the advocacy of ones who desire to set things right again.

And it begins with prayer. But not just prayers cast up into the sky in vague hopes that they somehow find their way to the throne of God; they must carry the convictions that things can change and that, because of our prayer, the courses of breakdown might be opposed. In John 15:7 Jesus urges his disciples,“If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” The oft-overlooked dependent clause of this sentence reveals the true character of the prayer life: abiding in Christ. Prayers don’t necessarily solve the problems of the world by the mere fact that they are prayers. No, for true change to take place we must first strive to be one with Christ, as he is one with us. And this oneness, this abiding in Christ, has been the point of our prayer project thus far, so we shouldn’t feel overwhelmed if we aren’t there just yet, but coupled with this spiritual intimacy must also come conviction. As the parable of the persistent widow goes in Luke 18:1-8, we must be willing to stand up for the (physical, spiritual, relational) injustice that we see around us and be convinced that, if we only persevere in our intercession, things will change.

And so intercessory prayer takes shape around a core of anticipation. They are prayed not with vague hope but with expectancy, with confidence that what we see isn’t what we have to see and that our urgent desires and dreams actually mean something to God. If we truly are co-laborers with Christ then we can take assurance in the fact that God does hear and does take into account our earnest prayers and that, like the prophets of old, we can change the mind of God. To drive home this point more eloquently, in his book The God Who Risks John Sanders writes:

So this week let us begin to imagine that prayer is not a one-way street but rather an honest dialogue between the Creator and the Created. As we traverse this town and interact with people whose conditions in life may or may not be obvious, as we communicate with family and friends back home, and as we seek daily transformation in our own lives, let us be active in interceding to God, imposing on God our most heartfelt and sincere requests as they correlate with the abiding presence of Christ. I will ask us this week also to engage in a little prayer walking, taking 30 minutes to an hour at least once this week to immerse ourselves in the injustices we see around us.

And last but not least, I want us to resume a little bit of journaling with the following questions as we battle with this idea of true intercession:

Let us be active in this world, not only passively receiving the outcomes of brokenness. Let us confront the powers of darkness and prevail upon our God for his intervention. Let us intercede and believe that it will be done.

As a segue to the next type of prayer…from The God Who Risks by John Sanders:

“Our prayers make a difference to God because of the personal relationship God enters into with us. God chooses to make himself dependent on us for certain things. It is God’s sovereign choice to establish this sort of relationship; it is not forced on God by us. God once asked Moses to leave him alone so that the divine anger might grow against the people (Ex 32:10). God repeatedly instructed Jeremiah to stop praying for the people (Jer 7:16; 11:14; 14:11; 15:10). Why would God say such things if Moses and Jeremiah had no impact on the divine life? James says that the prayers of righteous people make a difference (Jas 5:16). The prayers of God’s people make a difference not only in the lives of the people but also in God’s life. For Abraham Heschel, God is not at home where his will is defied. Thus “to pray means to bring God back into the world … to expand his presence … His being imminent in the world depends on us.” Allowing for overstatement, Heschel is correct that God takes our prayers seriously and weaves them into purposes and actions for the world. God desires a deep personal relationship with us, and this requires genuine dialogue rather than monologue. The fellowship of God desires entails a give-and-take relationship wherein God gives and receives from us.”