So what about conversing with God? Do we speak with him in the same way we talk to a good friend or to a beloved spouse? Or do we speak to him reluctantly—without much trust or care?

I ask this because I have the impression that too few Christians think of God as a close and congenial conversation partner. Instead he’s more of a potential resource for special needs, or an iconic figure at church meetings and ceremonies.

We need to acknowledge at least one obvious difference in talking to God. He isn’t physically present in the room so we can’t have the sort of back-and-forth exchange we’re used to when we think of conversations. And most comparisons between normal sharing and speaking to God won’t apply. We even have a separate term for talking to God—“prayer”—that recognizes the one-sided nature of coming to God. Prayers and conversations are not the same thing.

Or so it might seem to us.

The Bible actually portrays God as fully invested in us as potential conversation partners. His presence in all believers is immediate—a Spirit-to-spirit bond as in 1 Corinthians 2 and Romans 8—and is potentially more lively than any human bond. Psalm 139:4 portrays him as intimately aware of everything we ever mean to say, even before we voice our thoughts. God, then, is the greatest of communicators. He wants us to hear his heart and vice versa.

But if that’s the case how do we take advantage of such access? Imagine the benefits of a clear and strong connection with God! And with that vision in view let’s move ahead.

A starting point is to seek him. The term “seek” is Bible jargon for our ambition to start a conversation. Listen to Psalm 28:8—a Psalm attributed to David—“You have said, ‘Seek my face.’ My heart says to you, ‘Your face, LORD, do I seek.’ Hide not your face from me.” And hear Christ’s call: “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things [i.e. all our life concerns] will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33).

Next comes a willingness to listen. God, once again, is not a poor speaker. Instead we’re poor listeners. We don’t really want to hear what he has to say.

This conundrum of moral deafness calls for humility and openness. Making the connection work is something only God’s Spirit can accomplish. He alone knows our heart’s true motives. So the starting point for a clear connection with God is an invitation to him to check the connection. Let’s return to Psalm 139 here, to verse 23: “Search me, O God, and know my heart!” David recognized God as the solution to our deafness.

So the heart is crucial as the center of our values and motives. Before our new life of faith we had deadened hearts—wanting to “be like God” as usurpers and users rather than followers—but even in coming to faith our old interests still haunt us. God said as much in Jeremiah 17:9-10—“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? I the LORD search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.”

And now we come to the main insight of conversing with God: he invites us to speak about important matters and not about the themes of our former rebellion. The near deafness of most Christians remains a problem as long as we make self the focus of our approaches to him. Such efforts represent our past spilling into the present—recalling how we once lived as lovers of self rather than as lovers of God and neighbor.

God’s Trinitarian existence is the ultimate measure here. God the Father wants us to take up our new identity: we are now his children by way of union with Christ. We are now his Son’s eternal bride: as much beloved by him as his Son is. So any efforts on our part to continue with the old values of spiritual autonomy and self-interest need to be crucified just as Jesus was crucified for our former life.

A clear connection with the Father is only made in our devotion to his Son. As we abide—living boldly and overtly—in Christ and in his love for us our values shift dramatically. We now discover the Bible to be speaking about this bond from beginning to end. This lesson that Jesus taught his still-dull disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24 is crucial: everything in the Old Testament was a story about the Father sending his Son, the Servant, to give us life.

Once we get the Spirit’s focus on the Son offered throughout the Scriptures we start to pick up on what’s really important. The story of fall and redemption stands behind God’s answers to all our questions. We then hear the Spirit whispering to our hearts as we read, “Yes, yes, you’re getting it at last!”

The tension of the past came when we tried to force God to treat our own stories as central to life. Now we know better. And we can join the Father in his delight in his Son, which is where the conversation reaches its peak.

The post A Clear Connection first appeared on Cor Deo.

It’s a topic worth revisiting on a regular basis even apart from these reminders. Conversations are the threads that make up the fabric of life and our sense of belonging to community.

What is a conversation? In basic terms it’s a word-based exchange of thoughts: the informally expressed first fruits of inner reflections exchanged between or among any participants. They are topical and spontaneous, usually maintained by social conventions of mutual curiosity, caring, and humor. Assertions, questions, answers, and counter-questions prosper in a good conversation.

The reflections are reciprocal: an exchange of thoughts in a dialogue. What one says will shape, in some measure, what the other says. Yet each is also contributing from his or her unique point of view. So a new reality—the substance of shared thoughts—is formed by every conversation.

It’s possible, of course, for one voice to dominate—to move to a monologue. It’s also possible for the combination of lecture and dialogue to occur: for a teacher to engage any questions. But these variations only serve to accentuate the unique quality of a true conversation—when two or more hearts and minds are joined in a search for insight and accord.

The place of the heart is important here. In Bible conversations the writers regularly assume the heart to be prior to the mind in what a speaker says. And with that they assume the affective foundation of a true conversation.

Isaiah cites the LORD, for instance, in challenging the citizens of Jerusalem, “this people draws near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me” (29:13); and centuries later Jesus cited this text against a different generation of Jerusalem leaders (Mark 7:6). This addressed a truism that it’s always possible to be insincere in what we say. So, as we discover here, God makes it clear he isn’t thrilled with insincerity.

Consider, too, the exchange in Judges 16 between Delilah and Samson. In a scene that anticipated television soap operas, Samson was holding back information from his girlfriend as they talked at night. Her complaint? “How can you say, ‘I love you,’ when your heart is not with me?” In time he caved in and “told her all his heart” with a transparency Delilah recognized at once. And, given her own insincerity, she promptly betrayed him.

And this feature of heartfelt motivation is where examining conversations becomes intriguing. If we recognize a difference between “good” conversations that consist in heart-to-heart exchanges, and our “ordinary” conversations that consist in swapping loose thoughts and opinions about football or restaurants—exchanges in which our hearts are largely out of sight—we may have stumbled into something important.

And we have. A host of Bible texts presume that our souls consist in the substance of our collective conversations: the stuff of who we talk to; what we talk about; and the level of heart-birthed honesty in our sharing. In Isaiah 32, for instance, the prophet set up a contrast between the transformation of all who will respond to the coming King of righteousness versus “the fool [who] speaks folly”—“But he who is noble plans noble things, and on noble things he stands.”

Jesus also allowed his disciples to listen to one side of a conversation with his Father in John 17. In this prayer Jesus discriminated between those who will “see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world” and those who are with “the evil one”—a judgment that was based on their being conversation partners with Jesus.

The disciples, in other words, had been drawn into the substance of the Son sharing what the Father had shared with him: “For I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from you” (verse 8).

And this participation by the disciples in a conversation with Jesus also set up a participation by us—in a chain of hearing and responding—so that even today we share in a line of conversations going back to the Triune conversation in glory: “I [Jesus praying] do not ask for these [immediate disciples] only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word” (verse 20).

Let me return to my Friday visit with Terry. We talked, in part, about the proper boundaries of conversations: what makes a good conversation? And when are conversations fruitless or misguided?

This morning I took that question to God. The conversation started when I both listened to—on my iPod—and read Isaiah 25-44, and then talked to him—praying—for the next couple of hours. The day started at a friend’s house in Cannon Beach. From there I drove the short distance to Hug Point soon after my time in the word.

What came to mind and to voice in my prayers? My concerns included some recent decisions I’ve made; some thoughts stirred by Terry and by Pete’s book; and the most compelling thoughts came from reading Isaiah at length. My earlier questions and circumstances stirred my reading and listening, and then my praying. It was a working conversation, and it’s certainly not finished!

Two final thoughts.

First, if I had more space I’d love to return to 1 Corinthians 2—a hobby-horse passage for me—to trace how the Spirit supports a Heart-to-heart, Spirit-to-spirit, communion with God. Please go there if you don’t know it already.

And second, I always come away from Hug Point wanting to talk to others who love God. It’s a joy to talk about him and the difference he makes in real life. He changes both us and the conversations we have with each other!

The post Conversing with God first appeared on Cor Deo.

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There is a strange phenomena in the church when it comes to praying for people.  Obviously this is a generalisation, but I have observed it enough to suggest that it may be a pattern.

When people become followers of Jesus our prayers for them seem to change.  Before they are saved we pray for God to work in their lives and circumstances, for their hearts to be drawn to Christ, for the spiritual blindness to be taken away, etc.  Once they trust Christ and are in the family, then what do we pray for? Often it seems to shift to the more mundane matters of health and career.

This is not just the case in church prayer meetings, but also among leaders too.  I know that I am tempted to pray more fervently and more “spiritually” for those who are outside God’s family, or for those who are on the fringes.  But for those who seem to be doing well in human terms?  It is tempting to assume all is well.

Take a look at Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians in 1:15-23.  He begins by referencing how thankful he is for their faith in Christ and love for the saints.  These are healthy believers – they have a vertical relationship that is spilling into their horizontal relationships.  These are the kind of people I am tempted to bypass as I pray.  Not so for Paul!

The One Thing – He goes on to make clear the one thing that he prays for them: that the Father might give them the Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him!  That is, Paul prays for these believers to know God.  Simple.  Or is it profound?

Clearly he doesn’t mean that he wants them to “come to know” God, but to grow in their knowing Him.  He wants their relationship with God to go deeper, that the union they have with Christ should become more vibrant and developed.  (Remember that “in Christ” occurs almost forty times in Ephesians – union with Christ is a massive theme in the letter.)

I suspect many of us who have a passion to see the lost brought to salvation may fall into the trap of then missing the growth potential that exists for a believer.  There is so much more than just getting saved and then telling others, there is massive potential for spiritual growth and maturity.

The Three Things – Paul spells out this one prayer request with three specifics.  He wants God to enlighten the eyes of their hearts to know three things.

First, he wants them to know the absolute certainty of their calling in Christ.  We have churches filled with people who carry the label of Christian, and yet have all manner of uncertainty and confusion over God’s calling on their lives.

Second, he wants them to know that they are God’s inheritance – an inheritance He considers to be gloriously rich!  This is not something new believers readily grasp.  Just as it takes a wife many years to truly believe that her husband really loves her, so it is with God’s people.

Third, he wants them to know how much power there is toward them as they trust God for it.  That is, is there enough power for a life like mine to be truly transformed by the gospel?  Is there enough power for me to be raised from my sinful state of death to do the works God has prepared for me to do?  There is if that power is the same power that raised Christ from the dead, seated him in glory, put all enemies under his feet and made him head over the church!

Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians is incredibly encouraging for us to read.  More than that, it is deeply challenging to recognize that this prayer was prayed for those who were already faithful and loving.  Let’s not bypass those that seem healthy and established in our churches and in our ministry spheres.  Let’s pray for them, and for ourselves too, to be growing in our relationship with God, knowing more profoundly the reality of our hope, his inheritance and the abundance of power available!

The post How do you Pray for Fellow Believers? first appeared on Cor Deo.

In God’s story we find that prayer has depth, ceaseless frequency, and a naturalness many of us do not experience. Maybe before I offer some reasons why I think this is the case, let me give a brief description of what I’m referring to today.

The Inexplicable Prayer Meeting: In my experience, a weekly hour-long church prayer meeting consists of a 45-minute discussion about the week to harvest any medical prayer requests.  Once the harvesting is complete, the meeting ends with a 15-minute prayer time where each person takes a single turn to pray. When finished, we go home with some sense of accomplishment. We’ve ticked the box that so many Christians have no desire to tick.

But the strangeness of the meeting doesn’t end there. The actual prayer time is quite foreign. You might hear people speak in spooky voices that seem to take possession of warmhearted people.  Or you may even hear people pray in archaic language that anyone under the age of 150 can’t understand without some careful translation—as though God says, “I love it when you call me ‘Thou!”

I could go on, but you get the picture.  We don’t talk like this to our friends, family, or spouses, well anyone really, yet with God we do.  Then we wonder why we don’t pray. Prayer just doesn’t make any sense, it isn’t natural, and lets face it, God doesn’t seem to respond all that much.  We don’t pray, but when we have to, when it’s a must, we’ll dutifully break out our spooky voice and pray.

Some Inexplicable Advice:  If this is true, and prayer is a duty, we can’t possibly live up to Paul’s command to “pray without ceasing” (1Thess 5:17).  After all, do we do anything without ceasing? And if we do, it can’t possibly be prayer, can it? It’s just so strange to pray to God … that is, it would be if God hadn’t commanded it.

Leaders that offer instruction on prayer instinctively begin with the importance of prayer (feel the vice squeeze down?) followed by a list of advice in order to develop a habit of prayer.  Some advice may include:

• Much praying is not done because we don’t plan to pray, so plan it!
• Pray with some sort of structure like ACTS (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication).
• Pray until you pray

I don’t say all this as if I haven’t struggled to pray or haven’t given and used such advice.  Not too long into my walk with Christ, I was told if I had difficulty praying to try to pray through ACTS.  At the time I thought it was great advice, “Finally,” I thought, “a way to make sure I say all the things I needed to say to God!” Yet after awhile I started to realize I was more concerned about order above anything else. My “conversation” with God was robotic and not truly conversing with and baring my heart to God.  Yet I didn’t know what else to do, talking with God just didn’t seem instinctive or easy.

When I finally got into the Bible consistently I discovered this entire struggle was absent. The Bible assumes prayer just happens. From Moses, to David, to Daniel, to Jesus through to the early church, prayer just happens in all circumstances, in every situation, without end.  Prayer just overflows from a relationship with God.  It is as if communication is the very essence of any relationship.

Why is Prayer so Sci-fi Weird? So far I’ve been slightly subtle, but the answer comes down to how you view God.   If we understand God to be the unmoved mover (the eternal monadic God that set everything in motion with a single decree), then there’s no place for prayer.  Prayer is as alien to God as it is to us. Prayer, in this reality, isn’t the communication innate to any relationship.  Instead it’s some kind of relational dissonance: a creature attempting to speak to a non-discursive deity.

God is a Communicative Spreading Goodness: But thankfully, God has been a Father-Son-Spirit God for all eternity.  God’s glory before the creation of the world was a loving communion (John 17).  That is, God’s essence is relationship bonded by communication and other-centered love.  The overflow of this reality was the motivation for creation. The Trinity desired to have a creation to share his communion, his goodness, and his ethos with his image (male-female person united in relationship).   You can imagine Adam and Eve talking with God in the cool of the day in the Garden because they just loved talking with one another.  You can picture them enjoying the presence and warmth of communion with the other.  This was the reality before death and hostility crept in when the image bearers rejected life with God by exploring the reality of making themselves god–the primary object of their affections and reference of reality.

But wait . . . what’s even more amazing is that this God invites us back to participate in his community again.  The Father, motivated by love for his creation, sent his Son to defeat death and make a way for life to return to his creation.  And this gift of grace is the communicative bond the Father and Son share–the person of the Holy Spirit.  Now as part of the Bride of Christ we have the pleasure to speak to our Bridegroom and our Father who poured their love upon us by the Holy Spirit.

Like everything else in Christianity, we tend to pile instructions on top of advice.  However, if we are missing out, the solution won’t come from better techniques, but from a clearer view of God.  And when we glimpse the communicative self-giving love of God, isn’t our response to communicate back?  That’s prayer and there’s nothing weird about that!

The post Why is Prayer Weird? first appeared on Cor Deo.

As a young believer I was taught the A.C.T.S. acronym.  Adoration leads to confession, to thanksgiving and finally to supplication.  It made sense and proved helpful over the years.  Yet I couldn’t help but notice the tendency of my flesh to “meify” the pattern.  Adore (because that cracks open the door for God to be favourable to later requests), confess (since sin always gets in the way of getting prayer answered), be thankful (again with an eye toward what is to follow), and then finally get to shopping, uh, I mean, supplication (the real goal throughout).  Wretched man that I am!  Who will deliver me?

Over the years I’ve developed a three-part structure that I follow in focused prayer times.  I begin with “Redirecting the gaze – dependence.” Recognizing the tendency of my fleshly self to curve in on myself, I begin by looking to Him.  All the concerns, the anxieties, the cares are cast on Him (because He cares for me).  As well as petition, I may find myself confessing, or expressing thankfulness in order to look beyond the gifts to the giver.  If I stop here there is a danger that I am loving God for my own sake, so I move on to loving God for God’s sake.

The second stage is “Responding to the object of the gaze – devotion.” Time spent in God’s presence will lead to devotion, to adoration, to praise, to worship.  Now the worshipful part of prayer is not a duty, but a delighted response.  Yet if I stop here I suspect I still fall short of all that a relationship should include.  I’ve moved from a me-focus to a God-focus, which is good.  But in a genuine relationship two hearts will start to beat together in shared values and desires…

The third and final stage is “Reflecting the heartbeat of God – intercession.” God passionately and sacrificially loves others.  Time spent with Him will stir the same in my heart, the spreading goodness will spread.  So my responsive and God-reflecting heart will be stirred to pray for the world, the church, the widow and the orphan, the lost, the injustices, the mission field white unto harvest, etc.

Does this progression reflect a relational responsiveness to our others-centred Triune God?

Jesus answered his disciples with a pattern that is simpler still – pray to your Father about the Father, then pray to the Father about the family (give us, give us, give us).  Love God and love others.

A pattern for prayer.  By no means an exhaustive post on prayer, feel free to go where you like in your comments, but perhaps this post might be a helpful nudge for some.

(I just started A Praying Life by Paul Miller, so far so good.  Maybe a review on here in due course.)

The post Pattern for Personal Prayer first appeared on Cor Deo.