Part III Putting It All Together - Your First Prayer Note Book
Under the supervision of the Holy Spirit of God who teaches all things, you should by now have a firm grasp on the realilty of concrete prayer as opposed to “airy-fairy” prayer. In this chapter I will now layout how all this information fits together in a beginning prayer notebook.
The Notebook Itself
Use a ring binder with holed paper. The prayer pages should be detachable as needed for when they are moved from one tab to another.
The cover itself should be as ordinary looking as possible in order to give you as much privacy as possible. You are not praying “to be seen of men,” so you should make sure men will not see you prayers.
Remember that your prayers are going to come from the Father in the name of the Son through the Holy Spirit Who indwells you. God will know whether you are pursuing this path of prayer because you really want to pray His prayers, or whether you are just trying to attract attention to yourself. If you use a notebook with a noticeably garish cover and put a title on it like DAY BOOK OF THE MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM, you are trying attract attention to youself, and God may not deal with you in anyway other than to call your attention to what you are doing.
Use a plain old, nondescript, commonly available notebook cover. Indeed, put a title on it like “Optimization of Statistical Functions with Simulated Annealing.” That will keep the nosy parkers out.
The Tabs
“Daily.” - What you need to pray every time you pray.
“Round x.” - Separators for how ever many prayers you have which are not as urgent as the dailies. My pray notebook has one to seven “Rounds” in it.
“Answers” - This is where you will place your completely answered prayers. A book of memorial. You’ll want to look at them on days when the Devil is telling you there’s no such thing as answered prayer.
The Prayer Pages
R - page. A specific request for something. The request is at the top of the page. As you receive “morphs” to it ( as I explained earlier), it will move down the page. You will write the date you prayed the prayer at the bottom of the page and work your way up as you continue to pray, stamping A’s next to the last date recorded as you get answers.
Sometimes R-pages are for specific things that you receive an answer to that you will then remove from from the Daily or a Round and place in Answers. Others will be continuing requests, like for example “strength to continue on,” that you will always pray for and receive a number of answers. When a continuing R-page fills up, simply remove it from the Daily or Round and and place it in the Answers and make a new R-page for the request.
S-page. Supplications. Prayers for other people. Sometimes it is a prayer for one person and/or a prayer for one thing for that person. It has the same format as the R-page. The prayer goes on at the top and “morphs” its way down the page to meet the dates it was prayed for moving up the page.
But sometimes it’s a list of people running down the left of the page and a list of the dates they were prayed for running down the right side of the page. This is where there is a generic supplication for those you know, such as “cause them to be conformed to the imagine of thy Son the Lord Jesus” As you learn of things that tell you the suplication is being answered for one of the people in the list, that’s when you will marked the latest date with an “A.” You can add more specifics next to to that “A” if you want do.
If the Lord puts people on your heart to pray for, He will generally provide a means for you to receive little synchronistic reports on how they are doing. But if anybody asks you to pray for them or someone they know, make sure you extract a promise from them to inform you of what has happened as a result. Remember that God wants you to thank Him concretely for answered prayer.
F-page. The general prayer at the top is, “Lord, for these that I name, I forgive them, please forgive and give grace to them.” After that prayer is the list of all the persons or events that have filled your heart with evil because of the evil they have done. You will generally add a name at a time to the top and then moving down, as the dates of the praying moves up the page.
When the list of subjects and the dates of prayer meet, move the F-page to the Answered section and begin a new F-page.
There will be parts of you that resist the idea of answers being made to these F-page prayers, but rest assured, even these perverted, counter-intuitive prayers are answered. You will know they have been answered when you are finally able to look at the name of the person on the page, and not sin in your heart and mind by hating them to death. That is when you can stop praying for them on an F-page and move on.
Q-page. This is where you can ask a question of God. It will be up to God to decide if your question should be answered. Some questions you ask will be worthwhile because the answers to them will cause practical things to be done that honor God. Other questions will not be answered if their sole purpose is for you to simply know the answer to them while no one else does. My perception is that God is not into passing on knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
“Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.” (1 Cor 8:1)
God is into passing on knowledge that causes worshipful activities to take place. As George Muller has testified, Q-pages are the premium way to conduct a Bible study.
T-pages. As discussed before, here is where you will list all the benefits God has given you so that you can remember thank Him for them. And don’t forget to thank Him for every “A” you mark down in your prayer book.
The Initial Metaprayers and Prayers
These are the initial metaprayers and prayers that you can use to start off with on this journey.
Your proper addressee for these prayers is:
"My Father Who is in Heaven,
in the name of Thy Son, the Lord Jesus Christ,
through Thy Holy Spirit within me,"
The prayer pages are:
R: “Show me what to pray for and what to stop praying for.”
R: “Sharpen my perception of You in my life. Cause me to truly see answered prayer at work.”
R: “Cause me to continue to pray.”
Q: “Is anything hindering my prayers? Please show me what it may be that I may confess to it.”
R: “Give me a strong and potent desire to read Thy word.”
F: (Construct them as you need them.)
T: (Don’t forget your thank pages!)
Initially, as you can see, you will have a very small set of prayers to start out with. So you will be able to say them more than once a day. The only “A” ‘s you will be marking down initiallly will be to the “Cause me to continue to pray” one. Everytime you pray your notebook, that will be the one that is always answered. And this is not trival, I assure you. While you are in this inital business of showing God that you are serious about receiving answers from Him, there will be a lot that will try to work against this, both within and without. Treasure those “A” ‘s to this one prayer alone! And thank God for them.
Eventually you will get an Answer.
What is it like? I can only tell you what it is like for me. For me it is like losing my car keys.
I’ve lost my car keys. They are in the house somewhere. I know I’ve put them somewhere. But I’ve searched everywhere I know to find them. And so I give up looking for them and start doing something else more useful. And then, whether it’s a few seconds later, or a few minutes later, or a few hours later, a piece of brain cloud suddenly moves away in my mind, and THERE! I SEE THEM! I see where I’ve put my keys.
For me, that’s exactly what an answer to prayer is like. I’ve been praying awhile and then suddenly a peice of brain cloud moves away in my mind and I see exactly what is I should pray for. Sometimes this happens when I’ve returned to my prayer notebook and am in the middle of praying. Sometimes it happens when I’m not praying and it’s a bolt from the blue. (This is one good reason why you should always keep a notepad on you if you have a life of prayer.) Sometimes its a morph that tells me I need to change a prayer. Sometimes it’s a new prayer page altogether. And sometimes it’s a revelation of something I need to physically do (lets not leave that out!).
But there it is, the answer to a prayer. A!!!!!!!!
Distinguishing Voices
Having put this simply to you this way, I would be remiss in not telling you that it is not that simple. When you first begin to pray, there will be voices other than Christ’s who will be happy to come prancing by the back door of your mind (or even banging on the front door) and leave you a message that is not from Christ. This is just in the nature of things from living in a fallen creation. “the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in his heart.” (Matt. 13:19)
If you are new to Christianity, as well as new to prayer, there is one tricky voice I want you to watch out for. It’s the voice of conscience.
Now why would I say a shocking thing like that? Isn’t conscience the voice we should all listen to at all cost? Well, it depends.
The genius of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is that is showed the audience of its day that our consciences are often culturally conditioned. Huckleberry Finn was a wild boy of the Mississippi mudflats whom some Sunday School types were trying to “civilize.” But they were Sunday School types of the Southern plantation society - a society of slave owners. They had semi-civlized Huck into thinking that helping an enslaved African-American to seek freedom was a “sin.” So the story starts out with Huck getting himself used to the idea that he’s going to go to hell for helping Jim the slave run away. That’s the genius of Huckleberry Finn. It’s a demostration of the weakness and fallibility of human conscience.
The scriptures say that the conscience is like a copy of the Ten Commandments, and the Law of God as a whole, in the human heart.
Rom 2:14-16
14 For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves:
15 Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;)
16 In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel.
(KJV)
The Ten Commandments, and the Law given to Moses, was not something that was not already in the human conscience to start with. But it was given to make what was implcit in the conscience explicit to the sight, for all men to see. The reason for making the conscience explicit in the law was that, as the scriptures say, a person (or a society) can start out with a good conscience (Act 23:1), but end up with an evil (Hebrews 10:22), or a seared (1 Tim. 4:2) or defiled conscience (Titus 1:15). The “moral compass” can, so to speak, be demagnitized from pointing true north. The consequence will be that when it does speak, it may speak incorrectly. This was Huckleberry Finn’s problem. His conscience was intact in deeper things, where that of the society he grew up in was not.
But the opposite problem is the weak conscience (1st Corinthians 8:7). This is the conscience of the neophyte Christian, starting to experience Christ’s indwelling by the Holy Spirit of God, but still having a conscience conditioned by the society he or she has grown up in.
In somethings, the good in the neophyte’s conscience will match the will of thrice Holy God. No problem there. But in other things, the neophyte will have no conscience about some things that are against the will of thrice holy God. And as with the conquest of Canaan by the children of Israel, there will be priorities in what must conquered first.
Some things are obvious. “Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.” (Eph 4:28). And the neophyte will have already been given the moral strength of soul to change this behavior. But there are other things that are more latent and harder to get at. “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” (1 Cor 13:11) . Growth in Christ will take care of that.
But there are also things that are not wrong at all, but only seem wrong - like freeing slaves.
It is this last class of things - things are can only be dislodged by growth, and things that only seem wrong but are not - that the neophyte has to be on his or her guard for when his or her weak conscience begins to speak. A weak conscience will at first scream at a neophyte over every little thing. In the literature of spiritual formation, this condition is called scrupulosity. The newbie Christian begins to perceive a thousand and one sins they seem to have committed.
But there a diabolical element to this as well as just the human element of conscience. Before a newbie became a Christian, Satan did everything in his power to convince him or her that he or she had not committed any sins at all and was prefectly safe and free to be brought into the presense of thrice holy God, deadly as that would have been.
But now that the newbie nas entered into Christian thngs, Satan tries to convince him or her that he or she has committed every sin there is under the sun in order to prevent him or her from having sweet fellowship with Christ in prayer.
In many cases it will be the diaobolical voice of Judas that immitates the voice of conscience, and thus betrays its origin:
John 12:1-8
1 Then Jesus six days before the passover came to Bethany, where Lazarus was which had been dead, whom he raised from the dead.
2 There they made him a supper; and Martha served: but Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with him.
3 Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.
4 Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, which should betray him,
5 Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?
6 This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein.
7 Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this.
8 For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always.
(KJV)
The thing to keep in mind when the voice of Judas mimicks the voice of conscience is this one thing of all things:
“... Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures ...”(1 Cor 15:3, KJV)
and
Rom 8:1-4
1 Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,
2 because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.
3 For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man,
4 in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.
(NIV)
Against this, the voice of conscience, weak or otherwise, or that of any other creature, must cease.
My own realization of this is why I was given a morph to one of the foundational prayers above. This is its new version:
Q: “Is anything hindering my prayers? Please show me what it may be,
by grace and not by law, that I may confess to it.”
The voice of conscience is, in the end, the voice of the law. But Christ has died for you to every consequence the law has against you. He has freed you from it so that you may serve Him by His grace that is sufficient for you, and not by any law -- your’s or another’s. As you serve Christ and are conformed into His image, your weak and overly active conscience will be brought into line with His personality, and it will begin to function properly and not hyperactively.
The Alien Voice
So what voice, then, does one listen for -- before, during and after prayer? In my experience, it is what I think of as the Alien Voice that is the most true, most of the time.
The Alien Voice is the one that comes out of left field in regard to all the things that are going on in your life. The voice of conscience, by contrast, usually occupies you a great deal with what you are already occupied with, and its purpose seems to be to keep you always occupied with it to the exclusion of all else.
The Alien Voice, on the other hand, is the one that gets you thinking about something else for a change. Something you hadn’t thought about before. Some new way of looking at what you’ve been looking at. And certainly something that is a lot more worthwhile than what you have been thinking about so far.
The other difference is that the voice of conscience is usually the first to speak, and to speak up quickly and loudly. It is in fact a reflex. Just as you have a reflex action that causes you to scream and yell whenever you stub your foot, so your conscience will scream and yell as soon as you go against it, whether it is right about what you have done or not. It is the first to pipe up when you pray.
The Alien Voice on the other hand, takes its time, and waits to speak. Sometimes it waits for hours or for days or for weeks - but it does wait. And then it speaks. Most times when you least expect it to speak. And for this reason, also, it is well for you to keep a notepad on your person, both through out the day, and near your bed when you sleep. And when it does speak, it speaks softly. So you must listen carefully.
The Alien Voice speaks and is often He who is your Shepard, ready to lead you out of the wilderness of your sin, frenzy, and perplexity, and into the sheepcoat of His love, rest and care for you. There is no better master than He.
Matt 13:52
52 Then said he unto them, Therefore every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.
(KJV)
John 10:14
14 I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine.
(KJV)
It Can Be A “Wanting To” Or Not
Those who were not chemically addicted to alcohol, but still liked getting sloshed on Friday night suddenly find that their desire for that has left them, and a new appreciation for the beauty of a quiet Saturday morning of peace and soberiety has replaced it.
Those whose only taste in music was in the sped-up speed-driven, frenzy-making kind, suddenly find that they are beginning to appreciate slower, deeper forms of music that detach them from this present evil age, and attach them to the other to come, “wherein dwelleth righteousness.”
Those whose taste in movies once consisted of “rebellion, destruction of property, and people taking their clothes off,” come to find that they are now interested in what happens to human souls.
In the end, holiness does not sterilize people. Rather, it transfers their fertility to deeper, more fullfilling things, which unfortunately may be more subtle then gross sensuality can perceive. Holy people used to drive me nuts when I was a kid because it seemed to me then like they lived on nothing but air. That turned out to be an intuition on my part, because the Greek word for “spirit” is “pneuma” - “breath.” “Air.” Holy people are the true Breathairians.
I’m reminded of what St. John of the Cross has said. He said that the further you go along in the life of prayer, the more simplified the things that feed you spiritually become. They become like the manna from heaven that the children of Israel lived on as they made their desert journey to the Promised Land. Sweet, satifying, but simple. The apex of this is when the written word of God becomes for us “the savor all things” because the Living Word of God is feeding us from it.
Sometimes an answer to prayer can be the receiving of a whole new world of things to care about and desire.
What a Non-Answer to Prayer is Like
Do I ever have prayers that are not answered? Yes, I do. When that happens, it feels like when I keep forgetting something because somebody keeps interupting my train of thought. The prayer is written down. I’m ready and willing to pray it. But between one thing and another, it doesn’t get prayed, and then the energy to pray it is gone, and then the wanting to pray it is gone. It’s even possible for the wanting and caring to go out of it before I come to the prayer a second time. What gives?
Well, someone’s free will may be involved in it. Remember, prayers are not answered in isolation, even if the one praying is in isolation. There are chains of cause and effect that take place in the spiritual realm before they are manifested in the physical realm when people start moving their bodies around. If something in the answer to the prayer is contingent on someone’s free will, then the whole prayer is contingent on that person’s free will. And God will not override a person’s free will. Prayer is not magick after all.
There was a situation once where somebody asked me to pray for a third person who was having a spiritual problem. I agreed to do that. But then after a month later, I was annoyed with myself to discover I had still not gotten around to praying for that person more than the little bit I had. Then later on I received a communication from the person who originally made the request, and she told me that she too had stopped praying for that person because she realized the problem was with the third party’s self-will. That is how it goes in prayer sometimes. God knows what is going on, even if you don’t. And He will sometimes douse a prayer you were hot on originally.
There is also the possibility is that your impulse to write a prayer down was wrong in the first place. The spiritual being who put it on the back door of your mind may not have been God after all. That can happen. But since you’ve also prayed for God to tell you when to stop praying for something, He will answer that prayer by removing your desire and interest in praying that bogus prayer.
And sometimes it is just that the answer is “not right now.” Another good reason to save your old prayers.
A Caution to the Fledgling
When you start praying concretely in this way, you have to remember that you are a fledgling learning to fly and not yet the eagle that can soar through the heavens. You have to get used to seeing little prayers answered (that you can easily tell were answered) before you can really believe your big prayers are being answered (which will be longer term and will be based on “evidence not seen.”) That is the real secret behind having faith in prayer. You have to ride a bike with training wheels before you can ride a Harley. And Christ will take you through even this.
“His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”
(Matt 25:21,KJV)
Fledgling Prayers
Your fledgling’s prayers will usually be about things you can easily check on for yourself. That’s because they will mainly concern you! I’m talking about the “help me to” ‘s that eventually get turned into “cause me to” ‘s. If you have tried to pray before, but never succeded in keeping at it, you will start to be amazed at how many times you keep marking “A!”’s on your “cause me to pray” prayer. They stack up after a while, and then you realize that enjoyment of prayer has somehow snuck up on you.
You may never have thought of yourself as being the kind of person who prays a lot, but eventually you’ll go “Enjoyment of prayer? Who’da thought?” And that will be because at a deeper level, Christ - by the Holy Spirit of God within you - will have paid you His quiet visits in your heart. “The desire of all nations” (Hag 2:7) will have secretly become your desire.
Prayer Tactics As Aids to Sanctification
After you get used to praying against yourself (your old self, that is), you may start to get smarter (or it’s Christ who is making you smarter) about prayer. You may begin to discover that it is prayer that is the lever that can move the world (or least your world, anyway).
As I noted earlier, you will get smart about praying at the roots of things instead of their fruits. From here on out, whenever you say “I can’t because ...” -- you will catch yourself and realize that you can pray about the “because” and all the “becauses” that are under them until you get to the root of the thing and turn it into a fruit.
I’ll give you a personal example. As Christ started moving me through my process of santification (which is still on-going and has many as many setbacks as successes), I kept getting hung up on the boredom issue. I knew that a lot of the entertainments I used to satisfy my craving for excitement were not very worthwhile things (to say the least!), and that they were taking up too much of my time.
Then it drawned on me to ask God about that craving. Here’s an early prayer from 4/10/96 to 5/6/96:
R: “Lead me to find true enjoyments. Lead me to find Christian occupations and weapons against boredom. “
There were six prayers. And five answers!
Here’s one from 11/25/95 to 4/8/96:
R: “Lead me to find true play (later morphed to “enjoyment”).”
46 repetitions. 27 answers! I don’t care what anybody says. If you’ve got something that works half time the time, you’ve got something!
Here is a key morph that took place from 5/25/96 to 10/7/97:
R: “Grant me something from Thy great storehouse of good, O God. Grant me some of the happiness Thou hast in Thyself, O God. Grant me even Thyself, O God. Thou art the Master of Happiness.”
47 repetitions. 33 answers!
I haven’t looked at this old prayer book in a while, and I’m sitting here, on April 22nd, 2005, at 1:34 am writing this, and I’ve suddenly realized that THIS prayer is what caused me to write Twenty Seven Metaphors to a Grasp of Happiness from around December 2002 to June 2003!
“Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.” So be it!
And the lesson here is -- never throw away an old prayer! You’ll never realize just how far the Lord went past what you prayed for!
Some Other Prayer Tactics
Some of you reading this may be young people (or even not-so-young people) who have become addicted to giving your heart to certain celebrities like super models or rock stars or movie stars. You may even be addicted to their music if they make any. This is either hero worship (if they are the same sex as you), or sexual obsession (if they are of the opposite sex).
Now believe it or not, I am not going to deplore this. I am not going to deplore this because it is a kind of love. And God is love, and understands more about love then you and I will ever know. The only problem with having these kinds of loves is that there may be more worthy objects of love out there for you, who are more worth your love than you realize, and would do you better to love than these media-created shells that just reflect aspects of yourself back at you. You do not know who these more worthy objects of love are because they are not media icons and the media is therefore preventing you from finding them because it is serving up these shells for you instead.
But your heart is captured by them right now, right? Here is how you get free: Pray to God that He will witness, by His Holy Spirit, to your celebrity’s spirit, about His only-begotten Son, Christ our Lord, that he or she might have eternal life.
If you are sucessful in your suit, then you will have reaped all joy in the object of your affections from The Object of your affections. This is unspeakable happiness.
But because of this possiblity, something else may happen instead. Satan may find that one of his best tools for sapping the affections of millions from their true Source is now coming under the influence of his Enemy. I’m pretty sure that the evil one will not risk something like that if he can prevent it, especially since his time is now so short. So the evil one will likely cut the link he’s forged between your heart and this celebrity. You will then begin to see your celebrity as the empty husk he or she really is, and you will them be free to send you heart out to a more worthly object. Now this is spiritual warfare worthly of the name!
Here is another prayer I have received that’s directed at sanctification. It is based on a quote from A.W. Tozer, which I cannot now find.
R: “Re-string the harp that is within my heart; that I may enjoy the pleasures that Thou givest, O God. Help me to find these pleasure in the place where Thou providest them. Change me over to the tastes and delights that They Holy Spirit with in me has. Let me please Him. Fill me with these pleasures of Thine so that there is no room for any other.”
The thing about this prayer is that it took awhile before it gained traction. It took about 42 repetitions before I started to get some answers to it from time to time.
Here is another. It is based on two verses in the Bible, which are crucial things to understand if you are going to go on with the Lord.
R: “Lord God, help me to avoid being the kind of servant who thinks Thou art a hard one who reaps where he does not sow. Remind me that Thou art altogether NOT one such as myself. Give me the courage to invest the talents Thou hast given me. Give me the courage to be productive. Cause me to truely see Thee through the eyes of Thy Holy Spirit within me.”
There were around 60 repetitions before I got some on and off again answers that satisfied me. But I did get one answer six repetitions into it that encouraged me.
Stretching Your Wings
Eventually, you’ll get used to marking those “A” ‘s down. It will be good to continue to thank God for them, but there will come a time when you realize you won’t need them as much to support your faith in prayer. Faith in prayer will become the air you breath, as will prayer itself to some degree.
It is then you will begin to be able to pray some pretty Quixotic, “tilting at windmills” type prayers. Prayers that would before have been “airy-fairy” prayers can now be taken on with some confidence of seeing some kind of an answer at some point - even if only by way of a synchronistic “wink” from Christ. I’ve already mentioned my prayer for good government earlier. That’s one example. But I have another one, which has another lesson in it. After a number of morphs, this is what the prayer became:
R: I beg that false ideas about Thee
in the minds of men everywhere
be replaced with true ideas about Thee
in the minds of men everywhere,
that they may know Thee,
True God,
and Jesus Christ,
whom Thou hast sent,
that they might have eternal life,
and that Thou mayest have more worshippers.
I beg for there to be servants of Thine
to accomplish this purpose
And that Thy servants already employed in this purpose
maybe upheld in what they do in Thy will
And that Thy assemblies everwhere be prepared and made ready
to receives these new lambs unto Thee, O God.
So be it!
It wasn’t until sometime after this prayer started morphing its way into existence that I realized the importance of it. With the current revival of Gnosticism in the popularity of such books as The Da Vinci Code and their ilk, I’m seeing that there is a mighty wave of misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies about Christ’s person being spread amongst men. Today’s Christian, as at no other time in history, truly stands against a thousand liars.
This little prayer really does tilt at a windmill - or a least a windbag. But the interesting thing is that I’ve now found myself sucked into being part of the process of it being answered. I’m in the blogosphere putting out works like Twenty Seven Metaphors to a Grasp of Happiness, and now Concrete Christian Prayer. A!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’d like to say “Be careful what you pray for, you may end up being part of how it is answered.” But I can’t say that about concrete prayer. Christ picks the prayers. And you just pray them. And go along for the ride, come what may.
When You Should NOT Be Marking Down Answers
There are some prayers that you will receive that you should NOT be marking down answers to because if you do, you will defeat the whole purpose of the prayer. These will usually be border-line airy-fairy character-type prayers for which you will not only have to rely on “evidence not seen,” but you should really really hope you do NOT see any evidence of it at all. I’ll embarress myself now by showing you such a prayer of mine, just so that you can see what I am talking about. (Some of it is built on a quote I heard from a mystic I read, but I cannot now recall who it was.):
R: “Cause me to stay clear of pride, spiritual and physical. All I have comes from Thee, O God, and those Thou hast used. Cause me to embrace humility and lowliness with all my heart and love Thee for it. Cause me to take humiliation as the thing necessary to humility. Let other lips praise me, and not my own. [recently added morph: ] Yea, let other lips praise not me but Thee, O God.”
You see?
Praying Machine
After you have been at this awhile, you will have accumulated a goodly number of prayers.
A brand new prayer should probably go into your “Daily” to start with so that you can get some frequency on it to -- well I guess I can say “build up a head of steam,” though that would make things sound a little mechanical. If the new prayer is in the nature of a continuing request, and not something for which a single answer will terminate the request, you will likely move it to one of your “Rounds” where it will get less frequency in comparision to how frequently you pray your other prayers
As I have said, I now have around one hundred or so pray pages, distributed amongst my “Daily” and from “Round 1” to “Round 7.” You will now likely ask me, “Doesn’t that take up a lot of your time?” And I will reply “ It sure does.” For awhile there was a period of time where it took me about an hour and forty-five minutes to get though my prayer notebook.
If that seems extreme to you, you should try to remember that main thing about praying is less the praying itself than in having come from prayer.
Have you ever worked in a work place that had, either an exceptionially nasty person or an exceptionally nice person working in it? If you have, then I’m sure you’ll have recognized the following phenomenon: After working in such work place for a while, you begin to be able to tell who has just been in close proximity with that exceptional person. People will have come away from being with that exceptional person being either nasty themselves (if the exceptional person is exceptionally nasty) or nice themselves (if the exceptional person is exceptionally nice).
That is analogous to what happens in prayer. In prayer you go to spend time talking to an unseen, but very present Person, Who is at the apex of exceptionality. It is a crime to short change yourself the amount of time you spend with that Person, because when you leave His presence, you breathe a different air for a little while, and live a different life for a little while. The more you short change your time with that Person, the more you are short changing yourself of that air and that life. If you short change it enough, He’ll get the message and stop coming by. And tears will result. And this is what the difference is between real prayer and fake prayer: That you can tell the difference.
So, if you get up to your eyeballs in prayers, good for you! And add this next one to them:
R: “Cause me to have the strength to complete my prayers.”
Remember that you can pray about your praying! You can pray about anything that effects your prayer life, or anything else. Pray at the roots to get at the fruits.
Answer Patterns
As I look over my prayers, I do see patterns to the answers.
Sometimes there is a series of repetitions (short or long) and then a answer. A very simple pattern.
Sometimes there are a series of half-answers I see before the final answer is given. A little bit of a tease pattern.
Sometimes there is a buildup of a number of reptitions on a number of pages, and then suddenly something happens that is an obvious answer to multiple pages. God apparently likes to be efficient. And those are glorious prayer sessions. Marking down all those A’s, page by page is quite thrilling.
But then there are instances of some repetitions which go on for awhile, and then out of the blue, the interest is lost or the prayer just doesn’t seem as hot as it used to. God has said “no” or “no yet” in a nice way.
Sometimes the answers involve changes to my inner world, such as getting a word from the scriptures, getting a word from a non-scripture, getting a word from a wise person, or even getting a word from a media item (movies, DVD’s,internet etc.) The sychronicity of getting a word at the exact same time I need a word is what convinces me that it is a word. That, and the fact that the word does not contradict what I know is in the Bible.
Sometimes the answers involve my outer world. There are people God wants me to meet so that either I can add something to their lives, or they can add something to mine, or both. The term “six degrees of separation” comes to mind. That phrase asserts that every person in the world is only six aquaintences away from every other person in the world. The old tune about the abdication of Edward the VIII a pretty good example of this doctine: “I danced with a man who danced with a woman, who danced with the Prince of Wales...”
This is of course another example of the concept of synchronicity. Some of it is of God, and some of it is of the Devil, and some of it is neutral. The apostle Paul meeting Lydia the seller of purple in Thyatira was the work of God. Bonnie finally meeting Clyde was the Devil’s work. Your meeting the former orthodondist of the personal secretary of your favorite movie celebrity is completely neutral (and meaningless).
More than likely, your praying will see you having more synchronicities of God’s kind then of the Devil’s. .
Supplications Can Be Tricky
Here is where you are going to have your greatest challenges to believing in answered prayer.
I have found that answered prayer for both my internal life and for my physical needs is fairly common. I have found that general outward prayers (of the “good government” kind) have been answered by little winks of synchroniscity, from time to time, that assure me that something is happening instead of nothing. I have even found it to be the case that praying for a group of people yields those synchronistic winks as well.
But what has challenged me the most has always been specific individuals. There is a quirkyness to individuals that can be both joyous and dismaying. And sometimes at the same time. There is the newcomer we’ve been discipling for months who suddenly abandons Christianity for a California religion. There is the hard boiled atheist who’s been hammering on us for months, and who now wants us to pray for him or her, even though he or she is still adamant about not believing in God. There is the teacher we’ve been idolizing for so long who suddenly takes a fifty foot pratfall. There just seems to be a sort of spiritual Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle when it comes to supplications for individuals as individuals.
The thing that we have to keep in mind in regard to individuals that we pray for is that Christ Himself has these problems with individuals all the time. It is the same problem that He had with us when we first came to him:
Ps 32:8-9
8 I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye.
9 Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they come near unto thee.
(KJV)
When we first came to Christ, we were bucking broncos He had to break. And break us, He did. But there are still times when something can spook us and cause us to buck Him off our backs and head for the low chaparral.
If these are things that He deals with, then they will be things that we will deal with. We’ll just have to get used to them and look for our faith to those things were are more stable.
Heb 13:8
8 Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.
(KJV)
Your Mileage May Vary
I have tried to keep this book, and this particular chapter, as flexiable and general as possible. I have tried to avoid giving you a set of prayers and saying “here, pray that,” though in fact it looks like I have done just that.
What I have been trying to do is not so much leave you with a “cookbook” of prayers, as show you that you can have a dynamic (though unseen) relationship with the Father, in the name of the Son, through Holy Spirit, and that this dynamic relationship is expressed and carried on in a dynamic ever changing, interlocking set of prayers. But I cannnot show you this without showing you some prayers and saying “here are some prayers I was given and this is now they worked to together, and here is some of how things worked out in practice.”
So let me clarify one thing. Once you take this embryo of a relationship with God into your own hands, its going to become your own responsibility. I will be any Christian’s brother in faith towards Christ. But I will be no man’s teacher, father, master, or guru, as long as he has Christ within him by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God. I have no intention of founding a school of prayer. The the only thing any Christian should expect from what I have written here is that their relationship with Christ will be different from my relationship with Christ:
John 21:20-22
20 Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them. (This was the one who had leaned back against Jesus at the supper and had said, "Lord, who is going to betray you?")
21 When Peter saw him, he asked, "Lord, what about him?"
22 Jesus answered, "If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me."
(NIV)
All I have done here is give you a starting point to move forward from. In fact, given my limitations, I expect greater things from you all than I do of myself. Go to it!
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