I tend toward the melancholy. It is easy for me to be drawn inward, caught up with everything going on in my heart. As I look back on my prayer life, it would sometimes look like this – I would take my cue from how I felt right as I woke up. Most of the time I felt fearful about something or maybe distant from God or perhaps just under some kind of cloud. I would then go to God and focus exclusively on these feelings. It left me wallowing around in what Bunyan’s pilgrim experienced – the slough of despond. One of the biggest breakthroughs in prayer came when I learned to start praying with a focus on God and his character. I learned how to confront the melancholy and preach to myself as Asaph does in Psalm 42 – “Why are you in despair O my soul? And why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God! For I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.”
I read a lot, for my own pleasure and because I’m a seminary student. I usually have half a dozen books going at the same time. I don’t have time to reread things unless they are really profound. I’m just about to finish rereading one book that I read only about six months ago. It’s called Where Prayer Becomes Real by Kyle Strobel and John Coe. I’ve read many books on prayer but this one has impacted me more than most. The premise of the whole book is this –
Prayer is not a place to perform, but a place to be honest.
If there is another dominant aspect to my personality, it’s definitely a kind of Type A performance. I want to be good at everything. This book has revealed how much that has dominated my prayer life. How often do you do this in prayer – you start praising God or praying for someone and a distracted or maybe sinful thought comes up out of nowhere. What do you do? Do you ignore the thought? Do you turn aside from God for a moment and quietly beat yourself up because of the distraction or indiscretion? The authors’ counsel is to see these thoughts as a path to deeper intimacy and honesty with God. These thoughts are a barometer of your heart, indicator lights on the dashboard so to speak. You need to bring these thoughts to God and enter into honest conversation with him about the condition of your heart. He already knows. And he is already praying for you through the Spirit’s wordless groaning.
The powerful lesson of preaching to myself has matured my prayer life in many ways. But I’m seeing now that this can, if I’m not watchful, be used as a way to avoid the kind of heart searching and soul baring candor that God desires. In prayer I might encounter awkward feelings, irrational fears, or sinful lust, and instead of sitting with these things and looking at them with God in prayer, I may instead respond too quickly, trying to beat those feelings and temptations back before honest examination takes place.
As the authors explain, prayer is the training ground for learning how to put on Christ. In prayer we remind ourselves of the truth of who we are in Christ, converse with God about how our heart is responding to that truth, and then allow ourselves to be transformed by the Spirit so we can walk in that truth a little more deeply. I think this requires us to use both approaches that I’ve described in this post – preaching the truth to ourselves, and being honest with God in prayer. These are two sides of the same coin. We need both of them to enter into the kind of communion that Jesus calls abiding in the Father’s love.
Women Studying the Word 