The Prayer of the Heart

In my continuing amazement with this little book "The Way of the Heart," I thought I would take some time this week and journal on the place of prayer in the place of interior devoition. Prayer is the key to a deeper relationship with the Lord, but often it's left for only a select few to "do." But in this hour God is raising up wise virgins in the body of Christ who are storing up oil for their Bridegroom's return (Matthew 25:1-13). Prayer is one of the means that we use to cultivate our intimacy with the coming Bridegroom.

Nouwen spends the third section of his book, after discussing the necessity of solitude and silence, turning to prayer. One of the major distinctions that Nouwen makes is that there are two types of prayer. One type of prayer is the prayer of the mind. The prayer of the mind is where we pray with our intellect. Praying from our intellect has a negative outcome in our lives. We begin to think of prayer as an intellectual chore that we must do daily. And because it becomes an intellectual chore we cherish it as much as we do figuring out our checkbook or reading a college text book. We walk away from having done it without an exchange occuring between us and Heaven. Because the prayer of the mind is a function of the intellect, we often walk away bored with God. We remain unfascinated by God and the result is a thousand other things capture our attention.

But for Nouwen (and for me) the answer to regaining a prayer life begins when we discover the prayer of the heart. The desert fathers (who are the subject of "The Way of the Heart," you really gotta read this book!) believed that there was a place in prayer where you connected with the Spirit of God in a way that gave you rest.

Most of us believe that this pursuit of more of the Spirit of God is an external journey. What I mean is that to gain more in the Lord we must receive the Spirit of God coming out of Heaven and resting on us. But the Bible speaks frequently about "Christ within" which is our hope of Glory (Colossians 1:27, 1 Peter 1:11). The pursuit for more of Jesus is an internal journey to lay hold of Christ within. This was the conviction of the Apostle Paul (cf. Ephesians 3:14-20), the desert Fathers, and virtually every devotional master in the centuries since.

It is the search for Christ within that the prayer of the heart is concerned with. Nouwen writes, "By its very nature such prayer transforms our whole being into Christ precisely because it opens the eyes of our soul to the truth of ourselves as well as to the truth of God. In our heart we come to see ourselves as sinners embraced by the mercy of God...It unmasks the many illusions about ourselves and about God and leads us into the true relationship of the sinner to the merciful God. This truth is what gives us the rest of [the prayer of the heart]."

The practice of this prayer of the heart is simple and requires little mental gymnastics. The Desert Fathers discourage us from using too many words. John Climacus says, "Wordiness in prayer often subjects the mind to fantasy and dissipation; single words of their very nature tend to concentrate the mind. When you find satisfaction or compunction in a certain word of your prayer, stop at that point." As Nouwen says, "The quiet repitition of a single word can help us descend with the mind into the heart...this way of simple prayer, when we are faithful to practice it at regular times, slowly leads us to an experience of rest and opens us to God's active presence."

I discovered the way into this method of prayer by accident. I wasn't trying to look for a way of prayer, I was just trying to seek God with a group spending time in corporate interecession. While the worship was going, I began to pray in tongues and ask Jesus to visit us with short, one or two word prayers. And as I continued doing this, I begin to sense the presence of God rise in my soul. He was visiting me. What excited me was that this works anywhere! I can pray like this at work or while I'm shopping, and as I do the Spirit of God comes and meets me.

While this method of prayer is simple, it does require time. Twenty or thirty minutes will work. Spend time praying in the Spirit first, focusing on Jesus. Most find it helpful to pray actual words, and I would suggest using words in Scripture. "The Lord is my Shepherd," from Psalm 23 is a great start, but whatever scripture is relevant to your spiritual condition will work. As you do, pay attention to what the Spirit is doing inside of you. Eventually you'll notice the Lord leading you in various ways. Visions, dreams, and the prophetic will become more common place in your life. Fascination with God will increase and the pleasures and toys of this world gain less and less of a hold on you.

The thing I'm most excited about as I've been learning this discipline of prayer is that I'm becoming a lover of the presence of God. Instead of having to spend time in prayer, I'm finding myself spontaneously entering into the presence of God throughout the rest of the day. My hunger and thirst for the presence of God is returning, and my soul really is beginning to enter into the rest.

But this journey isn't just for me, its for everyone. We're all called to live fascinated and alive in God. Make it your goal, even this week, to steal away and spend time with the Father, just as Jesus did. Don't let the business of the season steal your heart away from the purposes of eternity. And believe this is for you. As you sit before Him, your heart will be changed.

Silence And The Future World

So I had other plans for a blog this week, but I found myself reading "The Way of the Heart" by Henry Nouwen again and it was too incredibly meaningful not to journal about. I have to commend this book to you. The whole book is a masterful description of disciplines that transform us into the image of Christ at the end of the age. But this time around, I noticed two segments of the book that really grabbed me. I'll write a little about the first today and maybe I'll write about the second next week.

The desert fathers (the subject of "The Way of the Heart") found themselves in a transitional period of history where the meaning of being a witness for Christ dramatically changed. The church went from a three century period of persecution into a period of time where the whole Roman Empire was flooding the ranks of the "Christendom." As Nouwen comments, "If the world was no longer the enemy of the Christian, then the Christian had to become the enemy of the dark world." Many practiced this by fleeing to the desert. These men discovered a new martyrdom by offering themselves as living sacrifices to God (Romans 12). Nouwen sums up the content of the desert father's lives by the story of Abba Arsenius. He was well educated and entrenched in the court of Emperor Theodosius. He asked the Lord how to enter into sanctification, and the Lord spoke to him, "Arsenius, flee, be silent, pray always, fore these are the sources of sinlessness." These three disciplines (solitude, silence, and prayer) become the central focus of Nouwen's book. Today I want to write about silence, because it seems of its importance and relevance to Christianity at the end of the age..

First, I have to say one more thing about the book as a whole. It becomes progressively more difficult to understand because each chapter is deeper than the last. To understand the chapter on silence, you have to really be able to relate to the first chapter on solitude. And to relate to the chapter on prayer, you must be able to truly understand silence. I realized this after reading my wife's copy. My wife is notorious for writing in the margins of books that are hers, and she puts question marks by things she doesn't understand. As we've loaned the book out to others, we've found, especially with this book, that they totally agree with all of her question marks in the margin. And its in the section on silence that I found the most question marks. One of the most frequent questions was next to statements that assert a connection between silence and the future world. According to Nouwen, the Desert Fathers believed, "that if a word is to bear fruit, it must be spoken from the future world into the present world. The Desert Fathers therefore considered their going into the silence of the desert to be a first step into the future world." Its this disicipline of silence that brings us into the presence of the future that I want to write about.

The reality that silence brings us into the presence of the future shouldn't surprise us. It's what we're called to. Jesus Himself speaks of "this age and the age to come," (Matthew 12:32). This age is the world we currently live in and the age to come is the Kingdom of God that will be fully realized at the return of Jesus. Hebrews 6, in describing some who fall away, mentions they "have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come." There is a power of an age to come that is avaible for us to taste and experience right now. It is the power of the Kingdom of God, the power of another age that will descend upon us at the end of this one, and the future the Nouwen is calling us into. As we fellowship with God in silence, we come under His Lordship, He becomes the Center, and the power of God that we sometimes relegate only to Heaven or the Second Coming begins to work in us now.

How does this work? Silence strips away all distractions. Silence makes us come to grip with the internal noise in our souls. As we gain victory over all these internal noises, a still, small voice emerges that engages us with the conversation of another, heavenly realm. The subtle whispers of heaven (that will be amplified dramatically at the end of the age) begin to be heard. There is no mystical power in the silence. It's that we're finally undistracted enough to enter into true communion and the power of an indestructible life becomes ours.

And as crazy as it sounds, silence affects the way we speak. Silence creates a boundary space for us to receive the love of God. It's in receiving this love that the words we speak become powerful. The words become more than clanging symbols (1 Corinthians 13:1). They go from well intentioned words of encouragement which are helpful but so often feel shallow to prophetic words crafted by hearing clearly from Jesus. One of the prophetic ministries I became familiar with in Kansas City continually teaches silence as the path to revelation from God. When our silence is filled with the presence of God, we emerge from that silence with words freighted with power from Heaven. We become friends of God in silence and the secrets we utter when we emerge betray that friendship to the world.

To be real practical, this only happens in a significant degree when we are deliberate about it. We can only enter into silence if we take it out of the realm of theory and into the realm of our schedules. We must make time for it. We have to be willing to take an hour, a few hours, or even a day or two where we can sit before the Lord without interuption, without the sounds that so stroke our souls, and without our voice which creates so many distractions. Actually getting time in silence really is the biggest fight.

Once we get there, we must learn the companion discipline of communing prayer. I may talk a little bit about that next week. But the real issue is to believe that this is for us. This isn't a discipline for spiritual giants, it's a source for all true believers. It will free us from the shallowness of this world and begin building in us the qualities of a Kingdom that is coming. And that's what we're called to be: heralds of another age that is already breaking in on this age now.

The Re-Launch of a Previously Misdirected Blogsite

I was part of a ministry at one point in my life where the apostolic leader launched a church planting initiative in his city. I found out about six months into those church plants that the apostolic leader had allowed every senior leader in each of those churches one transitional period where they were able to “fire” the entire staff. The lead pastor would then “rehire” those on the staff that fit with the direction the church was going and fill in the gaps left by those who weren’t rehired. A little dramatic? Pehaps. But the wisdom behind this leader’s thought process is that everyone needs one fresh start. We all make mistakes, especially early in the game. So now I’m going to tell you about mine.

I began this blog to be a journal and sounding board for those of us who believe that God desires to change the understanding and expression of Christianity in the Earth. The very first thing I posted was “Wolfgang Simpson’s 15 Theses,” which is this amazing article about the shape that I believe the church is going to look like before this whole thing is over. But then I took a step back and looked at the article. It’s revolutionary. It’s brilliant. I’ll probably post it again some time. The only problem is it was pointing my heart into a different direction. It talks much of the church and the change that is coming, but it speaks little of a vibrant relationship between Christ and His people. It didn’t direct my heart into the love of God.

And as I reflected about my situation, I realized that I found myself in a place similar to much of the body of Christ. We’re constantly focused on what’s next. Our message is the change that’s coming to the structure of the church or how to prophesy or more effective ways to reach lost people. The preaching and teaching and writings in the land have everything to do with the church and have little to do with Jesus. We have an obsession of what we look like, who we are, and how we do things. In the end, it’s clouded our vision of Jesus.

We have to come to an understanding that everything is about Christ. The Apostle Paul had this as his aim. He says in Galatians 1, “But…it pleased God…to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach Him…” (Galatians 1:15-16). It was the pleasure of God to reveal Jesus to Paul, not so that Paul could teach about the five-fold ministry or inner healing or cross-cultural missions. It was the pleasure of God to reveal Jesus to Paul so that Paul might preach Jesus. God desired a vessel to declare the excellencies of Christ. “ To me, the very least of all saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ,” (Ephesians 3:8). Christ and Christ alone consumed Paul. I’m convinced Paul saw his life as a relationship with Jesus that happened to be apostolic in nature.

A great example of this was Sadhu Sundar Singh. He was born in India and accepted Christ at the age of 15. He lived out his love for the Lord by leaving everything he owned, walking through India meditating on Christ, and preaching to anyone who would listen. His ministry had an enormous impact on India and eventually lead to him preaching abroad in Europe. His message wasn’t how to do what he did or a new secret to powerful ministry, but “the universal human need to seek God, and on God's revelation in Christ. The one thing necessary for those in both East and West was to sit in silence at the feet of the Divine Master, who was equally hidden and equally accessible to all,” (“Wanderer For Christ” by Timothy Dobe, Christian History, Issue 87, Summer 2005, Vol. XXIV, No. 3, Page 37.).

My goal in saying all of this about us is that for me, it’s time to repent. Not only is it time to re-launch the blog site a little differently, but its time to live life differently. I want to start living with Christ as the center and the reason for who I am. Not my ministry, not my brand of Christianity, not my talents, just Christ.

I don’t know what it’s going to look like at all but I want to invite you along in the journey. A leader I greatly respect has repeatedly said that, “it takes God to love God,” and I think the first step we have to take is to find our way into His presence, waiting on Him, knowing Him. Christ had to be revealed to Paul before He could be revealed through Paul. The same will be true for us. Let's begin to spend real time meditating on Him, not for meditations sake, but to truly know Him. Let’s seek to know this God-Man and make Him the center of finances, our emotions, our words, and our lives. When this really happens, I believe that true apostolic Christianity will emerge on the Earth, and the result will be like nothing ever seen on the face of the planet.