Re-Thinking Prayer

When I began my Christian walk, I was (and still am) blessed to be a part of a church where prayer was (and still is) highly valued. Any minister at our church can attest to the role that prayer plays in our functioning as a church body. When the church has a decision to make, a challenge to face, or a paradigm shift to grow through, the church, and especially the leadership, will pray earnestly. The church prays, fasts, waits, and listens to the voice of the Holy Spirit in every major decision, and often the minor ones. It was in this environment that I learned to interact with God personally, and through discipleship as well as personal experience came to know the “friend we have in Jesus” in a way I didn’t know was possible for the “No Name Brand” believer.

What I was not prepared for, however, was the roller coaster effect prayer had on my life. I would enjoy a season of experiencing dramatic, immediate answers to prayer, full of spiritual highs, followed by seasons of apparent spiritual drought, with its accompanying feelings of disappointment and spiritual inadequacy. During the seasons where I saw God moving visibly, I felt unstoppable, and my faith rose on the swell of answered prayer and personal testimonies of God’s work. When my prayer life seemed dry, however, I would turn back into the “pre-encounter” Gideon, minding my own business and hoping the enemy would leave me alone.

Seasons of fervent prayer turned into seasons of faithless introspection as I tried to figure out where I had gone wrong. My alone time routinely became a time of self-diagnosis and navel-gazing, trying to get my engine to turn over so I could pretend my way through another work day. Conversational relationship with God became one sided as the desert swallowed up the oasis that had previously been my prayer life.

I want to share what I have learned through this, but I want to be completely clear: I am not claiming in any way to have easy ongoing success. What I am sharing are truths that have consistently set my prayer life straight in the midst of a “dry season.” These are the truths that I go back to and renew my mind with when I notice my mindset reverting to a faith-less perspective towards God and towards prayer. As I have practiced living in the continual recognition of these truths, my experience of God has become more consistent, and my belief in God’s faithfulness has become more resolute.

I have become convinced that the desert experience is not the will of God for the believer’s interaction with Him. In John 4, Jesus makes a comparison between wells and rivers. The woman at the well is interested in knowing if Jesus will endorse her “well” of choice, the Samaritan high place of Mount Gerazim, or if Jesus will insist on the Jewish “well” of spiritual experience, Mount Zion. This analogy can be applied just as easily today: unbelievers and believers alike have “wells” that they frequent when they experience spiritual or emotional fatigue. Some wells do, in fact, offer living water, and some offer imitations of different qualities. It seems that Jesus, however, has something completely different in mind. “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water I give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:14) Jesus undoubtedly has the same picture in mind in John 7:37-38: “On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’”” This talk of rivers is a far cry from the well-language used by the woman at the well. Jesus seems to be promising an experience that is a little more sustained and intense than can be contained in a half hour quiet time.

So what is the condition to experience this kind of personal revival? What pre requisites does Jesus set for us to “experience more of God?”  Jesus makes it clear that our continual, conscious saturation with the Holy Spirit comes to us by the exact same means of our salvation: by grace, through faith. “”Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’” Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive…” (John 7:38-39)

Paul explains the same thing to the Galatians: “Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?” (Galatians 3:2) “Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?” (Galatians 3:5) We consciously experience God’s presence to the degree that we recognize He is in us! While God does choose to manifest Himself to us in special ways at different times, we are freed from a dependence on those “rainfalls” for our spiritual growth: God has put a river inside of every believer. To stay full of the presence of God, we don’t need to strive for more of God. Instead, we need to simply believe the specific promise of God that there is no more of God to have than God has already put inside of each of us. As we begin to believe this promise, our perception of lack will begin to fade as we experience the reality of the Holy Spirit’s presence in us.

As we understand this reality, our language towards God will begin to shift. Instead of praying from a perception of lack, we will begin to speak the language of gratitude, recognizing our endowment with every spiritual blessing in Christ. (Ephesians 1:3) Insecurity in God’s presence will be replaced by knowledge of our worth and acceptance in the Beloved as children of God. (1 John 3:1) A conscience stained by the past will be cleansed with the confidence of knowing Christ’s righteousness. (2 Cor 5:21) A plea for personal transformation will turn into praise because of the recognition that if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. (2 Corinthians 5:17) Instead of our spiritual disciplines, our exclusive boast will be in the cross of Christ, and instead of promoting self help products and seminars, we will become walking testimonies to the power of the message of Christ and Him crucified.

Prayer, at its heart, is our personal experience of the Gospel, day by day, moment by moment. It is a learning process. In prayer, we are learning to relate to God not on the basis of either our shortcomings or our successes, but on the success of the cross in securing God’s very real presence in us.  (Colossians 1:27) In learning prayer, we learn how to relate to every other area of our lives through a Gospel lens, and begin to live as the living epistles who God has made us to be.

If you are in a dry season and praying for spiritual rain, it is my prayer for you that you would discover (or re-discover) the river that God has already put inside you, and that you would learn to drink from the river whether the rain comes or not. As we collectively discover this river of life, a dramatic difference will emerge between the spiritually and the naturally minded people. As wells dry up, and as there is more and more time between rainfalls, there will be an increasing necessity and demand for spiritual life that is independent on any external source, and our rivers will become dramatic evidence of God’s presence in our lives.