The Transforming Power of Prayer

The Transforming Power of Prayer
Deepening Your Friendship with God
by James Houston
published by NavPress, Colorado Springs, Colorado 1996

For many years, prayer was probably the weakest dimension in my life as a Christian.
After years of feeling useless and guilty, I began to realize the truth of a comment made by one of the early Fathers of the church, Clement of Alexandria. He said that "prayer is keeping company with God." This began to give me a new focus on prayer. I began to see prayer more as a friendship than a rigorous discipline. It started to become more of a relationship and less of a performance.

At the same time I learned another important truth: that God calls us to use our Achilles heel, where we limp most, to lead us through our natural weakness or woundedness of personality, to grow spiritually strong. After this discovery, I made up my mind that the desire to pray and keep company with God would become my primary concern in life. Prayer would come even before my public ministry.

Today, when there is so much talk about spirituality and meditation, it becomes increasingly important to know what we mean by Christian prayer, as distinct from prayer that is inspired by other religious traditions. ...Christian prayer is prayer to the Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit.

But prayer is guided by right living as well as by right thinking. True prayer means behaving in a way that is worthy of God's company.

When we pray, we allow God to live within us, so that at the deepest level it is God's Spirit who does the praying in us and through us. Archbishop Fenelon, a seventeenth-century French churchman, expressed it in this way: "Teach me to pray; pray thyself in me." If we experience prayer in this way on a regular basis, it will obviously transform our whole lives.

We are changed by prayer much more than we ever realize, Soren Kierkegaard put it like this: "Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays." We do not pray to inform God, as if he was ignorant of events and of what we are thinking and feeling. Instead, we pray "your will be done" so that in our companionship with, as prayerful people, we really do begin to become radically different. Our whole being begins to be shaped by the life and spirit of prayer.

...a lack of prayer is such a characteristic of today's world that many different approaches to prayer are needed.

To live without prayer is ultimately to disbelieve in God and to lose the most important human values, such as faith, hope and love. Living without prayer is the result of going to bed with all the attitudes of a modern secular society.

...as C. S. Lewis put it in The Great Divorce, God either says to us, "Thy will be done," in damnation and loss, or else we say to God, "Thy will be done." Prayer is ultimately a battle of the will. The battle makes us choose what in the end we really want.

In all the areas of our life, prayer is the one where we can least afford to be complacent. We may spend regular times in jogging, exercising, and dieting for the sake of our bodies, but refuse to make time for prayer for the sake of our souls. We dedicate enormous effort toward developing our professional skills through expensive education, yet our time and our communion with God has become a lost art and a rejected relationship.

The Desert Fathers (a protest movement against worldliness in the early church) spoke of busyness as "moral laziness." Busyness can also be an addictive drug, which is why its victims are increasingly referred to as "workaholics." busyness acts to repress our inner fears and personal anxieties, as we scramble to achieve an enviable image to display to others. We become "outward" people, obsessed with how we appear, rather than "inward" people, reflecting on the meaning of our lives.

Prayer is not real unless it comes from the heart. "The heart" is a phrase that is strongly emphasized in the Bible. It is a picture of the heart of human personality, the place where all our attitudes, drive and motivation come from. The heart is the core of our being. Prayer starts with the heart, because God longs to relate to us at every level of our being. This includes our feelings, our mind, our imagination, our love, our memory, our will. God seeks to know us intimately for all that we are. This is why prayer focuses on the very core of our being, inside the heart. John Chrysostom, the great preacher in the fourth-century church, said:

Find the door of your heart, and you will discover that it is the door of the Kingdom of God.

Many people have the impression that prayer is simply another thing we do, alongside all the other activities we pack into our lives. This way of thinking, which sees prayer as an interest or a duty, may prompt us to read about prayer in exactly the same way that we learn from "how-to" books about cross-country skiing or stamp collecting.

We can start to pursue prayer because it makes us feel good, or to meditate because it is part of a healthier style of living. Prayer becomes an instrument of our sense of well-being. When this happens, prayer becomes an end in itself. In fact, it becomes a dead end. Absorbed in the techniques, we forget who we are praying to. We lose sight of the relationship that we wanted to have with God.

Many people keep up their habit of customary prayer because it is something they identify with their childhood. It simply "feels good" to maintain the custom. This may seem a fairly harmless habit, but the problem with it is that it can produce a self-congratulatory way of thinking that dulls the senses. Prayer that is done "because I have always prayed" inoculates us against true prayer, preventing us from ever finding a living relationship with God.

The Focus of Prayer is Not Prayer But God Himself
This is absolutely basic to prayer, but it is easy to forget in today's world. We are such a technique-oriented society that we love to use tools just for the fun of using them. But all tools have a specific purpose beyond themselves. Mountain boots and ropes are used for climbing mountains. We pray not simply to enjoy the experience of praying, but to communicate with God, to submit to him, to be like him, to love and serve him. Prayer, like climbing mountains, is a challenge, but it is much more than just a challenge. We don't pray simply "because it is there." Instead, prayer is our response to God's interest in us and his love for us. To pray is to become aware that God's Spirit lives within us. Through prayer, we explore a deeper and more intimate relationship with God.

All this gives us a new perspective on prayer--as an opening up of ourselves before God.
We can now begin to see that Jesus has more to do in us than through us. Our inner changes of heart become much more important than the things we may achieve in front of other people. Prayer makes us more flexible before God. We become open to his Spirit, begin to respond to what we read about in the Bible, become curious about how he wants our lives to be. Prayer becomes more a matter of listening than talking. It is obvious that he has much more to say to us than we can bear at any one time. As we obey what the Bible terms God's "still, small voice," we become more concerned about knowing his mind than letting him know our thoughts.

Prayer Needs Help to Work
A final support of prayer is the increasing practice today of what is known as "spiritual direction." This means meeting with an older, more mature Christian, who is able to offer regular advice and direction in living the spiritual life. Spiritual direction is God-oriented, and its primary focus is on deepening and enriching a life of prayer. It helps us to move beyond seeing prayer as simply talking to God, presenting him with our needs, to a more meditative and contemplative way of life, with prayer at its heart.

In this way, people are able to become both more fully human and more spiritual than ever before. They come to enjoy a greater degree of inner freedom, with a greater sense of control over their handicaps, limitations, frustrations and suffering. The life of the Trinity opens up to the worshiper as a never-ending dynamic of expanding possibilities of love, fellowship and service.

Prayer is wider than the world, deeper than the heart, and older than the origin of humanity, because prayer originates from the very character of God.

To pray is to declare loyalty to a spiritual reality above and beyond the human realm of self-effort and control.

Our Prayers are Inexpressible
Because prayer is a two-way relationship, we are caught in a deep dilemma. We need to pray to God, but since we are so unlike him, how can we know for certain that he hears us? In fact, the more spiritually aware we become, the deeper this dilemma seems. We start to realize exactly how different our actions and thoughts are from the way God acts and thinks. How can our broken humanity ever express true thoughts and right worship to God? We clearly need the help of the Holy Spirit to grow in true prayer. Paul can help us here:

He who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will.

Not only does God's Spirit teach us how to pray, but he prays for us himself.

The Spirit and Human Temperament
Our development as spiritual persons is often handicapped by the powerful combination of our natural temperament and the environment to which we naturally gravitate. This double enemy--the enemy inside and outside--blocks our prayer life and with it our spiritual progress. Because of this, we need to become critical both of the culture in which we live, which so often promotes self-fulfillment as the ideal, and our own inner temperament.

The first step we should take is to recognize how our prayers reflect our natural temperament. A sanguine person becomes restless if he or she spends more than ten minutes alone in prayer. This is because sanguine types are very active They generate enthusiasm, act spontaneously, and find discipline very trying. They therefore find prayer in the company of other people much more easy than long hours spent on their own.

Phlegmatic people by contrast, are much more dependable, stable , and conservative. They find security in routine, and so find it easy to develop a daily discipline of prayer.
Phlegmatics are faithful, but they are not usually creative or spontaneous in their worship. The choleric person tends to be logical and rational, lacking in feelings and in the quality of relating well to others. One choleric who struggled with prayer said, "My prayer life is all exegesis, like preparing a series of sermon!" cholerics need plenty of space for their times with God, but they don not experience the ecstasy of others who pray.

The melancholic are creative, persuasive, and imaginative people who think reflectively and deeply. But they can also be touchy, or set themselves impossible standards. Their prayers are often creative and spontaneous, but they happen more intermittently.
We do not need to feel guilty that we do not pray in exactly the same ways and for the same lengths of time that we admire in great Christians from the past. Instead, we can draw encouragement from and thank God for the different ways in which we see growth and enrichment in our times with God.

We can discover our weaknesses as we probe our inner selves with significant questions. Which of the four functions (intuition, sensing, feeling, and thinking) most exhausts me when I try to focus on them? When am I most easily upset, disturbed, or distracted? What do I find most difficult to sustain? When do I feel least confident? When am I most negative and unassured? When do I most need powers of concentration and peace of mind?

Prayer is for Amateurs
The New Testament tells us that "the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective." But these prayers are powerful not because the person praying them is an expert in prayer, but because he or she is righteous. It is not by expertise or professionalism that our prayers become effective It is by our enjoying a true, deep relationship with God.

Prayer in Community
Prayer is not simply a solitary activity; it is also an expression of the community of God's people. And yet in many modern churches, prayer is rarely expressed in this communal way. Even in the churches that do have a prayer meeting, the small group that gathers rarely represents the whole life of the congregation, but instead represents only two or three expressions of the community. The church needs to rediscover communal prayer and to make it a central feature of its life.

To be prayerful is essentially to be open to God.

Prayer is the choice to direct ourselves toward God's friendship, to reach beyond human relationships to the love of God.

In the words of Antoine de Saint Exupery: "To love does not mean simply to look at one another, but to look together in the same direction."

So community is strongest when we are all set on meeting God.