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- Herausgeber: IVP Bible Studies
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Serie: LifeGuide Bible Studies
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Most Christians have experienced the "laundry list" phase of spiritual life, in which praying means giving God an agenda of needs to handle. But how do you move to having real conversation with God? How do you hear what God is saying back to you? How can you make your experience of God's presence part of everyday life? In this six-session LifeGuide® Bible Study, Jan Johnson covers the disciplines of prayer and of practicing God's presence. Going deeper in these areas will help you to draw closer to God in everything you do. For over three decades LifeGuide Bible Studies have provided solid biblical content and raised thought-provoking questions—making for a one-of-a-kind Bible study experience for individuals and groups. This series has more than 130 titles on Old and New Testament books, character studies, and topical studies.
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PRAYER AND LISTENING
6 STUDIES FOR INDIVIDUALS OR GROUPS
CONTENTS
ONE
Conversation with GodGENESIS 15:1-16; 17:15-22; 18:1-15
TWO
Praying with AuthenticityPSALM 74:1-23
THREE
The Prayer of RequestMATTHEW 6:9-13
FOUR
Listening to God in Prayer1 CHRONICLES 14:8-17
FIVE
Praying for Others as Jesus DidLUKE 22:31-34
SIX
Practicing God’s Presence1 THESSALONIANS 5:16-18
GETTING THE MOST OUT OFPRAYER AND LISTENING
For many people, prayer is a way to ask God to do what they want done. While requests are important, prayer also includes listening as we come together with God to know the “mind of Christ” about ourselves, our situations, and the people in our life (1 Corinthians 2:16). In this way prayer becomes a way of connecting with God. Through this two-way conversation God can “train [us] to be godly” (1 Timothy 4:7). God created us for a relationship with him and wants to make us into the “same kind of thing as himself.”1 Here on this earth, we become disciples of Jesus and “share in the life of Christ.”2 This transformation of your soul is “the hope to which he has called you” (Ephesians 1:18) or, more poetically, “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).
But if we’ve tried to be Christlike, this can seem like a cruel joke. How do we become people who automatically love our enemies and don’t grab the credit? Who naturally gives up power instead of wanting to take control? Some of us have been waiting a long time to become the tenderhearted, conscientious person our family always wished we’d become.
THE SPIRITUAL FORMATION OF YOUR SOUL
The key to this transformation—obedience—comes not from trying to be good. Trying to be good generally makes us obnoxious. When we succeed, we subtly look down on those who don’t do as well. When we don’t succeed, we beat ourselves up and obsess on our lack of spirituality. The enemy has won either way because we remain constantly focused on self instead of setting our hearts on things above.
So if trying doesn’t work, what does? Through the work of the Holy Spirit, we copy Jesus in the behind-the-scenes, everyday activities he did to connect with God. As we let these activities become habits, we slowly are trained to have the heart of Jesus and behave as he did. As we do the connecting, God does the perfecting.
HOW SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINES WORK
We connect with God through spiritual disciplines or exercises. Prayer and listening, the topics of this Bible study, are two of them. Other disciplines include solitude, silence, Bible study, Scripture meditation, worship, celebration, prayer, service, secrecy, reflection, confession, community, and submission. It has been said that a spiritual discipline is anything that helps us practice “how to become attentive to that small voice and willing to respond when we hear it.”3
How do spiritual disciplines (or exercises) help us connect with God?
They build our relationship with God as we acquaint ourselves with the ways of God. (It’s possible, of course, to do these disciplines in a legalistic way and never bond with Christ.)
They build our trust in Christ. Some of the disciplines are uncomfortable. We have to go out on a limb. We try fasting and we don’t die. We serve someone, and it turns out to be fun and enriching.
They force us to make “little decisions” that multiply. Our little decision to abstain from watching a television show helps us to deny ourselves and love others in all sorts of ways.
They reorganize our impulses so that obedience is automatic. For example, if we have a spiritual discipline of practicing the presence of God, we may learn to automatically pray the breath prayer “Into thy hands” when someone opposes us. Without our realizing it, our opponent is no longer an adversary but a person God is dealing with or perhaps even speaking through in some way.
They help us eventually behave like Christ—but this is by God’s miraculous work, not our direct effort. “The Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. [The Christian] does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”4
They teach us to trust that God will do the work in our inner being through the power of the Spirit (Ephesians 3:16). Our spirituality is not about us; it’s the work of God in us. We get to cooperate in God’s “family business” of transforming the world.
HOW WE GET SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINES WRONG
Spiritual exercises must be done with the goal of connecting, not for any sake of their own or any desire to check them off a list of to-do items. If we read our Bible just so we can get it done, or because we’ve heard this will help us have a great day, we’ll be anxious to get all the Bible study questions finished or to get to the bottom of the page of today’s reading. But if our goal in Bible reading is to connect with God, we may pause whenever we sense God speaking to us. Then we will study the passage further, comparing it with other sections. We’ll stop and meditate on it. We may pray certain phrases back to God, indicating our needs or our wishes or our questions. We may choose to read that passage day after day for a month because God keeps using it to speak to us.
After such a session, we will have a stronger desire to connect with God. That “little choice” we made to connect will leave us slightly different for life.
The exercise or discipline is helpful because it helps us practice connecting with God. If we want to play the piano well or swing a tennis racket well, we have to practice certain exercises over and over. In life with God, we get good at connecting on an everyday basis by devoting time to developing the skills needed. Good baseball players train behind the scenes by practicing their batting day after day, with no crowds watching.5 That’s what spiritual disciplines or exercises are about. If we can hear God in prayer and in practicing the divine presence, we’ll more likely hear God in a board meeting or an altercation with a recalcitrant teen when passions run high.
THE DISCIPLINE OF PRAYER
Prayer is, no doubt, the most common spiritual discipline, used even by those who aren’t sure there’s anyone listening! In crisis, folks who wouldn’t identify themselves as Christians or who don’t attend church find themselves praying. This indicates a distinct human tendency to talk to God.
While some other disciplines seem mysterious and laborious, folks almost fall into praying without thinking about it. Until we make it too complicated, that is. Over the years people have developed formulas, techniques, and foolproof schemes to get God to say yes to their prayers. It’s as if God has been reduced to a vending machine, and people search for the right sort of coin to insert so that goodies will appear in the tray to be grabbed. Such frantic grasping misses the point of prayer, which is so well explained by Oswald Chambers: “We look upon prayer simply as a means of getting things for ourselves, but the biblical purpose of prayer is that we may get to know God Himself.”6
Biblical prayer is about building a relationship with God. Knowing God himself teaches us to relate to God in an authentic way—not just doing the good things that good people are supposed to do.
We learn that God is transcendent; we learn to talk and listen to this all-knowing, all-powerful Creator in ways God teaches us. The studies in this guide outline some of those ways. We also learn that God is immanent and that we can reach out to this God who is as close as our breath.
HOW DO THESE STUDIES WORK?
These studies examine examples, how-to activities, and the results of connecting with God through prayer and practicing God’s presence. One question in each of the six studies calls for actual praying to be done in the session. Look for these questions and use them. This will demonstrate the pattern that Bible study leads us to respond to God, especially through prayer.
