Spiritual Disciplines: Prayer

I hate that the intro to each of these blog posts is a comment about not writing blog pots. But, there you go.

Continuing going through the spiritual disciplines, we come to prayer next. This is a spiritual discipline that Christians everywhere seem to practice - in private and in public; it is talked about, preached about, and taught about.

But when I really got down to thinking about prayer, in all its ubiquitousness (is that a word?) it still seems as mysterious to me as meditation. (See previous post.)

I come from a cessationist tradition that denies miracles in the present day; but all my life, I've heard people pray to God asking for things like healing of the sick (and praising God when He's healed them). I have trouble putting these two things together. This past April, after the tornados in Alabama, I heard story after story of people saying that God protected them because they prayed. What about the people that prayed that weren't protected from the tornados? And just this morning in church, someone prayed about how he knew God loved us because of our material blessings. At times, I've asked God to help me pay the rent, and praised Him when I was blessed with the ability to make the payment. But a lot of people don't have material blessings, and can't make ends meet - but if they're asking for these things from God and He doesn't provide, does that mean He doesn't love them? (Of course, there's a whole other set of posts about our role in helping the less fortunate.)

It made me start to wonder how much praying was tied to meditating. I guess, when all else fails, read what Jesus said about it:

I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you. (Matthew 17:20)

and

If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. (John 15:7)

This really got me to thinking. We like to throw around trite sayings like, "God always answers prayer - sometimes he says, 'Yes'; sometimes 'No'; sometimes 'Not now'." I've always hated that saying. But my own preferences aside, maybe the problem with us and prayer is that we don't know what to pray because we don't know God. We're not in tune with Him. Maybe it's taking that time in quiet meditation to understand who He is and what He wants that we're missing. Sometimes I look around at our current Christian culture, witnessing the hate, the hypocrisy, the utter selfishness we tend to project, and I wonder if we really understand God.

People always ask for things in prayer, adding "if it's Your will"; but I'm wondering, based on Jesus said - shouldn't we know?

Spiritual Disciplines: Meditation

Yeah...I said I was going to start blogging again. Maybe I lied.

I've got a lot I wanted to put on here, but haven't had the time to fish it out of my head and put it on paper (screen).

But in our current church curriculum we're studying the Spiritual Disciplines for the next 2 months. I thought I'd follow Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster, and use that as a jumping off point for study and discussion.

Last week, we talked about Meditation.

Foster talks about a few different types of meditation:

• Meditation where you ponder a short passage or scripture
  
• Meditation where you turn your concerns over to God
  
• Meditation where you think about God's creation - seeing God's glory in the creation around us
  
• Meditation on the events of our time and understanding their significance
  

But if you look for the word meditation in the Bible, you'll have some interesting findings.

As Foster notes, David talks about meditation a lot in the Psalms. The first Psalm talks about the man who is blessed and says that he meditates on God's law day and night. I've actually been reading Psalm 119 recently (for example, look at verses 97-104). Here, the words translated from the Hebrew mean to ponder, study, reflect.

But try looking for it in the New Testament - you may not find it. The King James lists it in a couple places, but you won't find it in the English Standard Version, the New International Version, or The Message. (The ESV uses meditate once - to mean premeditate. And the KJV uses it in the same passage; but the only other place it uses the word, the ESV translates practice - 1 Timothy 4:15.)

Of course, we do see Jesus spending a lot of time finding a lonely place to be in solitude with God. Foster lists the following passages through the Gospels: Matthew 4:1-11; 14:23; 17:1-9; 26:36-46; Mark 6:31; Luke 5:16; 6:12.

So we see the example of Jesus; but I was curious if there were any teachings about it. All Foster talks about is "hearing the voice of God" (which confused me for a bit - I'll get to that in a minute). But the absence of the word meditate made me wonder - does Jesus ever tell his disciples to do this? He talks about prayer a lot, and while there seems to be some overlap between meditation and prayer, (meditation would use more contemplative prayer), they are separate spiritual disciplines.

But then I stumbled across the word consider which is used throughout the teachings of Jesus as well as the epistles. The first place I found it was Matthew 6:28.

And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin...

The word that is translated into consider is actually a word that is a combination of two other Greek words: kata (meaning doing something intensely) and manthanō (meaning to learn or understand). It's the only time this word is used in the Bible; but I think it makes sense that we can say Jesus is telling us to "contemplate these things" or "meditate on these things".

And what's interesting about this passage - if you go back to the types of meditation Foster mentions, this seems to incorporate 3 of the 4: turning your concerns over to God, meditating on God's creation, and meditating on scripture (the last because, well, this is a scripture).

It gets even more intriguing if you look at the word used in Luke 12:22-29:

...do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will put on. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing... Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

The word consider here is also two Greek words put together to make one word. But while the first part of the word is the same used in Matthew, meangin to mean doing something intensely, the second part of the word comes from a different word: noeō, meaning to observe, perceive or understand. So Luke uses a very similar, but different word to convey the same message.

These Greek words are translated as different words throughout the New Testament. I'll stop with one last example of the word that's translated as consider in the passage from Luke, above. It's used in Matthew 7:3:

Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?

Here, the word see just means "to look at". The word notice is the same word translated consider, above: to observe intensely. Personally, I think it's telling that Jesus tells us we see the problems in other people lives, but we need to really spend some time contemplating our own faults. But maybe that's just me.

Robert Foster states in his book that Christian meditation is the ability to hear God's voice and obey His word. This confused me at first - I was thinking "hearing God's word" as reading the Bible or being told about the Gospel. I thought, "how can meditation be about hearing and obeying God's word?" But he's talking about a more literal hearing of God's voice - and obeying that. He goes on to mention Bible passages on communing with God, including several from Acts that talk directly about Jesus guiding the early Christians.

I think that the Bible teaches us - through the example of Jesus, through the way the Holy Spirit led the Christians in the book of Acts, and through some of these other verses, that it makes sense to take time out to just sit and consider, or meditate on, or contemplate these things.

There's definitely history here - just look at Deuteronomy 11:18-19.

You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.

Should it be any different for us?

But my question is: can we literally hear the voice of God today?

I'll have to meditate on that.