by Keith Miller | Bible, Christian Living, Prayer, Small Groups, Weekly Devotional
Keith, After I decided to surrender my life to God, how should I go about finding my vocation?
Good question. At first I didn’t know what to do. I was a land man for a major oil company. It was a good job but hardly considered to be a training ground for Christian disciples—which I definitely wanted to be after finally trying to turn my life over to God.
I prayed about what to do and at that time there seemed to be only one way for really serious players to go: go to theology school and become ordained to be a full time Christian minister. So I studied the Bible and theology and the history of the church and preaching under some good professors. Along the way I sat with my parents when my older brother was killed and with my father when he died of a heart condition and with my mother when she died of cancer—all before I was 30. All during this time I was praying and reading the Bible and the lives of the saints—the people in the past who had given their lives to God.
I decided that the playing field I was called to in which to help people find hope and real love was in the ordinary life I was trying to live as a businessman. I made a decision that God had my address. Instead of spending all my time “deciding what I would become for God,” I would treat my own ordinary life as a father and husband who commuted in a car pool twenty miles one way to work five days a week—that I would commit that life to God and to learning how to live for him all day long.
I made that decision because I simply didn’t know any ministers at that time who talked, preached or shared individually about having real problems in their own lives and relationships with their spouses, children, parents or fellow clergy. I was still in my thirties and just couldn’t believe that I was the only committed Christian who wrestled with lust, jealousy, and the many faces of fear of failure. None of these pastors seemed to have that terrible three-day silence warfare with their spouses or had to be right in arguments with a spouse or feel like a wimp, or worry at night about developing a retirement plan or squeezing in vacation time. In fact, since I did wrestle with all of these things, for a number of years I thought I must not be a good Christian.
But at another level I was learning that the way out of the fears for me was not courage, which I’d prayed for, but love. When I was worried, I discovered that if I helped someone else, my fear left me—and that maybe Jesus was right (J) when he said that it is “love that casts out fear.”
At twenty-two I had met a man who encouraged me to keep a journal about the things in which I was interested. He helped me write a small book of ballads. And after a few years of talking to lay people about the hope I was finding in an intimate relationship with the God Jesus called Father, I began writing books about the simple yet agonizing discoveries concerning what it might mean to try to live one’s whole life for and with God.
As I’ve written in blogs before, I kept trying to be open to finding out the truth about my own character defects. And that process has made me face many of the denied self-centeredness and control issues with which I had never before been confronted—either in church or school. But because I’d learned a lot about Jesus and his life, teaching and self-limiting love, I knew that when I learned about my sins and character defects, to confess them to some Christian men also trying to live for God. And I began to see how I’d hurt many of the people I love most.
The incredible thing to me is that in spite of my flaws—many of which didn’t surface until I had become a best-selling author and lecturer and had traveled in many foreign countries around the world, teaching about how God can change our whole perception of what it means to live intimately with him and other people. The bottom line about the discovery process is that I would have bet anyone that I would not do the immoral and hurtful things I wound up doing. And they happened to a man who was very disciplined and had “kept the rules” all his life. I was baffled. And when I faced and admitted what I’d done, it was too late to mend some of the fences I had charged through.
What does this have to do with finding a vocation? For me, a great deal. After having a number of best-selling books translated into many languages and having trained with and learned from many powerful and wealthy people as a young man, I finally realized I am just a person. And that I can sometimes love and help people who are struggling with the questions of life and who have discovered the hard way that they are powerless on their own to change their lives at a deep level.
I go to group meetings of people, some of whom I have known for twenty-five years, with whom I share the pain and joy of trying to live for God. When guests and new people come, we discuss our scariest and most fearsome problems. I was writing books and lecturing in different places in foreign countries, but for twenty years I didn’t find it helpful or necessary to tell them that I was a writer and lecturer. But lately, since many of the people who read my books are very old or deceased, I have told some of these people I love and meet with that my vocation is being a writer and a sort of talent scout for God—helping a few people discover the vocational dreams they buried along with their self-centeredness and control issues. That’s come to be the focus of my vocation.
The short answer to your question about choosing a vocation as a Christian is that since God seems to want loving representatives in every culture and every financial, political, educational and medical field, it doesn’t much matter what you do vocationally as long as you love God and surrender the center of your life to God. So I’d advise you to pray about it, ask God’s will, and then pick something that you really love to do. Then go and find out if you can do it.
Will there be pain and sorrow? Of course, but you will find that in the long run your ability to navigate through pain and still be loving will have more effect in spreading the Good News into other people’s hearts around you than all of the sermons you could preach and all the books you could write.
Lord, help me to keep listening for your voice in the pain of other people’s lives and in my own. And thank you that you let me fail enough to wake up and see that I don’t have to “win” to be the person you will love “someday,” but just to open my eyes and see your loving presence in Andrea, our families and the other people we get to walk with on your crazy adventure. In Jesus’ name, amen.
“This is a large work I’ve called you into, but don’t be overwhelmed by it. It’s best to start small. Give a cool cup of water to someone who is thirsty, for instance. The smallest act of giving or receiving makes you a true apprentice.”
-Jesus to the Twelve in Matthew 10:42
“But I do more than thank. I ask—ask the God of our Master, Jesus Christ, the God of glory—to make you intelligent and discerning in knowing him personally, your eyes focused and clear, so that you can see exactly what it is he is calling you to do, grasp the immensity of this glorious way of life he has for his followers, oh, the utter extravagance of his work in us who trust him—endless energy, boundless strength!”
-Ephesians 1:18-19, The Message
“Always continue the climb. It is possible for you to do whatever you choose, if you first get to know who you are and are willing to work with a power that is greater than ourselves to do it.”
-Ella Wheeler Wilcox—American Writer (1850-1919)
“Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
-Theodore Roosevelt—26th President of the United States (1858-1919)
by Keith Miller | Bible, Christian Living, Prayer, Recovery, Weekly Devotional
Keith, what if we have let God in our lives and into the driver’s seat and nothing happened? I still have the same struggles that I have always had. Is there ever a way out? I am really wondering and feel as though I am constantly in a spiritual battle between God and the devil. Thanks, R.
This is a question that most Christians don’t have the guts to ask. And yet for anyone who has consciously and seriously tried to put God in the driver’s seat of her or his life, it is the question to ask.
There are a couple of times Jesus dealt directly with that question. “What’s necessary to put God in the driver’s seat where the decisions are made?” One is recorded in Matt. 19. A rich young man came to Jesus and told him that he wanted to quit being a listener and start being one of Jesus’ committed disciples—which in terms of our conversation would be saying, “I am ready to put the God you call Father in the driver’s seat of my life.”
Jesus said in effect, “Great, “If you want to enter the life of God, just do what he tells you.”
The young man said, “What in particular?
Jesus said, “Don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t lie, honor your father and mother, and love your neighbor as you do yourself.”
(R., can you say that you are following what Jesus says? I suspect you are from the tone of your inquiry.) Anyway, the young man said in effect, “I’ve done all that.” (I’ve put God in the driver’s seat and am willing to keep all his commandments.)
Then Jesus must have looked at the man and said, “This young man is a serious player.” But then Jesus says something completely of the wall. He asked the young man to give up the thing that was really most important to him that wasn’t even a “bad” thing, but was the thing that bottom-line motivated and determined his most crucial decisions (what was really in the driver’s seat of his life—but he had never seen it that way.) Jesus told him that if you really want to trust God with your whole life, then, “go sell all your possessions; give everything to the poor. All your wealth will then be in heaven. Then come follow me.”
What I think Jesus is saying to the young man, and what I heard him saying to me (that for years stopped me in my tracks) was that I already had a god sitting in the driver’s seat of my life—in fact several as it turned out–and until I was willing to see and admit that something or someone who was not God was the most important thing in my life (“in the driver’s seat determining my private decisions”), I could not really surrender my whole life to God at all.
The young man in the story’s response was: “That was the last thing the young man expected to hear. And so crestfallen, he walked away. He was holding on tight to a lot of things, and he couldn’t bear to let go.[1]”
What Jesus does still, it seems to me, is to help us see that when we come and want to follow God totally, we already have a god we do not realize is a trump card to our attempts to put God in the driver’s seat (or maybe several gods that we obey when they call.) The young man’s god was his money, or possessions. And until we see and admit that these gods which unconscious to us are already in the driver’s seat, we are not free to surrender our whole lives to God and are baffled that we are constantly in internal battles we don’t understand.
I was absolutely shocked when I tried to see what was really most important to me—because consciously God was number one. Some of the things I have had to admit were keeping me from surrendering my whole life were—at different times—financial security, sexual fantasies or actions, the love of my wife or one of my children (more than anything), my vocational success, drinking too much, my reputation as a fine Christian man, and my writing and speaking ministry. A mentor helped me realize that each of these things was at times more important than God, when I would spend time thinking about and doing one of them to the detriment of my clear duties as a father, husband, and Christian man “surrendered wholly to God.” Many of these things were not even “bad” things, but they kept my focus on me and what I wanted, instead of what I knew was the priority of God for me, and were detrimental to my growing up to be the man God had in mind for me to become.[2]
But after many years of meeting with other men and women wanting to follow Jesus and be his people, I finally realized that although I can’t just “put God first,” I can tell him that I am willing to, and give Him permission to show me those things that I have consciously and unconsciously put in the driver’s seat of my life and relationships. In fact working with individuals and small groups to help them –and me—to discover, confess and commit God those other hidden gods, so that together we can uncover and achieve the dreams and vocations God has for each us—this became my life’s work for God.
These positive changes in direction came about when some bad decisions I made because of obeying some of the competitive gods I had not faced caused me such pain that I became willing to surrender my entire life to God, realizing that only He could give me the courage and insight to even want Him that much.
But the other part of what happened when I specifically set out to give God permission to sit in the driver’s seat in my life was that I agreed to start doing the disciplines that could help me learn how God wants me to live. For me this has entailed learning all I could about what Jesus said the Father wants us to do in the new Kingdom (Reign) of God in his people’s lives. I read the scriptures, concentrating first on the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:1-2), the parables, and the teachings of Jesus describing the character and purposes of God, realizing that God wants us to live out of these same characteristics. That includes loving the poor and marginalized people, but also Jesus said people will know we are his followers by the way we (Christians) love each other. (John 13:35) And I prayed almost every day about what I was learning, asking God to show me where my life needed to be different, and to help me to stop clinging to my old ways of running my life as I learned how to let God be in control.
And when I saw how Jesus said God wants us to live, I examined my life and saw not only the false gods in the driver’s seat, but also self-centeredness everywhere. And when I discovered I had hurt someone I had to learn to confess to God, then go and confess to the person I had harmed and make amends to that person. All of this became part of a running conversation with God about the life of loving I was discovering that I’d always wanted to live but was afraid to try because I might look “pious” or “holier than thou.” Now I don’t care. I just want to love people and learn how to use the gifts God has given me in the process.
And all I can tell you is that what has happened to me has made me more loving, aware of my good traits as well as those which derail my best intensions and conscious motivations.
I started not to tell you all this, but since I found that God accepts us the minute we come to him in as complete trust as we have, I have discovered the life I always suspected might be out there somewhere for me. I am still only a child trying to obey his intimate heavenly “daddy.” But I also care enough about you to tell you these things, whatever you may think me. And that—as anyone who has known me many years will tell you—is a real miracle.
“Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other.”
John 13:34-35
The Message
“I am talking about a revolutionary way of living. Religion isn’t something to be added to our other duties, and thus make our lives more complex. The life with God is the center of life, and all else is remodeled and integrated by it. It gives singleness of eye. The most important thing is not to be perpetually passing out cups of cold water to a thirsty world. We can get so fearlessly busy trying to carry out the second commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” that we are undeveloped in our devoted life to God as well as neighbor”
Thomas Merton
A Testament of Devotion
“We live in a world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence…. To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in the world are equally centers and the true center is outside the world, this is to consent…. Such consent is love.”
Simone Weil
Waiting for God
“If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which use to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.”
Alcoholics Anonymous
Third Edition, page 83-84
P.S. If you want to check out a way a Christian or group of Christians can use the 12 Steps as a guide to spiritual wholeness see A Hunger for Healing: The Twelve Steps as a Classic Model for Christian Spiritual Growth.
[1] If you want to see a case in which Jesus did the same kind of helping someone see the ‘god’ that was already in the driver’s seat of her life, but upon seeing that god was ready to put Jesus’ God first, see the story of the woman at the well—and what happened to her life when she made the decision to put God before her secret god (i.e. Relationships with men—or sex.) See John 4.
[2] R. – I am not suggesting that you have any particular ‘gods’—just sharing what happened to me when I faced this very question.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Prayer, Weekly Devotional
Keith, you talk a lot about prayer being an important part of your life over the past forty-five years, particularly since you made a decision to try to surrender your whole life to the God Jesus called Father. I have two questions. First, how and when did you get introduced to praying? The other question is about whether the way you pray has changed or evolved over these many years. If so, how?
These are perceptive questions. I could (and may—but not now) write a book to deal with them. But for now I’ll just start by telling you about a time when I was a little boy, probably four years old. One night my mother was putting me to bed, and she changed our routine. She always sat on the edge of the bed and would leisurely ask me about my day and we’d visit. Then she would say a prayer. I have no memory of what she prayed about, but I loved her being present, and the sound of her voice.
But one night after the sharing time, she said, “Johnny*, God is listening for you to pray, to talk to him.”
I said, “You mean God is actually here in this room with us??”
Seeing the look of apprehension on my face, she said, “Yes, and he knows all about you, has forgiven you of your sins, and loves you very much.” Then, smiling, she kissed me on the forehead, tucked me in and left, leaving me in the dark with a thin shaft of light from the almost-closed door.
I looked up in the left-hand corner of the darkened room (somehow placing God there) and pulled the covers up to my neck. All I could think of were the nasty things I’d done in that room when I’d thought I was alone that I certainly wouldn’t have wanted God to know about. But then I remembered that mother had said, “…and he knows all about you, he’s forgiven you for your sins and loves you very much.”
So finally I whispered, “Thank you very much.” And my prayer life had begun.
As to how my prayer life changed during the next seventy-nine years, I don’t know when I realized various things about God and about myself. But I can say that for years, praying was something I did, mostly at night. But after the last member of my family died and I surrendered my entire life to God (not realizing how little I knew about my behavior and its effect on other people) my prayer life changed from just expression of gratitude and requests for help. I now wanted to be God’s person, so I began to ask God to let me know what I should do and to help me do those things. Later, after I wrote my first book and it was published in eleven languages, a lot of my prayers had to do with gratitude and a desire for guidance.
Then when I was forty-seven years old, there were serious problems and conflict in a marriage of twenty-seven years. I prayed for “solutions”—that would (I now realize) change my wife—although consciously I thought I was praying for our marriage to change. But I had developed a strange blindness that made it difficult (impossible) for me to see the extent to which I was out of touch with my own reality. I found myself giving God “weekends off” somehow.
Finally through a very agonizing divorce (primarily due to my self-centered, immoral behavior) I continued to pray, but the sense of intimacy with God was no longer real somehow.
After the divorce I began to try to find out who I now was. I had to face the fact that I drank too much and didn’t even want to quit. But finally in 1985 I went to a treatment center and there I learned about my intense self-centeredness, my addictive personality and my unconscious denial of unpleasant personal characteristics. Ironically I was praying the whole time, praying to be able to see the truth that was so baffling to me. Then at the end of treatment I had a gut-wrenching night of reality in which I vividly saw my selfishness and how much pain it had caused not only my first wife, but my children and some of my friends and business associates.
The resulting surrender of my life including all the previously denied “putting myself in the driver’s seat of my life where only God belonged” put me into an entire new place in my prayers. I had become more like a small child not knowing what to do with my life. There was a deeper quality of asking God what I should do and be. In addition to praying, I read the Bible and all kinds of books about recovery and the lives of people who had surrendered to God. And I consciously “took my hands off the wheel” each morning and listened harder for directions. I learned to ask for and trust people enough to take directions, to move toward recovery, and to share the larger awarenesses I was coming to in my daily attempts to live for God one day at a time.
During this period I prayed to discover God’s perspective concerning all of life—and for knowledge of anything else about which I might be in denial so that I could surrender the newly discovered deceptive and harmful thoughts and behaviors to God, asking him to help me remove them.
For about twenty-five years I lived in a world that I had not even known existed as I tried to help other people to find God, people who had never seen their own self-destructive issues of control and self-centeredness and the problems their blindness was causing. And since I was no longer hiding any areas of my behavior from myself or from God, my prayer life was much more tranquil. I felt peace and acceptance inside for the first time ever. During this time I traveled, spoke and wrote books in the field of codependence, control issues, the twelve-step spiritual process and business management. And although these were dramatic years of working with other troubled people in different countries, many of whose languages I did not speak, it was a time in which my prayer life became more who I was than what I did. Communication with God was often all through my days and nights.
Finally, I realized that although I was no longer recognized in airports or when attending public meetings, I was more at home with God, myself and people who were running from God (and secretly hoping God would catch them) than I was with many of the Christians I’d known.
During the last five years my prayer life has become more of a running dialogue with God that seems somehow natural for me. Prayer is not so much a series of staccato cries or requests for help as it is an attitude of intimate listening and sharing in a life in which I am learning how to love other people as I have felt loved by God and some of his other recovering children.
Almost every personal encounter becomes a chance to listen to and learn about the wonderful stories of all kinds of people. And sometimes now as an old man I can see small ways in which I can help some of them see the good things and value in who they are—things which self-centered parents (like me) may never have gotten around to telling them. All this is part of what I now see as my prayer life. And at the end of the day I feel inside like a little boy who has an intimate contact with a Daddy who created the whole game of life, about which I have an insatiable hunger to learn.
Lord, thank you for your invitation into a healing relationship with you. As I move through my days, help me to hear your guidance and feel your love and to learn how to share that life with other people. In Jesus’ name, amen.
***
“In prayer there is a connection between what God does and what you do. You can’t get forgiveness from God, for instance, without also forgiving others. If you refuse to do your part, you cut yourself off from God’s part.”
– Matthew 6:14, The Message
“He who has learned to pray has learned the greatest secret of a holy and happy life.”
– William Law (1686 –1761)
British minister and one of the writers/translators
of the King James version of the Bible
“Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.”
– Sören Kierkegaard (1813 –1855)
Danish Christian philosopher, theologian and religious author
“Prayer may not change things for you, but it for sure changes you for things.”
– Samuel M. Shoemaker (1893–1963),
Episcopal priest, instrumental in the
founding principles of Alcoholics Anonymous.
* My first name is John.
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Prayer, Weekly Devotional
With elections just completed and Thanksgiving creeping up on us, we are in the midst of the screamers on the radio and television talk shows warning us of the “crooks” running for office, or the “blindness and the incompetence” of our elected representatives, and of the failings of our leaders in virtually all fields. However, I want to tell you that we Christians have a deep well of strength, hope, and confidence from which to draw a toast to the future this Thanksgiving in the country in which we live that has more freedom and opportunity than any place the world has ever seen.
By the time I was 28, I had buried all the family I grew up with and I’d broken my neck in a car wreck—which ended my hope to be a basketball star. These events made me realize I am not the center of the universe. I also realized through these losses, some other failures in my life and the resulting fears were more than I could handle by myself.
But it was due to the chaos, pain and doubt of those days and nights that I was driven to the end of myself and wound up parked on a lowly roadside in East Texas. There I made my first attempt to surrender my future, my family’s future, and the future of the world I lived in to the God Jesus called Father.
I drove that stake into that East Texas soil as deeply as I could at the time. I was a helpless little 28 year old boy inside. And that day I turned from surveying the inner turmoil in my life, looked in a different direction—and saw a rim of light on the horizon. It was the beginning of a sunrise I had not known would ever come. I had been facing and living every day a “sunset” of all my hopes for my life. And when I turned my focus around, I realized that God is alive beyond mountains and oceans of my fear if I can but turn around right where I am each time the mountains or oceans threaten to overwhelm me.
Whatever happens outside us, God will be with us and give us the courage and strength to deal with our losses, failures, fears, and difficulties, one day, one hour at a time, as individuals and as a nation.
God has changed my life so much that I am spending my life pointing over my shoulder to tell you there is real solid hope to stand on. Right now—where ever you are!
So for the next few weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, I am focusing on all that I have for which to be thankful, including renewed hope that comes from the realization that God knows where each of us is and will never give up on us.
God bless you and Happy Thanksgiving (and the weeks of preparation that are leading up to it).
“Just think—you don’t need a thing, you’ve got it all! All God’s gifts are right in front of you as you wait expectantly for our Master Jesus to arrive on the scene for the Finale. And not only that, but God himself is right alongside to keep you steady and on track until things are all wrapped up by Jesus. God, who got you started in this spiritual adventure, shares with us the life of his Son and our Master Jesus. He will never give up on you. Never forget that.” (1 Cor. 1:7, The Message)
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Prayer, Weekly Devotional
Dear Keith, I’m having trouble with my prayer life. I’m not getting a lot of my prayers answered. (And I’m praying “in Jesus’ name.”) He indicated that he would answer prayers that were prayed in his name. Can you shed any light on that? And can you advise me what I can do to have a better average? I am committed to Christ and will work hard to pray right.
These are questions most thinking people have faced—good question.
The idea that the Father will answer our prayers if we pray them “in Jesus’ name” came to me first when I was a new Christian. I was working as a land man in the oil exploration business. One of my jobs was to buy oil and gas leases in a new area. The senior land man told me, “Keith, don’t ever forget that you are buying these leases in the company’s name.”
When I heard the phrase, “in the company’s name,” I thought about Jesus saying that the secret to having prayers answered was to pray them in His name. So I listened carefully to what buying leases “in the company’s name” meant.
“When you buy leases in someone else’s name,
1) you buy them in the location the company wants leases
2) You pay the price the company wants to pay
3) you buy only the five-year term the company wants to buy, etc.
In other words you buy each lease as the president of the company would buy it—the same location, price, and all the other conditions set out in the leasing agreement that the president would use if he were buying leases in each different area. And you need to know what different things the president may want in different places you will be sent to buy leases in his name.”
Later, I thought again about Jesus’ saying that God would answer our prayers if we prayed them “in Jesus’ name.” And it occurred to me that maybe he was saying that God will answer my prayers about any situation if I will learn to pray exactly as Jesus would pray if he were praying about that same particular situation. That way I will be personally representing God in the world as I pray.
If this is so, then in order to pray “in Jesus’ name” I needed to learn a lot more than I knew about Jesus: what he prayed about, what his priorities are, and what he asked for when he prayed. As I thought about this, I realized that the content and tone of my prayers was changing as I learned more about what Jesus prayed for, and as I committed more and more of my life to God. Over the years I’ve noticed that many times I just say about a situation, “and thy will be done,” since I often don’t know what is best for other people. (And I now realize that many of the things I didn’t get when I prayed for them would have ruined my life if I’d gotten them.)
That raised the question: who is “the Father” Jesus always prayed to—and what is our attitude and behavior toward God, the Father, to be? Over the years I come to see that knowing “the Father” intimately would be like relating to a strong, creative, intimate, and loving Father (more perfect than any earthly father could be). And Jesus prayed as he thought his Father would (e.g. in Gethsemane he said about his own death, “but thy will be done.”)
What Jesus Said about How to Begin a Prayer Life, Praying in Jesus’ Name
This passage gave me a cameo picture of the attitude and behaviors God wants us to have, as Jesus described how to begin a prayer life “in Jesus’ name”:
“And when you come before God, don’t turn that into a theatrical production either. All these people making a regular show out of their prayers, hoping for stardom! Do you think God sits in a box seat?
“Here’s what I want you to do: Find a quiet, secluded place so you won’t be tempted to role-play before God. Just be there as simply and honestly as you can manage. The focus will shift from you to God, and you will begin to sense his grace.
“The world is full of so-called prayer warriors who are prayer-ignorant. They’re full of formulas and programs and advice, peddling techniques for getting what you want from God. Don’t fall for that nonsense. This is your Father you are dealing with, and he knows better than you what you need…” (Matthew 6: 5-13, The Message)
What Jesus Said about How to Pray in Jesus’ Name
In this picture—and many others like it—we see how we should pray, and a little about what it would mean to “pray in Jesus’ name.”
In the passage, just before Jesus gave his disciples the only prayer Jesus ever gave them, Jesus said this about the process of praying to the Father:
“Be especially careful when you are trying to be good so that you don’t make a performance out of it. It might be good theater, but the God who made you won’t be applauding. “When you do something for someone else, don’t call attention to yourself. You’ve seen them in action, I’m sure—’playactors’ I call them— treating prayer meeting and street corner alike as a stage, acting compassionate as long as someone is watching, playing to the crowds. They get applause, true, but that’s all they get. When you help someone out, don’t think about how it looks. Just do it—quietly and unobtrusively. That is the way your God, who conceived you in love, working behind the scenes, helps you out.” (Matthew 6: 1-4, The Message)
Jesus then gave his disciples—and us I believe—the perspective that has helped me more than any other. He tells us, I think, that if we want to pray as Jesus would—in His name (as Jesus positioned himself before the Father) then we are to position ourselves differently than I ever had. I had treated God like a business partner ( who had all the money) or like a powerful psychiatrist I would consult (and fire if he got too confronting). But here Jesus gave what for me became the key to learning how to pray (and live) in his name. He said it this way:
“With a God like this loving you (one who “knows better than you what you need!) you can pray very simply like this.” [And he began to pray by saying,] “Daddy, in heaven”[1] and what followed is the prayer that Jesus gave us as a model of how we should pray.
What all this means to me is that if I want to pray with the same approach to God that Jesus had (in Jesus’ name) I need pray as if I were a small child and he was a loving daddy, not a business partner or psychiatrist whom I can fire. And to pray as a small child, I need to surrender as much of my entire life to God as I understand Him, realizing that the answer to my prayer is completely up to God. That way I can learn to listen and watch for God’s answers with the open mind of a child wanting to learn all I can from his father, the intimate loving Father in whose image Jesus was made, and who accepts me warts and all.
I have spent the last 50 years learning all I can in order to more nearly pray as Jesus would pray. These are a lot of words, but I’m dead serious when I tell you that in trying to surrender my entire life to the Father, my prayers have changed in many ways. Some of my prayers have been answered in ways I could not have imagined. And the ones that haven’t been answered…well, maybe they have, but I’m just not able to recognize God’s answer just yet, since the “answers” may have been something I needed to happen so I could grow up in some area—instead of what I ask for.
Some time I’ll talk more about the kinds of radical changes that have come about in my experience of trying to live for God as a small child and what being blessed by God has come to mean.
“In the world humans pride themselves on prudential wisdom, but the purpose of a Christian is to be a child. The child spirit is a goal and not merely a starting point. Though not all children demonstrate it, the ideal child spirit is of one who seeks to learn, because he knows that he does not know, and one who trusts his parent unreservedly. At best, the world of a child is a world of wonder, unspoiled by cynical judgment of others or by the corrosive effect of consciously hidden motives. The end, says Christ, is to rediscover the beginning.” Elton Trueblood, Confronting Christ
Dear Lord, thank you that you have let me experience enough pain through my self-centerdness and sinful bad choices that I was forced to face myself, decide to surrender and live for you and begin to learn how to pray and live in your name. In Jesus’ name, amen.
“Then Jesus made it clear to his disciples that it was now necessary for him to go to Jerusalem, submit to an ordeal of suffering at the hands of the religious leaders, be killed, and then on the third day be raised up alive. Peter took him in hand, protesting, ‘Impossible, Master! That can never be!’
“But Jesus didn’t swerve. ‘Peter, get out of my way. Satan, get lost. You have no idea how God works.’
“Then Jesus went to work on his disciples. ‘Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat; I am. Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self. What kind of deal is it to get everything you want but lose yourself?’” Matthew 16: 21-26 (The Message)
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‘‘ ‘Thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth. You’ve concealed your ways from sophisticates and know-it-alls, but spelled them out clearly to ordinary people. Yes, Father, that’s the way you like to work.’
“ Jesus resumed talking to the people, but now tenderly. ‘The Father has given me all these things to do and say. This is a unique Father-Son operation, coming out of Father and Son intimacies and knowledge. No one knows the Son the way the Father does, nor the Father the way the Son does. But I’m not keeping it to myself; I’m ready to go over it line by line with anyone willing to listen.
“ ‘Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.’” Matthew 11:25-30 (The Message)
[1] The word for our “Father” here is Abba which almost always can be correctly translated, “Daddy.”
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Dear Keith, I’ve been troubled a lot with anxiety lately and seem to be having more problems with my relationships recently. I have made a commitment to Christ and asked God for the filling of the Holy Spirit and I have done everything my friends have told me to do to get rid of this anxiety and these problems. I have gone back to reading the Scriptures and praying regularly and I’ve gone to several people for counseling, but I still seem to have these problems. Do you have any idea what this might mean?
You sound as if you think anxiety and problems are bad things and that you should do things to improve your spiritual life so these problems will go away.
I believe that problems and anxiety are not necessarily bad things. I think any time we are anxious, it is like a fire alarm going off warning us that there is something not being faced either in our relationship with God, another person, ourselves, or with our work. Some people, for instance, are overworking terribly and suddenly become anxious “for no reason at all.”
What I do when I become anxious or have a problem in a relationship is to stop and ask God, “What messages are you trying to get through to me?” In other words, instead of praying that the anxiety will go away, I am learning to ask God, “What is the anxiety signaling that might help me get closer to You and to live more sanely as your person?” Most often, the problem or the anxiety I am experiencing is merely a signal that something is wrong. Rather than trying to get the signal to stop, I find it’s better to locate the fire or the difficulty that is causing the anxiety or the problem in the relationship. When I discover the real problem, and address it (which usually requires me to change some unacceptable behavior) then often the anxiety disappears.
For example, one day I woke up anxious, afraid, and feeling very insecure—all adding up to a frightening loneliness and doubt about the reality of my Christian commitment. I hated to admit it, but my Christian friends began to get on my nerves. They seemed to be so untroubled, and I knew intuitively that some of them must have similar problems—but they just didn’t talk about it. So I started faking it, without even being conscious of it. Someone would call and say, “Hey, buddy, how are you feeling?” And I would reply, “Fine, things couldn’t be going better,” when in reality I was dealing with something serious or was worried sick.
Don’t misunderstand, I am not for telling everyone about your every ache and pain in order to be scrupulously honest, but sometimes I think we hide our less than joyful feelings because we believe that it is a denial of Christ to be miserable. Consequently I, and some of my friends, being human, were left alone and guilty in our times of misery.
Then I began to see that this position of hiding our humanity is that of the “whitewashed sepulchers” Jesus spoke of, smiling on the outside and rotten with guilt, anxiety, and incompleteness within. (See Mt. 23:23–28)
As I struggled with this problem, I had to take a new look at my humanity—the humanity of a man who wanted with all his heart to be God’s person and yet found himself anxious and restless inside. Why would I have vague feelings of unhealthy dependency and incompleteness, just when I seemed to be living a disciplined, outgoing life?
At last this search sent me to my knees, beginning again like a child. God had used my anxious sense of incompleteness to drive me back to the place where I would again put my life in his hands. The “fire,” in this particular case, was expecting myself to live up to some kind of image of what a “perfect Christian” would look like and hiding from myself the fact of my own humanity.
For me then, anxiety and restlessness as a Christian were not necessarily bad, but, like physical pain, they could be a warning signal—warning me that something was out of balance in my life, that I was somehow ignoring God—even while I was doing religious disciplines to “earn” some peace and quietness. And because of the signal that anxiety provided, I could stop and do something before I destroyed myself and the work I was trying to do.
At about that time, I remember being asked to speak to a men’s group on the subject “The Christian Life.” I went to the meeting and spent five or ten minutes telling the men very honestly that I was feeling weak and miserable. I was tired of speaking to groups and of being a Christian, and had even considered not coming that night. Then I told them that I had realized that whatever else had meaning to me besides God was so far back in second place that I had decided to come and tell them that I was a Christian almost by default—that is, there seemed to be no other way to find any purpose or meaning in my life at all. I had come to the meeting on the chance that some of them might live with misery and incompleteness too—that some of them might be looking for a Way that could give purpose and meaning even to a life that included anxiety and restlessness and the accompanying lack of confidence in themselves.
I thought that my honest and specific confession of my miserable restlessness and self-centeredness would compel these men to reject me and any message I might have to give them. Instead, I found a room full of brothers, of warm, struggling fellow human beings, who also needed a second touch from their Lord, even though many had been committed Christian ministers for years.
I have found that committing my life as wholly as I can to God and receiving the reassuring sense of his presence does give me a deep and ultimate security my humanity has longed for. And, when I discover that I am again anxious, I remember that Jesus counted on his disciples having troubled hearts and told them he was sending the Holy Spirit to comfort or “strengthen” them when they did (see John 14). And not only that, but I now believe that restlessness and ultimate dependency, like pain and evil, are woven into the fabric of life perhaps to become the motivating power to drive us toward fulfillment in God as he is revealed in Jesus Christ.
Understanding this, however, has not changed the fact that I find it very unpleasant to be anxious, restless, discouraged or afraid. It is all very well to understand that God will teach me something from the inexplicable and anxious periods and bring me closer to himself, but during these times I feel very lonely, and I still resist surrendering control of the people or situations to God in order to find God’s way. Only now, I can remember faster that when I’ve held out and refused to surrender, I have experienced long and unproductive sessions of introspection and discouragement.
My prayers come with this for you. It has not been easy for me to accept the fact that I can even hide things from myself that I don’t want to face. This may not be true of you, but based on my experience it’s what I have to offer you at this point.
Dear God, thank you that you have given us an “alarm system” for discovering things we cannot see about ourselves. Help us to pay attention when the alarm signal goes off, and to begin to change any behaviors, thoughts or situations that have triggered the alarm. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Psalm 139:22-24 NIV
Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed.
James 5:16, The Message
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Prayer
Keith, what can I do when my prayers are boring—even to me? How can I pray more attentively in a way that leads toward the transformation of my real life?
Years ago, when I first began taking a life of communicating with God seriously, I felt uneasy with silence while praying. So I filled most of the communication time with words. But as the years rolled on and I read the lives of many of the saints of the church, (and met some very loving and unselfish Christians), I noticed that a number of them seemed to view communication with God as a time for them to listen to Him (since they had the idea that the purpose of prayers was to let God change them—instead of informing Him about what He should be doing each day).
At about that time Paul Tournier told me that he and his wife, Nellie, spent time together each day listening for God, and writing down what came to them in the silence. I still didn’t do anything until some years later when another very reality-oriented spiritual friend told me she did the same thing the Tourniers did, and it helped her a lot. So, feeling a little uncertain, I began to listen for ten minutes, writing whatever came to me. At first what came was a cross between a laundry list and a “to do” list for a Daytimer. The first thing I wrote down was “get your car washed.” I shook my head but wrote it down, along with calls to make, immoral thoughts that came up as I was praying, and financial worries.
When I reported that listening for God didn’t seem to work very well, my friend pointed out that I was getting my day organized, and the immoral thoughts could be transferred to my prayer, asking God to help me with them. “Besides,” my friend said, “you’ve told me that you have spent a good many years tuned into other stations in your mind. It may take weeks or months to be able to sort out the way God talks to you.”
I am amazed at what has happened. After many years of listening this way, I now often get a list of everything I need to do for that day in about five to eight minutes. Later I reorder the list, and my day is planned, and—after several years of doing this—I added almost nothing to the list except for new things coming into my office that day. But often the last couple of minutes I’d just sit in silence and listen.
And in that small space of silence, one morning I heard, “Keith, you are a precious child and I love you”—and I wept.
I didn’t know whether that came from God or just the deepest part of me. But I wept the first time I wrote it down, because I had never heard anything like that in my mind before. All the inner voices I’d listened to all my life seemed to be critical, pointing out faults and mistakes I had made, or was afraid I would make. And in that last few minutes I have also become aware of ideas for creative projects, many of which I later investigated and some of which I have carried out.
But some days, God seemed to be silent. That is, I didn’t feel or hear God’s presence. And I guess I had the idea that I wasn’t doing something correctly. I smile now as I think of the way I often used to get busy at such times doing religious things, as if by doing that I could get God’s attention. I would increase my time of reading the Bible, or lengthen my (talking) prayer time—focusing on intercession. But most of the time God was still silent.
I told a friend about this not feeling God’s presence. I told him that some days I didn’t seem to have any faith. He smiled and said, “You seem to think that if you don’t have a spiritual feeling you don’t have any faith?” When I looked a little puzzled, he said, “Keith, if you have the feelings that God is with you, you don’t need any faith.” He went on to tell me how someone had pointed out to him that on those days when God is silent, and there are no spiritual goose bumps, that could be an opportunity to give God a special gift—as a matter of fact about the only gift we can really ever give Him: a day of living in raw faith.
So now when God is silent, instead of feeling I’m losing out on a relationship with God, I tell God that I love Him. I say something like, “Thank you, God for this chance to tell you that I love you by risking doing what I think may be your will today and living in faith—with no feelings that you are here at all. I love you! Have a good day!”
Then I try to do something for someone in trouble, or need, a small thing, a call or visit with someone who is lonely. And often I feel much better at the end of such “silent” days in which I haven’t worried about taking my spiritual temperature.
Lord, thank you that you have given us a life of love, instead of just a religion. Help us learn to let love loose in our lives—and through them. Amen.
It’s best to start small. Give a cool cup of water to someone who is thirsty, for instance. The smallest act of giving or receiving makes you a true apprentice. You won’t lose out on a thing.”
Matt. 10:40 The Message
Have you ever tried to spend a whole hour doing nothing but listening to the voice that dwells deep in your heart? … It is not easy to enter into the silence and reach beyond the many boisterous and demanding voices of our world and to discover there the small intimate voice saying: “You are my Beloved Child, on you my favor rests.” Still, if we dare to embrace our solitude and befriend our silence, we will come to know that voice.
Henri J. M. Nouwen
Life of the Beloved
