One of my favorite board games is Monopoly. I’ve always enjoyed the bartering and trading and the joy of bankrupting someone when they land on Boardwalk with a hotel. It came as a surprise to me, however, when I went to play my friends in college and discovered that the rules were different. We set up the board and one of my friends yelled out, “I’m the car!” “Wait a minute,” I said, “We have to roll to see who gets to choose their piece first.” Another friend chimed in, “Roll? No, that’s not how you do it. The oldest person gets to choose first.” “Wait, I always played that the last winner got to choose.” “Whatever happened to playing rock, paper, scissors to see who chooses.” It would have probably had been wise for us to have just stopped then, because the whole game was just a comedy of errors when it came to the rules. Some said you put the fines on free parking. Some played that you had to buy a property you landed on or it went up for auction. Some said you could trade mortgaged properties and others said you couldn’t. One guy landed on a railroad, paid the rent, and then proceeded to move his piece to another railroad saying that he paid the fair so he’s riding the rail. One said that no one could purchase property until the first person had passed go. Two people got into an argument over whether you could or could not collect rent when in jail and you would have thought we shot someone’s dog when we told another person they couldn’t buy a hotel because there weren’t enough houses. I’ll just say this – if you ever come over to my house to play monopoly, be prepared to sign a written document stating the “official” rules that we will follow.
When it comes to prayer, there are no “rules” or “secret formulas” that we need to follow in order to get what we want. In fact, Jesus speaks specifically against this in Matthew 6:7, “When you pray, don’t babble on and on as people of other religions do. They think their prayers are answered only by repeating their words again and again.” If there is one “rule” or “secret” to prayer it is that there are no rules and secrets to prayer. God isn’t looking for key words or actions in order to bring about answers to prayer. Now sometimes our actions may be directly linked to receiving an answer, but God isn’t holding back. Sometimes God is waiting on us to act. If we were to pray, for example, that God would help us to lose weight, then we must be willing to do our part of diet and exercise to help bring that about. Sure, the God of the universe could just instantly transform us back into the size and shape we were in high school, but I would say that’s not typically how God works. What I mean when I say that God isn’t waiting on any action for us is that God isn’t waiting for us to do something worthy of His attention before He listens to our prayers. God is listening and He is willing to answer our prayers if we are willing to turn our lives over to Him and seek Him in prayer.
So, if there are no “rules”, then how do we pray? The short answer is, “Just talk to God.” It’s simple and it’s true, but maybe not all that helpful. It’s a lot like the advice you may hear from someone on how to have a long and happy marriage, “Just talk to each other.” True? Yes, but not all that helpful. How do we talk to God? For something that is intended to be so simple, prayer is often very difficult for us. “No rules” doesn’t mean that there aren’t guidelines for us to help us develop a deeper prayer life. What it does mean is that there is no way for us to get it wrong. There is no one right way to pray, but there are helpful ways for us to guide our prayers. It’s a lot like a drawing that your toddler brings to you that’s really nothing more than a couple of red scribbles and a blue smear. You look at it and it looks like a bird eating an elephant while snow skiing. Your kid tells you it’s a picture of you riding a horse. Is it a good picture? Probably not the best your child will ever draw for you, but as a parent there is no such thing as a bad picture. You are thrilled that your child has drawn a picture for you and you cherish it. In the same way God is thrilled when we share our lives with Him in prayer. And while we are learning to pray we may offer some awkward prayers to God, but God is still thrilled to be with us and to spend time with us in prayer.
So, if we have no rules, how do we start in prayer? While I think there are probably hundreds of ways to approach God in prayer, there are some simple keys that will benefit any approach we take to God in prayer. I want to take the advice of scripture this morning from Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know that I am God.” I think if we can grasp the truth of these words, we can build a healthy practice of prayer that will grow within us and help us discover and live the life that God intends.
First, we must learn to “be.” It may not seem obvious to us by how we live, but God did not create us as human doings but as human beings. We were not created to fill our lives, as we all are prone to do, with the business of life. We live in a phenomenally fast paced and busy world. We are constantly on the move and constantly doing and it has created within us and within society a push for instantaneous gratification. Part of the struggle I have in faith and in prayer, as I’m sure some of you have, is that prayer just isn’t fast enough. I pray and I expect, if I am truthful with myself, instant results. I expect, for example, that when I pray that God will help me to be more loving to those around me that I will instantly have a heart of love and compassion. I pray that God will help me build a better relationship with my kids and then I get frustrated with myself and with God when it doesn’t seem like I’m able to change. We have come to expect instant answers in life and in prayer. And our busy lifestyle inherently pushes out those things that we don’t immediately see as beneficial. We are so constantly on the move and doing, that we fail to take time to be.
I’m sure you’ve all seen or heard the illustration of the empty jar that a speaker brought to a conference and started to fill up. He started by putting some large rocks in the jar and asking the question, “Is it full?” The crowd, I guess seeing some of the other materials on the table, said, “No.” He then poured in gravel and shook it around and again asked, “Is it full?” The answer, of course, was “No.” He then poured in sand and shook that into the jar. “Is it full?” “Not just yet,” the speaker said, interrupting the crowd to pour water into the jar, finally filling it completely. “So what is the point of this demonstration?” he asked. One person raised their hand and said, “No matter what you think is going on in life, there is always room for more.” “No, the illustration is about putting things in priority. If I had started with the water and sand, there would be no room left for the big rocks. We must start with the big, important things in life and then make room for everything else.” To be a human being, we must make being a priority and make our life of faith and prayer a priority for us.
Not only must we “be”, but we must “be still.” Stillness, isn’t a virtue that we are often honored for in life. Society says, “Move or get out of the way.” Being still isn’t something that often benefits us. But in our life of prayer, stillness is vital. So what do I mean by stillness? I mean we need to literally be still and quiet before God. When we are willing to set aside the distractions of life and to seek God, then we can grow in prayer.
I don’t know if your life is like mine, but stillness and quiet are rare commodities. On those rare occasions that Krystal or I get a moment of peace from the kids, that time is usually filled with the constant demands of life. Laundry has to get done. Bills have to be paid. There is always cleaning to do or correspondence to catch up on or a thousand other things that are always present to suck any time from our lives. In the middle of all of this we are supposed to find time to spend in prayer? I think this is where we have our fatal flaw of our faith life – we look to find time instead of making time. It is true that there are only so many hours in the day, but if we truly believe that God needs to be a priority in life, then He must also be a priority in our daily calendar. Stillness and time only come when we make them. If we want to “be still” then we must make a place where we can be still. We must find a place and a pattern where we can build stillness into life and take advantage of that stillness to spend time with God in prayer. For me, that stillness comes in the early morning. Before the house is up and stirring I’m usually up beginning my day. That is my time for stillness, although I will readily admit that far often than I want I let the issues of the day creep into my still morning. But I do know that when I take that still time and seek God in prayer, that my day is better and my life is better. For you it may be the morning as well. Maybe it’s those moments of rest when your little one finally goes down for a nap. Maybe it’s a long commute. Maybe you’re a night owl and then end of the day is a perfect time for you. All I know is that stillness doesn’t come, we have to make it. We have to escape the distractions of the world around us as much as we can and seek God’s presence, holy moments that will refresh us and grow us in faith.
We must “be” and we must “be still”, but probably most importantly we must know that God is God. This is important on two fronts. First, we must realize that God is God and that we are not. Sometimes this is hard, because we want to be God. We want to be the ones in charge and we want to be the ones making decisions about our lives. We’re a lot like kids that are growing up and testing out their wills. We want to make the decisions about what is important in life, but we aren’t always prepared to make the right choices. If we gave our kids the choice of a sack full of left over Halloween candy or a healthy meal for dinner, which are our kids going to choose? I’d say it’s a rare kid that isn’t going to choose the candy. But we as parents aren’t going to let them make that choice because we are going to watch out for their lives. There will be times that we will allow them to make some bad choices in hopes that they will learn, but we will always hold the ultimate call on their lives. God, in the same way, is God over us. He is God and we are not and He is looking out for us, even when we aren’t making good decisions for ourselves. It may not seem like it at times, particularly when our bad decisions lead to very rough lives, but God is looking out for us and from his eternal perspective is watching over our eternal good. Even the hardest things in life God is seeking to use to draw us to Him. The things we choose, the things others choose, the evil that befalls us that has no explanation – all of these God can use to draw us to Him. If we are to build a deeper life of prayer, it must be founded on the idea that God is God and that we are not. Only then can we seek God’s will instead of ours even as we seek to ask for His blessing in very specific ways. I firmly believe that God does want us to ask for specific answers in prayer, but I also know that it is God who will ultimately answer prayer in His own way. And this is where the second aspect of knowing God comes in – knowing that God is always God. God is everlasting and His love and grace do not change. We can trust that God will always be God over all aspects of our life and He is powerful enough to handle the largest to the smallest of worries in our lives. To know that God is God is to trust that God is powerful enough to handle our lives and to trust that the great God of heaven wants to bring His best into our daily living.
When it comes to prayer, it’s important to remember that there are no rules. God hasn’t laid one way for us to pray and only one that will be acceptable. But that doesn’t mean that we cannot benefit from setting our prayer in a framework of guidelines. Our prayer life will grow if we learn to “be still and know God is God.” We must make our faith a priority and learn to be instead of do, we must make time to be still and we must trust that God is God and remember that we are not. When we live within this framework, then God will bless our time of prayer and we will grow deeper in our faith and our love for Christ.