Simple Prayer

Learning to Speak to God with Ease

Charlie Dawes

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780830844814
• eBook ISBN: 9780830881079
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Sometimes our walk with God seems so difficult. We struggle to find the time to pray, the words to say, and the way to pray them. Are we making prayer more complicated than it needs to be?Charlie Dawes is a pastor and professor who understands both the desires and the challenges of deepening our prayer lives. He has identified simple, biblical prayers that will help you unlock the mystery of conversing with God by paring our words down to their most elemental level. By focusing our prayers, we can open up a new way of relating with God that we have never before experienced.Simple prayer is far from simplistic. Instead, it will help you connect with God at a heart level that cannot be mastered with words alone.

1

What Is Simple Prayer?

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

I grew up in a house where prayer was a normal part of our daily lives. I can’t remember how many times I would wake up for school before the sun peeked out from the covers of night to find my mom sitting in a chair in the living room praying and reading her Bible. Often before heading into the bathroom to shower the slumber away, I would listen; I would learn. I heard her pray for a lot of things, most of them now forgotten, but what I remember are the prayers for me—prayers for protection, prayers to sense the nearness of God throughout the day. It was the simplicity of the phrases that made the impact.

It seemed there was a level of intimacy that did not require an excess of words. To flood the moment with wordiness would almost violate the relationship. When my mom would pray, “Be with him, Lord,” it was a prayer filled with vision and hope. It was a prayer immersed in a trust that the Holy Spirit would surround me with protection, provision, and power. God’s response to the prayer had nothing to do with the word count but only with the unbridled dependency my mom had on God. Hearing her simple prayers had a profound impact on my life. Little did I know that learning to pray simple prayers would yield large returns in my own spiritual journey.

Simple prayer is a prayer of intimacy and confidence that our prayers give way to the deeper cry of our hearts. Before we can delve into an investigation of simple prayer, we need to make certain of our understanding of what prayer is and what it isn’t. This chapter explores the distinctions between simple prayer and many common understandings of prayer, and it suggests ways to launch out into this ancient prayer model to experience a depth in our spirituality.

MISSING THE POINT OF IT ALL

Adventures in Missing the Point is one of my favorite book titles1. For me it describes well my personal spiritual journey. Sometimes I have great intentions but miss the target. Prayer has been one of those adventures. I have made prayer transactional, trying to use it to elicit a specific response from God, often for my own gain, and I have been too concerned about my prayer performance.

Prayer shouldn’t be seen as a mechanism to get what we want from God; it is an opportunity to recognize that God is present and to respond. Prayer provides the entryway into interaction with a God who is here and now. As you read this, he is with you; when you stop reading this he will still be with you (but don’t stop yet; we are just getting started). The power of the incarnational ministry of Jesus is that he is among us.

The Message translation puts it this way: “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14 The Message). Even with the knowledge that God is near and desires to dwell among us, it is easy to slip into a transactional mode when we pray. We all have needs that are pressing, and we serve a God who is our source and supplier, but if we see prayer primarily though this lens, we trade intimacy for a transaction. The invitation of Jesus is an intimate one. Intimacy says, “Come, be known, and then get to know in exchange.” Intimacy promises trust and love abounding. Intimacy is what we crave, but often our prayers seem like a wish list offered for fulfillment.

When a transaction is substituted for intimacy, we are left with things as empty and unsatisfying as the sex industry. At the core of the sex industry are people exchanging and destroying relational intimacy because intimacy is viewed as a commodity for sale. This commodity requires much less investment, but the reward is an altered reality and a veiled experience of love and pleasure. True intimacy is so much greater but requires so much more.

Likewise, rather than seeking intimacy in prayer we are tempted to turn prayer into a performance. On paper this is obviously wrong, but in practice it is much more difficult to root out. So much in life is straightforward but difficult to execute. For me, physical exercise is something that I adopted regularly a year and a half ago, but the greatest challenge to my progress is the simplest thing to identify: cereal. Oh, how I love cereal! I am a convicted cereal killer. I crave a bowl in the afternoon and just before bed, and this bowl will not be filled with anything that the wonderful people at Kashi have created. It will be filled with berries—crunch berries, that is. I have a deep love for the cereal created for kids. I have watched my health progress elevate when I reduce and eliminate the sugary cereals, but how many times do I return to the forbidden aisle and load the cart with more of the Captain’s delicacies? More times than I care to admit. Diet adjustment is simple to identify but not always easy to put into action.

This is what prayer often feels like: easy to define yet challenging to implement. Prayer is critical to the spiritual life, but if you are anything like me, prayer leaves you with stage fright. More often than I want to admit, I find myself grasping for the right lines to deliver as if prayer were some type of performance.

I have to be reminded that prayer isn’t a show. I know this cognitively, but somewhere between what I know and how I behave, something is lost. Prayer isn’t about putting our personal righteousness on display in order to impress. Nor is our spirituality a museum for people to view our most valuable accomplishments and endeavors. When the disciples press Jesus to teach them how to pray, he offers them these thoughts before offering a rhythm to model their prayers by: “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” (Matthew 6:2-3 The Message).

GROWING IN INTIMACY

The longer I live, the more I come to find this to be true: just because something is simple doesn’t mean it is simplistic. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is a simple command, but our obedience to it is not simplistic. The gospel is offered in a way that allows the unlearned to have complete access and at the same time provides the scholar depths to explore. Simple prayer is an invitation to a prayer life that is focused on being with God. It is being direct and to the point. It is intended to be honest and raw. It is both well-written poetry and fragmented sentences that only make sense to God. When I sit on the couch with my wife, Nicole, who I have known for nearly twenty years, many words are not needed. It is not because we have nothing to say, it is because somewhere deep in our souls we are connected on a level where words are not needed to capture the emotions our hearts communicate. Deep calls unto deep.

I remember being young and Nicole telling me that she loved me. It was exhilarating to hear those words as a teenager and think we were writing the greatest love story ever told. After nearly two decades filled with thousands of moments when those three words—I love you—have filled the space between us, she is now communicating something far deeper than those words used to communicate. This depth is not demonstrated by the word count or word choice but by the life that we have lived around that statement. I love you means “We have had some tough days, but I’m still here.” I love you means “Thank you for the laughs and for being there in the tears.” Sometimes I love you means “Thanks for taking out the trash” and even “I forgive you when you forget.” Simple prayer is this type of communion with God. It is allowing the life that we live around our prayers to provide a depth in our prayers.

Simple prayer is accompanied by a desire for a deeper experience in prayer, which comes from a passionate heart that wants to move beyond dialogue about God. The desire to know must move past a rogue thought and into a rhythm of thoughts that desire to know and be known. “Prayers are tools2, but with this clarification: prayers are not tools for doing or getting, but for being and becoming,” write Eugene Peterson and James Watkins. They go on to add, “Most students of the human condition3 agree that prayer is basic to our existence. Prayer reaches into the unknown for whatever we sense, deep within us, will provide wholeness, or for what we hope, far off, will bring salvation.” What is the outcome of prayer? What are the desired results? We must keep these questions close at hand in any meaningful instruction on prayer.

A Scottish theologian warned that “no one ought to undertake4 [writing about prayer] who has not spent more toil in the practice of prayer than on its principle.” It is one thing to study prayer but another thing to practice prayer. This book is a collection of prayers that are tried and true in my life and in the lives of others. This book serves as an invitation for you to join in. Simon Chan offers this challenge: “Theory is not a substitution5 for practice; rather, it supports practice inasmuch as it explains the significance of it. Prayer, like everything else about the Christian life, begins with our incorporation into Christ.” Christian prayer seeks the ultimate outcome of union with God. Simple prayer is a mechanism for this to take place.

A FAMILIAR SIMPLE PRAYER

One vital aspect of oneness with God is bringing your whole life before him and offering it to him without restraint. Most of us have interacted with the Lord’s Prayer, though it has too often become a prayer that is rehearsed rather than a prayer model that helps us pray simply. I have been in worship gatherings where the Lord’s Prayer is recited without passion or a tangible faith that the words we are saying are true. Sometimes the number of words we use keeps us from focusing on what we are really saying. Simple prayer focuses on making the words count because our words matter. Simple prayer allows our hearts to be precise and focused while providing a vehicle for our minds to descend into our hearts. We pray in such a way that our prayers become the cadence to which we live.

The Lord’s Prayer can be a model for simple prayer. It can provide a template on how a few purposed words can become a powerful prayer. Jesus used this prayer to teach the disciples to pray, and we can use it to pray simply. Take a moment and get reacquainted with the prayer.

Our Father in heaven6,

hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come,

your will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread,

and forgive us our debts,

as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil.

For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever. Amen. [May it be so.]

The danger in our familiarity with the Lord’s Prayer is that the prayer loses its potency in our lives because we assume we have matured beyond it. We think that we graduate from the simple things of our faith the further we travel, yet nothing could be further from the truth.

Now let’s focus on a phrase and allow that to become a simple prayer: Your kingdom come.

This phrase captures the central theme in the Gospels—the coming kingdom of God is being established and experienced in the face of tyrannical rulers. The Lord’s Prayer was an eschatological reminder that the power Jesus’ followers saw around them was not the ultimate power. This prayer demonstrated that the rhythm of life Jesus’ followers found themselves in was not the method of living they should buy into. The words are powerful in the midst of the fuller prayer but also stand alone very nicely.

Close your eyes and begin to recite this phrase over and over. Prayer is not done well when done in a hurry. It is important to not hurry but to relax. With every utterance, allow your mind and heart to grasp each word and give space for a deeper meaning to emerge in your heart. Simple prayer leads us into deeper communion with God.

Simple prayer is similar to the practice of sacred reading or lectio divina. This ancient practice is a wonderful way to read the Scriptures. Readers take a passage of Scripture, and as they read they trust the Spirit of God to illuminate a word or a phrase for them to sit with. In the same way that our reading of the Bible can be diluted by trying to read too much at one time, our prayers can lose their focus when we are trying to say too much and don’t leave space for the Spirit to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Mark Batterson
• Introduction
• 1 What Is Simple Prayer?
• 2 Simple Prayer of the Heart
• 3 Simple Prayer of Faith
• 4 Simple Prayer of Forgiveness
• 5 Simple Prayer of Unity
• 6 Simple Prayer of Restoration
• 7 Simple Words to Pray
• 8 Simple Prayer of Finding Your Way
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Praise for Simple Prayer
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright