The Discipline of Intimacy

The Joy and Awe of Walking with God

Charlie Cleverly

• Publisher: David C Cook
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780830778553
• eBook ISBN: 9780830778560
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

People who pray are those who break through, who hold on, who stand in the gap, who will not be silent, and even who change history. But they are also those who wait in the silence, sometimes in the sorrows, who contemplate His beauty, and stand in awe. The Discipline of Intimacy looks at the dynamic paradox of prayer: knowing how to be still and silent but also how to plead and speak. Knowing how to let go but also how to hold on. For individuals and church groups, The Discipline of Intimacy is for anyone seeking help to develop their relationship with God, particularly where once-passionate hearts may have lost their spark. With accompanying videos and questions for reflection and discussion, readers and participants will be introduced to practical and biblically-rooted ways to experience the intimacy with God they have longed for, and will have the tools to cultivate a life that is characterized by this closeness.

Part 1

Prayer as Our
First Love

The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul.

- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward

Introduction

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,

God’s breath in man returning to his birth,

…

Engine against the Almighty, sinner’s tower,

Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

…

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

Exalted manna, gladness of the best,

Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,

…

The land of spices; something understood.

- George Herbert

But Jacob replied, ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me.’

- Genesis 32:26

But which of them has stood in the council of the LORD

to see or to hear his word?

Who has listened and heard his word?

- Jeremiah 23:18

Nostalgia for Heaven

The brilliant priest and scholar George Herbert chose Prayer as the subject matter of his greatest writing. He describes it as a banquet, the age of angels, the breath of God returning man to a new birth. He calls it an ‘engine against the Almighty’, then ‘softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss’. It is as if he runs out of adjectives of sweetness! Prayer bridges the gap between God and humankind. Later he sums it up, saying it is: ‘Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed’. Here there is a glimpse of prayer not as being something we do to reach a distant God, but as something that God also does, meeting us halfway. ¹

This insight – we reach up, and he reaches down – helps us to understand the longing in the human heart for prayer and communion with God – and also the grace to enjoy it.

This is a book about ‘open hands’ – abandoning ourselves to divine providence and giving up all our will to him. It is also a book about connection with God and how people throughout history have held on to him and not let him go till he blesses.

People who pray fall often into one of two camps: those who wait, who stand ‘in the council of the LORD’ (Jer. 23:18), who may even say they don’t really pray – they contemplate; and those who want to break through, who hold on, who stand in the gap, who will not be silent.

These two gifted groups of people would do well if they can learn from one another.

For I believe this is the eternal paradox of prayer: knowing how to be still and silent but also how to plead and speak. Knowing how to let go but also how to hold on. Some prefer activism or what Timothy Keller has called ‘prophetic prayer’. ² Others prefer silence and abandonment in the presence of God – what Henri Nouwen calls praying ‘with open hands’.

I write for both.

I write for all those who have a nostalgia for heaven, hardly knowing how to find their way home; for those who are searching for an anchor to the Source of Life.

I write for those who are parched and thirsty in a desert of ceaseless activity, who know that there is a river but cannot find their way to it. It is a question of survival; it is a question of desperation. The fact is, there is a well which becomes a stream of inner renewal that can be unblocked.

In the years since the first version of The Discipline of Intimacy was written, Anita and I moved from Paris, France, to lead St Aldates Church – the wonderful, large, creative company of called-out people at the heart of Oxford in the UK. Oxford is a crossroads of the nations, an ‘Antioch’ where people can have Epiphany encounters with God and go on to change the world. It is also a ‘normal city’ of families and single people – of rich and poor and many homeless.

It is a kind of ‘greenhouse community,’ of people incubating and warming up in God’s presence to bring hopeful transformation and change for the world. And this includes hundreds of young people discovering prayer.

But while this warming up goes on, Europe is in the middle of winter: atheism and anti-Christian sentiment bring their icy blast and Oxford is sometimes a leader in this field – the home of the new atheism and a place where people don’t hesitate to speak against the things of God. This too is a paradox – and your situation may be too.

I write for those who know that something is tugging on their heart calling them to pray. Deep is calling to deep. Like the sleeping Bride of the Song of Songs, you have awoken in the night to the sound of your Beloved and you want to let him in!

I write for all those who are weary and heavy laden and who long to find rest daily in him.

Hope in a Place of Paradox

The twenty-first-century post-modern, post-Christian world is a place of paradox. Despite more ‘connectivity’ than ever before in history, this is a disconnected world. Isolation abounds. We may have perfectly designed scandi coffee shops and public spaces but the private space of people’s hearts may be crumbling with mental health issues, breakdown or lack of relationships, and geographical disconnection. There is a longing for intimacy – but a fear of real intimacy – ‘ghosting’ on dating apps, and phobias concerning commitment. All of this is spiritual and to do with the alienation of humankind from God. All can be healed if we understand prayer!

We live in a culture searching and longing for spirituality. Education Authorities are opening the door to prayer spaces in schools, and Health Centres are investing in mindfulness therapies which are close to contemplative prayer practices, as we will discover.

Ever since our ancestors walked with God in the garden of paradise, there has been a Holy Longing for connection with God. Ever since the mythic story of the Fall, we could say that the whole of the story of the Bible speaks of this longing in humankind to find a way back home to a ‘promised land’ where there is connection to God.

Alienation and sadness resulting from separation from God describe our human history. And the Bible tells of God’s own desire to find a people for himself, and for that people to know their God and be in his presence. Ultimately when Jesus came, he broke down the dividing wall of hostility to bring us communion with God. Through the cross we have access to the presence of the Father.

The delight of union and communion with the living God is called prayer.

For ten years I lived and worked in Paris: a particularly fiercely secular environment. Jean-Paul Sartre said, ‘I caught the Holy Spirit in the basement of my mind and flung him out of there.’ Yet this didn’t bring the freedom he sought: ‘Atheism is a long and cruel business. I believe I’ve been through it to the end. For the last years I’ve been like a man who no longer has any reason to live.’ ³ Many have done as Sartre. Any vestige of God-ward impulse they have uprooted in a desi...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: Prayer as Our First Love
• Introduction: Nostalgia for Heaven
• 1. John on Patmos: ‘First Love Christianity’
• 2. Jesus: The Master Plan of Prayer
• 3. Prayer as a ‘Rule of Life’
• Part 2: Prophetic Prayer
• 4. Abraham: Prayer as Pleading with God
• 5. Hannah: Prayer Bringing to Birth
• 6. >Joel: Calling Leaders and People
• 7. Joel: Restoring Family Prayer
• 8. Isaiah: Praying for Nations
• Part 3: Exile Prayer
• 9. Set Apart and Seeking God: Scenes from the Prayer Life of Daniel
• 10. Lamentations: Learning a Language of Lament
• 11. Esther: ‘For Such a Time as This’
• Part 4: Prayer as Abiding and Asking
• 12. Paul: Caught Up into Heaven with His Feet on the Ground
• 13. Seven Prayer Burdens of Christ
• 14. Prayer When God Is Silent
• Notes
• For Further Reading