Covering All the Bases

Spirituality Column #137
June 23, 2009
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current in Westfield (IN) newspaper

Covering All the Bases
By Bob Walters

We are advised by both scripture and tradition to lead a prayerful life, but it is often hard to know how to pray.

The Bible has plenty of advice on prayer – look up pray-prayer-praying in your Bible’s index. Make sure not to miss Matthew 6:5-15 in the Sermon on the Mount. That is Jesus’ advice on praying.

To learn how Jesus Himself actually prayed read John 17, where Jesus prays powerfully and beautifully in the Garden of Gethsemane for Himself, for His disciples, and for all believers.

Catholic, Orthodox and the varied Protestant denominations have spent centuries perfecting their prayer books, and the prayers are magnificent to recite, majestic to hear.

Some people are hooked on rote prayer – prayers we memorize. Some people think rote prayer is akin to an Eastern mantra or the “babbling like pagans” mentioned in Matthew 6:7.

Rote prayer, I think, is incredibly helpful when we don’t know where to start praying, or aren’t quite sure what it is we are personally trying to say to God. The Orthodox “Jesus Prayer” – “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me” – is often my jumping-in point for prayer.

The key to prayer is to focus on God, on Christ, and on the Holy Spirit … not on our personal needs. In John 14:26 Christ promises that God will send us the Holy Spirit to act as our Counselor. And what is prayer, really, other than seeking divine Counsel?

Ask the Holy Spirit how to pray. Ask the Lord Jesus how to pray. Ask God Almighty how to pray. You’ll find their answers will all be identical. Only by focusing on Them, however, can you possibly hope to hear Their counsel.

When my prayer focuses on me … guess whose advice I get? Mine. And if my advice were all that great, I wouldn’t be praying.

A prayer formula can be helpful. I like “PTA” - Praise, Thank and Ask.
- Praise God for being God and for all the ways He lets us know it.
- Thank God for His blessings.
- Ask God for greater closeness to Him and understanding of His will.

I think it is safe to say we are all inclined to ask God for material things or physical/emotional comfort, but it is God’s closeness and our understanding of His will that brings the peace that passes all understanding (Philippians 4:7).

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) advises the inclusion of “Confession” in prayer as well. We can’t surprise God, and confession properly tempers our requests.

Praying Continually

Spirituality Column #136
June 16, 2009
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current in Westfield (IN) newspaper

Praying Continually
By Bob Walters

If “praying continually” isn’t something that seems practical or doable given life’s demands, responsibilities and temptations, is it more likely the Bible is wrong, or that our priorities and practices are wrong?

1 Thessalonians 5:17, like the rest of the Bible, is not passive in its language. “Pray continually,” (NIV), “Pray without ceasing,” (KJV) and “Pray all the time” (MSG), three versions of this same verse, leave no wiggle room.

So … shall we all become silent monks and nuns?

There is a place for that, certainly, but not for most of us. God gave us our lives and He gave us free will … and He is eternal so He already knows how everything is going to turn out.

No matter how much we debate predestination vs. free will, we can’t surprise God or create a truth God doesn’t already know. But we can surprise ourselves by how close we can truly be to God 24/7 if we learn to think about God first and ourselves second.

Prayer doesn’t have to be complex. It’s easy to say or think the words, “Jesus Christ is Lord.” If you mean it, that’s a prayer.

The wonderful Orthodox “Prayer of the Heart” or “Jesus Prayer” is similarly spare but powerful:

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

This simple prayer lands an enormous theological punch. In 12 words it identifies Christ as Lord, God as His Father, me as a sinner and requests my most urgent, perpetual and all encompassing need: God’s mercy.

Effective prayers can be unspoken and even unformed by words. A prayer can be a momentary awareness or mental image of God. See Christ on the Cross and use that image to battle Satan’s constant incursions into our inner peace and outer well-being. Invoke the Holy Spirit; ask how to pray.

If we desperately fear sin – and we all should – praying to Jesus Christ as Lord should be an all-day, all-night, all-encompassing attitude, not just an early-morning activity. Satan never sleeps. Thankfully, neither does God.

Sure, find time in your day to focus on God on your knees in private. Read a devotional. Read scripture. Participate in a Bible Study. Serve others. Go to church. Worship. Volunteer at church. Give to the church and the needy.

But learn to glimpse God without ceasing.

You will find yourself praying continually.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) has discovered praying for money is less effective than praying to know and follow God’s will.

Hope or Hell in 2007? It's your future

Spirituality Column – #8 – January 2, 2007
Current! In Carmel newspaper

Hope or Hell in 2007? It’s your future
By Bob Walters

Hope, as we see the word in the Bible, is always about the future. Even when scripture refers to hope in the present or past, it is in one way or another talking about a future fulfilled, a desire denied, or an aspiration abandoned.

Tomorrow can be a rough ride.

With 2007 still stretching another 363 fresh tomorrows before us, for what do you hope in the New Year? What do you think you will find?

Here’s some good news. Satan isn’t there yet; he does not work in tomorrow. He works in our past and, when temptation triumphs, in our present.

How do I know Satan is in the past? Because our sin is in our past. We haven’t sinned in the future yet. That’s why Satan’s power resides in our past.

Hell is when you expect Satan, instead of Christ, to be in tomorrow.

Christ is our hope for the future because God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit – the Trinity – are eternal; They are already in tomorrow. Satan isn’t eternal, but he does have perfect knowledge of our past and, with temptation and guilt, uses our past as a constant weapon against us.

While Satan may well visit each of us each of these next 363 tomorrows of 2007 and beyond, we know that in the very end, our past goes away and Satan goes with it. Even in this life, when our past goes away, Satan’s grip slips. But Satan’s persistence is never far from us.
There is a wonderful, all-purpose prayer from the Orthodox church, called the Jesus Prayer, that I love to pray when Satan shows up:

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.”

We may not be able to dispatch our fallen nature, but we can work to dispatch Satan by focusing on Christ. Satan will try to come back, but Satan can’t threaten us from the future. He knows our weaknesses from our past and tempts us today.

Tomorrow – our hope -- is up to us.

I think the purpose of our life on earth is no secret and pretty simple … love God, and love others. What makes everything so, um, interesting, is our sin.

The only way to prevent sin is to perfect our relationship with God. I think we all know that isn’t going to happen in this life, but we try. And we always have the hope of tomorrow, where God, Christ and the Holy Spirit already reside.

Satan will only get there because he rode along with us. Hope only makes sense when Christ, the promise of our future, is in the equation.

So here is a question for the New Year: are you going to ride with Christ, or is Satan going to ride with you?

Either way, you’d better buckle up.

Walters, a Carmel resident, hopes his airbag deploys. Contact him at rlwcom@aol.com.