Hi, I’m Daniel Westfall on the channel “Pray With Me.”

Occasionally on this channel, I will review books about prayer. I want to tell you about some of the books that have been the most help to me on my journey into prayer.  But today, instead of reviewing a book about prayer, I want to WARN you about the danger of trying to develop your prayer life by reading lots of good books. What’s the danger? If you read each of the books I review in the next few months, your head will be packed with information about prayer.  But where will your prayer life be?

Here’s how Ian Rankin, a Scottish author of mystery novels, describes the reading habits of his detective John Rebus: “Rebus collected unread books. Once upon a time, he had actually read the books that he bought, but these days he seemed to have so little time. Also, he was more discriminating than he had been then…  These days, a book he disliked was unlikely to last 10 pages of his concentration. His books for reading tended to congregate in the bedroom, lying in coordinated rows on the floor like patients in a doctor’s waiting-room. One of these days he would take a holiday. . . and would take with him all of these waiting-to-be-read-or-reread books, all of that knowledge that could be his for the breaking open of a cover.” (“Naughts and Crosses”, pp. 38-39).

Maybe you too have lots of good books around your house — dusty and unread. And maybe that’s a sign you don’t need more books — you could spend some time praying instead.

If you want to try some of the books I review, but don’t want to buy them, here’s how to keep costs down. Borrow from the library.  The Edmonton library where I live has lots and lots of books on prayer. If they don’t have the book I want, they can usually get it with an interlibrary loan. Many churches have libraries. Can’t find any other source? Talk to friends. They probably have books they’ve borrowed and haven’t returned!

Another option: check Amazon.com or Indigo.com.  They have a feature where you can look inside a book. Usually, you can read the first 10 pages.  Inspector Rebus would approve.

Finally, after my stern warnings about not building a library you don’t use, here are some comforting words from author Lauren Winner: (“Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis,”  p. 75)

“Because it is easier to read about prayer than to pray, I have shelves full of books: meditations on the Lord’s Prayer by a dozen authors; scholarly accounts of prayer in the twelfth century, the eighteenth century; Hasidic wisdom on prayer; manuals for knitting a prayer rug, a prayer shawl, a prayer blanket, a prayer tree. (I don’t, alas, know how to knit.) Sometimes I think all this reading gets in the way, that the books become excuses, something to do in lieu of praying.  Other days, I know that to read about prayer is at least to indulge my desire, to acknowledge that I want this thing, that I long for it, even if this afternoon the closest I can get is reading voyeurism, greedy spying on other people at prayer.”

I’m Daniel on the channel Pray with Me, encouraging you keep alive that desire for prayer, even if the best you can do right now is to listen to other people talk about praying.

Hi, I’m Daniel Westfall on the channel “Pray with Me”.  

Today we start praying through the Lord’s Prayer, in the manner suggested by Martin Luther, where we pray one phrase at a time.  I’ll start by saying the whole prayer, then today I will pray around the first two words from the prayer, “Our Father.”

Our Father in Heaven,
    Hallowed be your name.
    Your kingdom come.
    Your will be done on earth as in heaven.
      Give us today our daily bread.
    And forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.
    Save us from the time of trial,
    And deliver us from evil.
For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory, now and forever,
Amen.

Our Father,

We have not seen you. We feel we hardly know you, but we call you by the name Father.  You are our Father because you made us, and we have inherited some of your genes, for we are made in the image of God.

We call you Father because you have cared for us.  You made us from the dust of the earth, and breathed into us the breath of life, and we became living beings.  Our every breath reminds us that you still breathe into us. Each time we wash dirt from our hands, we remember it is your grace that keeps us from turning back to dust.

When we call you Father, it reminds us of our earthly fathers.  For many of us, this triggers the fear and rejection and family dysfunction we grew up in.  
Some of us have never known our fathers, for they abandoned us before we were born.  
Some of us had fathers addicted to alcohol or drugs or violence or sex. They abused and mistreated us.  
Some of us had fathers who had post traumatic stress syndrome. They left us a legacy of fear and depression and mistrust and instability.  
Some of us had fathers who provided clothes and food and schooling, but never gave affection or a sense of belonging or love.

So when we call you Father, which of these Father-names belongs to You?

We come to you in Jesus’ name, because he taught us that you are not like the fathers we have known.  As a father has compassion on his children, so you have compassion on those who know you. Moses said, “In the wilderness, you saw how the Lord your God carried you, as a father carries his child.”  Jesus said, “How much more will your father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him?” Jesus also said that not even one sparrow will fall to the ground outside the Father’s care.

When we pray, “Our Father”, we set aside the dysfunction and fear we learned in our birth family, and we present to you our deep longing for a father who will
know us
and love us
and teach us to grow up and make us wise.  

Our Father,
take our broken lives,
take these wandering paths,
take these lost minds and mixed up emotions.
Carry us through this wilderness of life, as a true father carries his children.

Oh you who were Father to Jesus in the days of his life on earth, we hear his invitation for us to call you Father as he did.  And we share his confidence that you will do us good and not harm, that you will lead us safely through our joys and trials on earth until at last we join your one glad family in the city of God.

Amen

I’m Daniel on the channel Pray with Me.

Hi, I’m Daniel Westfall on the channel “Pray With Me.”

You may have guessed from the channel name, “Pray with Me,” that we are actually going to pray.

So … let’s find a starting point for praying together. I suggest we consider an exchange between Martin Luther and his barber, Peter Beskendorf.  Peter asked Luther to teach him something about prayer, so Luther wrote him a short letter that said “I will tell you as best I can what I do when I pray. May our Lord grant that you do it better than I!”

Here’s the simple method Luther gave Peter for praying the Lord’s Prayer. Expand and personalize each phrase of the prayer and make it your prayer. For example, Luther started with “Hallowed be your name,”  and used it as his jumping off point to ask God to destroy and root out all sorts of abominations perpetrated by people who misuse his name, and to pray that God will help his people praise him by believing the truth and living holy lives.

Now that sounds like a Martin Luther prayer, definitely not mine. But I like his basic method. Take a small section of the Bible, think on it, and chat with God about it in your own words. Not difficult.

And what will the outcome be? Do you imagine that Luther’s barber used Luther’s good advice to become a mighty man of prayer? What actually happened was not long after Luther wrote him about prayer, Peter the barber got drunk and stabbed his son-in-law. Luther intervened on his behalf to get his death penalty commuted into a life-long banishment.  

Wow. I don’t know what it is about barbers. At the end of one haircut, my barber said to me, “Did you know that barber and surgeon used to be one combined trade?  I’m thinking of claiming back some of the old territory.” And he took out a large pair of scissors, held them in front of my face and said, “How are your tonsils today?”  

I said, “My tonsils are feeling really, really good today, thank you.”  

Anyway, back to Luther’s method for prayer. That is exactly what we will do when we pray. Take a little Bible section and pray it back to God. In the next episode we start by using the method Luther suggested to pray the Lord’s prayer phrase by phrase. I hope you’ll tune in and pray the Lord’s prayer with me.

Let us pray. Jesus, your disciples said to you, “Teach us to pray.”  We invite you to do the same for us. Teach us to pray.

I’m Daniel, thanking you for joining me on the channel “Pray with Me.”

Resources

Printable PDF of Luther’s suggestions for his barber, organized in booklet form: https://wmpl.org/filed/resources/public/Literature/ASimpleWaytoPray.pdfPrintable PDF of Luther, with pages in order:  http://online.nph.net/media/SampleFiles/PDF/0600751.pdf

Best article, which includes the sad ending: http://themelios.thegospelcoalition.org/article/a-lesson-from-peter-the-barber

Hi, I’m Daniel Westfall on the channel “Pray With Me”.

Today, a simple question: “What is prayer?”

I start with the Bible, a holy book, shared in part by Jews, Protestants, and Catholics.  The Protestant Bible I use is made up of 66 shorter books. The first book is “Genesis”, which means “Beginnings”, and has the famous stories about creation, Adam and Eve, and Noah and the flood.

Genesis first uses the word “pray” in the story of a man called Abraham.  The story goes like this: God called Abraham to go to the Promised Land and God made a bunch of big promises to Abraham.  But as Abraham wandered around the new land and got rich herding sheep and goats and camels, it didn’t look like God was going to deliver on the big promises any time soon.

A king saw Abraham’s wife, Sarah, and Abraham could see that the king found his wife attractive. Abraham introduced her as his sister, not as his wife, and the king conscripted her into his harem. A messy and inconvenient situation!   But Abraham didn’t have to sort out the mess, because God stepped in. God appeared to Abimilech, the king, in a dream and said,, “You’re like dead meat, man, because that woman you took? She’s married to one of my favorite people.”

Abimilech says, “Whoa, I didn’t mean it! He told me they were brother and sister, not husband and wife.”  “I know,” says God, “that’s why I kept you from touching her. But now, return this man’s wife for he is a prophet. He will pray for you and you will live.”

Did you hear the word “pray” in there?  It’s God telling Abimilech in a dream: “Return this guy’s wife, and get him to pray for you.”

A summary:  Abraham creates a problem for himself, for his wife, and for Abimelech. God sorts things out, and Abraham gets to pray for the person he caused trouble for.  

There are some helpful lessons in this story, not all of them about prayer.

1. The first lesson is, Hey! If you’re in a relationship, don’t pretend your partner is your sister.
2. The second lesson is, Even if you do something stupid like that, God might choose to protect you and her anyway, like he protected Abraham and Sarah.
3. The next lesson is one of the most important lessons in the Bible about how God works and how to understand the Bible.  The Bible is not all do’s and don’ts. It’s not just a bunch of instructions on how to live the right life. Lots of the Bible is stories–complicated stories–about complex characters who did good and bad, and about people who told the truth, half-truths, and sometimes outright lies that got them into trouble. The Bible doesn’t explain what all the stories mean. Sometimes it just tells the story.  The amazing and encouraging thing is that sooner or later God shows up in most of the stories.
4. And finally, remember this about prayer:  When you get yourself or someone else into deep trouble, and are clueless about how fix the mess you’ve made, guess what?  God is prepared to show up in the middle of the mess and help.

That’s it for today’s topic, “What is prayer?”  If you’re strong on logic, you are probably thinking, “But he didn’t  answer the question. He didn’t tell us what prayer is. He just told us a weird Bible story that has the word “prayer” in it.

Instead of trying to figure it out, why don’t you pray with me my prayer that comes from the story: “Dear God, I’ve made a mess of my life and I know it’s my fault and I don’t know what to do.  Can you please show up in the middle of my story, like you did in the middle of Abraham’s, and start to set things right?”

I’m Daniel, signing off this episode of the  channel “Pray with Me”.

Hi.  I’m Daniel Westfall, on the Channel “Pray with Me”.  

If you are  like me and have an ongoing problem trying to pray, perhaps you are  also like me in thinking, “It would be helpful to have someone to blame.” And I want to suggest that we blame Jesus, because something he said creates a huge problem for people who try to pray.  

So what problem did Jesus create? I think it’s that promise he made, “If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”  Six times in the gospels he said, “Whatever you ask.”  Wow.  Feels like winning a lottery.  I can ask for beachfront property in southern California. I can ask for health and happiness. I can pray that God will destroy all my enemies. Why not? Didn’t Jesus say, “Whatever you ask”?  

But of course, when we start praying, we discover quickly we don’t get whatever we ask. Doesn’t work. Not even when we request things we know the world needs, like when I pray that I will become patient and not so cynical.

So . . . are you interested in helping me solve the problem of prayer that Jesus created? Here are three suggestions.  

The first solution, offered by many teachers, is a series of lectures on “How to pray the right way so God will give you what you really want.”  These teachers suggest you need to pray more intensely. Pump up your faith with spiritual exercises because when you pray with enough muscle in your mindset, God is more likely to notice and respond.

If you feel this is what your prayer life needs, I suggest you Google the word “Pray” to find that kind of teaching.  It’s widely available.

A second way to deal with the “Whatever you ask” problem is to focus on the conditions.  Jesus said, “If you BELIEVE, you will receive whatever you ask,” and “Whatever you ask IN MY NAME.” Looks like it’s not Jesus who’s the problem, it’s YOU.  If you’re not getting whatever you ask, it must be that you are not believing correctly, or that you are not asking properly IN HIS NAME.

If you feel this is what your prayer life needs, I suggest you Google ”How to pray with faith” or “How to pray in Jesus’ name” to find that kind of teaching.  It too is widely available.

But if you’ve tried both those suggestions, and you are still stalled out and unmotivated in your prayer life — well, that leaves you with me still wondering how to solve the problem of prayer. In that case, here’s my most important prayer secret: It’s simple: I don’t have a solution to the problem of prayer.  All I have is some hope that when Jesus said, “Whatever you ask”, he didn’t say it to mock me, but to share with me his kind and generous heart.  “Whatever you ask” is an invitation that comes to us from the heart of God. And it is an invitation for us to begin a journey into the heart of God.  The beginning point and the ending point for this journey truly is “Whatever you ask”. I’d like you to join me here Monday to Friday starting October 1 for some short talks, short prayers, and short book reviews.   These talks, prayers and reviews will share my journey into the heart of God, and will invite you to come with me to that place. I call it the place of prayer.

I’m Daniel on the channel “Pray with me”.