Come Quickly

A Praying Life
Paul Miller

Look how God used the [Babylonian] captivity, this seemingly unfinished story, to prepare for the coming of his Son and the birth of the church: [during the 500 years of silence between the OT and NT]

• God used the destruction of the temple and the removal of the Israelites to Babylon to create the synagogue structure, a precursor to the local church. If temple worship had continued uninterrupted, the early church would not have had a model for local congregations. They learned to worship God without a temple.
• The Old Testament canon was organized during this time. Severed from their land in a virtual spiritual desert, the Israelites clung to their scrolls. That gave the early church the category of Old Testament, which in turn created the New Testament. God purified Israel of mixing with other religions.
• The dispersion of the Jewish people provided a base from which Paul and others could easily spread the gospel.
• Israel was forever purified of outward idolatry. Never again would the Jewish people worship idols. Monotheism became permanently central to Israel. This is the foundation of Christian thought and Western civilization. Because the Jews became devout monotheists, they got upset when Jesus claimed to be God. When Jesus claimed to be the unique Son of God, the high priest tore his robe and delivered Jesus up to be crucified.  

God was weaving a spectacular tapestry through the suffering of Israel. Without the Babylonian captivity there would be no Israel, no cross, no Christianity, and no Western civilization. Haggai was right. The glory of the new temple was greater than Solomon’s.

But the Jewish poet who wept by the rivers of Babylon never saw the end of the story.  Like all the heroes of faith in Hebrews 11, he lived with the story unfinished in his lifetime.  He lived by faith…

The first time I took Kim with me on a speaking retreat, a little girl came up to her as we were finishing dinner and asked, “Why don’t you speak?” Kim leaned over her speech computer, which was propped on the table, and typed, “I will have a beautiful voice in heaven.” We walked away with tears in our eyes.

Some stories aren’t tied up until heaven. Because of Kim, Jill longs for heaven. This desire permeates her conversation. Jill doesn’t say, “It’s a beautiful day outside.” She says, “This would be a good day for Jesus to come back. Everyone can see him.” Jill wants to go home.

Living in unfinished stories draws us into God’s final act, the return of Jesus. While we wait for his return, it is easy to predict the pattern of the last days. The book of Revelation pictures a suffering church, dying as creation itself is unraveling. Through suffering God will finally make his church beautiful and reveal his glory. In the desert you see his glory. In the last days the bride will be made beautiful, pure, waiting for her lover. Come quickly, Lord Jesus.

How Would You Love Someone Without Prayer?

A Praying Life
Paul Miller

I woke up in the middle of the night recently with this rather odd question in my mind: How would you love someone without prayer? I mean, what would it look like if you loved someone but couldn’t pray for that person? It was a puzzle to me. I couldn’t figure out what it would look like. Love without being able to pray feels depressing and frustrating, like trying to tie a knot with gloves on. I would be powerless to do the person any real good. People are far too complicated; the world is far too evil; and my own heart is too off center to be able to love adequately without praying. I need Jesus.

I Had Not Prayed

A Praying Life
Paul Miller

Bob didn’t particularly like me – he hadn’t for quite a few years. He didn’t like the way I looked, dressed, or talked. And that was just for openers. Every couple of years his anger would flare out at me, but generally he just treated me like a servant. Over time, the mellowing and acceptance that often occur in relationships didn’t happen. In fact, Bob got more irritated with me.

Then it dawned on me that I’d tolerated and even loved Bob, but I had not prayed regularly for him. I had assumed that his attitude toward me was like blue sky, part of the backdrop of life that doesn’t change. I am constantly discovering areas of my life like this. So I wrote up a prayer card for Bob and scribbled 1 Peter 3:4 on it, and I began to pray daily that God would gentle his critical spirit. Then I waited…

My prayer for Bob had a familiar threefold pattern. First, I wrote the prayer down. Then I watched for God to work while I prayed. Finally, God provided an opportunity where I “worked” the prayer request. By worked I mean that God involved me in my own prayers, often in a physical and humbling way.

Look at how similar this pattern is to Jesus’ description of how the kingdom works: The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.

[Mark 4:26-29] Notice the three-step pattern: planting, waiting, and then working again at the harvest. Jesus’ description of how the kingdom works is alien from how many of us pray. First, it seldom occurs to us to plant the seed of thoughtful praying because we think people like Bob don’t change. Or, prayer just feels too easy, almost like a cop-out.

Second, if we do pray, we don’t watch and wait. We want the answer now. We grumble right at the point when God is about to do his biggest work. When Bob suffers, we think that karma has finally kicked in. Bob is just getting what he had coming. We’d likely not admit it, but we are tempted to enjoy his suffering. And people like Bob don’t suffer quietly.

Finally, we don’t recognize the harvest when it comes. We are so cut off from an agrarian society that we forget that Jesus’ image of reaping is hard work. We reverse the kingdom pattern of ask (seed), watch (growth), and work (harvest). Instead of working in partnership with God, we attack the problem. We tell Bob what a pain in the neck he is. Then we watch the relationship disintegrate. Finally, when nothing is working, we might pray. But by that time we’ve concluded that Bob is hopeless and God is powerless. We decide that prayer doesn’t work.

But what really doesn’t work is us. For starters, we only prayed after we’d mucked up the situation. Then, by praying at the end, we didn’t allow any time for God to weave his story. Secretly we want him to answer our prayer by doing a magic trick on the other person’s soul. Our ‘prayer doesn’t work” often means “you didn’t do my will, in my way, in my time.”

Nothing Flows

A Praying Life
Paul Miller

Remember that we are not normal children learning how to pray. Like Kim, we are disabled by the Fall. We have a disorder that mars our ability to talk with God. As Kim needs a speech computer in order to communicate, so we need written aides in order to communicate with God. Deep within the American psyche is the 1960s’ Romantic idea, originally from Emerson and Rousseau, that if something doesn’t feel natural, it isn’t real. We think spiritual things – if done right – should just flow. But if you have a disability, nothing flows, especially in the beginning.

One morning when Kim was six months old, Jill called me into the living room, where Kim was lying on her stomach, struggling to turn over. Kim would bring one shoulder as high as she could; then she would twist her little hips to give herself a boost. She would almost reach the tipping point only to collapse again. With Jill and I hovering over her, she tried again and again. We couldn’t help Kim. If we did, then she would never learn. She knew the general idea; she just needed to make it work. Finally, after half an hour and hundreds of attempts, she got her little shoulders high enough and flipped over. Just as Kim had to work at turning over, we will need to persist when prayer doesn’t feel natural, especially during the learning stage when we can’t quite tip over.

All of Life is Covenant

A Praying Life
Paul Miller

The marketing slogan of Las Vegas – “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” – describes how our secular world views life. You can come to Vegas, have sex anonymously, and return home to your spouse as if nothing happened. There is no link between Vegas and the rest of your life. You have unlimited freedom to pursue feeling good about yourself. Baloney. This is my Father’s world. Everything you do in Vegas is connected to the rest of your life. Everything you do is connected to who you are as a person and, in turn, creates the person you are becoming. Everything you do affects those you love. All of life is covenant.

The Desert

A Praying Life
Paul Miller

The hardest part of being in the desert is that there is no way out. You don’t know when it will end. There is no relief in sight. A desert can be almost anything. It can be a child who has gone astray, a difficult boss, or even your own sin and foolishness. Maybe you married your desert. God customizes deserts for each of us. Joseph’s desert is being betrayed and forgotten in an Egyptian jail. Moses lives in the Midian desert as an outcast for forty years. The Israelites live in the desert for forty years. David runs from Saul in the desert. All of them hold on to the hope of God’s Word yet face the reality of their situations.

The theme of the desert is so strong in Scripture that Jesus reenacts the desert journey at the beginning of his ministry by fasting for forty days in a desert while facing Satan’s temptation. His desert is living with the hope of resurrection yet facing the reality of his Father’s face turned against him at the cross. The Father turning his face against you is the heart of the desert experience. Life has ended. It no longer has any point. You might not want to commit suicide, but death would be a relief. It’s very tempting to survive the desert by taking the bread of bitterness offered by Satan–to maintain a wry, cynical detachment from life, finding a perverse enjoyment in mocking those who still hope.

God takes everyone he loves through a desert. It is his cure for our wandering hearts, restlessly searching for a new Eden. Here’s how it works. The first thing that happens is we slowly give up the fight. Our wills are broken by the reality of our circumstances. The things that brought us life gradually die. Our idols die for lack of food. That is what happened to Emily in Guatemala. That is what happened to Jill with Kim. The still, dry air of the desert brings the sense of helplessness that is so crucial to the spirit of prayer. You come face-to-face with your inability to live, to have joy, to do anything of lasting worth. Life is crushing you. Suffering burns away the false selves created by cynicism or pride or lust. You stop caring about what people think of you. The desert is God’s best hope for the creation of an authentic self. Desert life sanctifies you. You have no idea you are changing. You simply notice after you’ve been in the desert awhile that you are different.

Things that used to be important no longer matter. For instance, before Kim was born, we used to have one of the kids comb the fringes of the living-room rug so it was perfect. Now we are lucky to find a comb for our hair. After a while you notice your real thirsts. While in the desert David writes, O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. (Psalm 63:1) The desert becomes a window to the heart of God. He finally gets your attention because he’s the only game in town. You cry out to God so long and so often that a channel begins to open up between you and God. When driving, you turn off the radio just to be with God. At night you drift in and out of prayer when you are sleeping. Without realizing it, you have learned to pray continuously. The clear, fresh water of God’s presence that you discover in the desert becomes a well inside your own heart.

The best gift of the desert is God’s presence. We see this in Psalm 23. In the beginning of the psalm, the Shepherd is in front of me–“he leads me beside still waters” (verse 2); at the end he is behind me–“goodness and love will pursue me” (verse 6, NIV); but in the middle, as I go through “the valley of the shadow of death,” he is next to me–“I will fear no evil, for you are with me” (verse 4). The protective love of the Shepherd gives me the courage to face the interior journey.

Prayer Softened Me

A Praying Life
Paul Miller

One of the first things I noticed as a I prayed for Emily was that I became more aware of her as a person. It also took the steam out of my tendency to fix her with quick comments. Because I was speaking to my heavenly Father about the potential drift of her heart, I could relax in the face of sin. Prayer softened me…

My prayers for Emily exposed my own heart. I began to see that I, too, loved the world and the things in the world. Even my frugality was a form of the love of money. The obsession of saving small amounts of money isn’t that different from the obsession of gaining large amounts of it. In both, money is the center…

It is surprising how seldom books on parenting talk about prayer. We instinctively believe that if we have the right biblical principles and apply them consistently, our kids will turn out right. But that didn’t work for God in the Garden of Eden. Perfect environment. Perfect relationships. And still God’s two children went bad. Many parents, including myself, are initially confident we can change our child. We don’t surrender to our child’s will (which is good), but we try to dominate the child with our own (which is bad). Without realizing it, we become demanding. We are driven by the hope of real change, but the change occurs because we make the right moves. Until we become convinced we can’t change our child’s heart, we will not take prayer seriously.

It All Depends on Me

A Praying Life
Paul Miller

Emily called me over to the computer to help her with the modem (this was before broadband). She was a freshman in high school and needed to go online, but the modem wouldn’t work. After doing a quick check, I realized I needed to reload the modem software. Fortunately, Dell provided the original disk. I reached up into the box of disks that came with our computer but couldn’t find the disk. It was gone. My blood immediately went to a low boil. I knew my son had taken the disk and not returned it. I called upstairs, “Andrew, come down right now.” He came out of the upstairs bathroom down to where we were in the living room. I could tell he was irritated by my abruptness, but I didn’t care. I was tired of him not putting stuff away. It was just selfish. Andrew rummaged around, found the disk, and went back upstairs. Feeling the tension between us, I wondered if I had been too harsh.

Repentance usually starts with a question, a slight uneasiness. Unlike Jesus, who says, “The Son can do nothing of his own accord” (John 5:19), I had reacted on my own. I didn’t ask God for any help on how to deal with my son. I knew he’d taken the disk and not put it back. Case closed. Self-will closed the door to a spirit of prayer. Until we see how strong our own will is, we can’t understand the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer–“your will be done” (Matthew 6:10). Not only was I prayerless with that incident, I was also prayerless about this area of Andrew’s life. It had never occurred to me to pray that Andrew would put things away because the solution was obvious: “Andrew, put your things away.” There was absolutely no moral ambiguity about what needed to happen.

Consequently, I did the same things Andrew had done. He’d been thoughtless in not putting the disk back, and I’d been thoughtless in angrily demanding that he come down immediately. Andrew had been selfish, and I’d been selfish. Sin is complicated. We are never a passive observer, dispensing wisdom and justice. We are part of the mess. My solution to the problem made it more complex. That’s why we can’t afford to do anything on our own. Because I acted on my own, independent of my heavenly Father, my words by themselves had to do all the work. Because I had not asked God to work inside Andrew’s heart, I felt it was up to me to deal with him about his irresponsibility, and this increased my intensity…

Imagine that Sue’s husband, Joe, takes out the trash every Tuesday. It’s his job. Last week he forgot to take it out, and then again this week. He’s usually good about taking out the trash, but Sue tells him, “Honey, you forgot to take the trash out again.” She says again with emphasis and more than a little irritation. What’s behind her irritation? Why does she feel compelled to add a twist to the word again? Because it is a hassle to take out the trash. It made her late for work. If she doesn’t say again, then her husband will keep forgetting. If he doesn’t see that this is becoming a pattern, she’ll be taking out the trash for the rest of her life.

Notice Sue’s underlying assumption: “It all depends on me.” If I don’t show him, no one else will.” God is absent from her thinking; consequently she believes it’s up to her to make her husband hear her words. If he doesn’t, she fears she’ll be swallowed up by his forgetfulness. Sue speaks on her own, using the word again to control her husband. In contrast, Jesus says, “For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment–what to say and what to speak” (John 12:49). Sue is using her words to do her own will. She refuses to accept the possibility of endlessly taking the trash out on Tuesdays. It is unacceptable. Sue is in charge of her life, determined to make her kingdom pain free. Even if she prayed, prayer would just be another weapon in her arsenal of control. God would likely disappoint her, and she’d end up bitter at both her husband and God. Ironically, self-will often becomes a self-defeating prophecy. The berated spouse pulls back; he not only stops taking out the trash, but he also stops opening up his heart.

Self-will and prayer are both ways of getting things done. At the center of self-will is me, carving a world in my image, but at the center of prayer is God, carving me in his Son’s image. It never occurs to Sue that God might want her to take out the trash for the rest of her life, because to do so would mean she is letting her husband take advantage of her. But isn’t Jesus endlessly taking out the church’s trash? Isn’t this action another way of loving an enemy? What would happen if Sue put off self-will? She doesn’t know. How will God intervene in her husband’s life? What does God want to do in her life? What beams will she discover in her own eye? Forgiving her husband would mean losing control. If Sue surrenders her self-will, she will join Abraham walking up Mount Moriah with Isaac. She will join David as he puts down his knife when Saul is within his reach in the cave. Sue is abiding. She has lost control of the story.

The Fracture Between Heart and Behavior

A Praying Life
Paul Miller

A significant source of cynicism is the fracture between my heart and my behavior. It goes something like this: My heart gets out of tune with God, but life goes on. So I continue to perform and say Christian things, but they are just words. I talk about Jesus without the presence of Jesus. There is a disconnect between what I present and who I am. My words sound phony, so other’s words sound phony too. In short, my empty religious performance leads me to think that everyone is phony. The very thing I am doing, I accuse others of doing. Adding judgment to hypocrisy breeds cynicism.

Grace Will Win the Day

A Praying Life
Paul Miller

Seldom do we pray seriously and thoughtfully for those we love as they deal with their besetting sins. I’m going to pick on husbands for a minute because most men don’t pray thoughtfully for their wives; they just whine or withdraw. When they do pray, they often simply want their own lives to be pain free. Men will work at making money, keeping the yard neat, or helping the kids in sports, but many don’t work or think about things that last.For example, a husband will rarely ask God for his wife to become more like Jesus. Let’s say she is critical of him. When he tries to talk to her about it, she says, “I wouldn’t be so critical of you if you didn’t have so many problems.” By raising the issue, he just got more criticism, so his heart quietly shuts down. He just doesn’t care anymore. She is who she is. So he moves on with life and flips on the television. 

Without realizing it, he has become cynical about the possibility of real change in his wife. A childlike spirit seems naïve, like a distant memory. He is wise as a serpent, but he’s not harmless as a dove. He is surrounded by idiots, and his only choice, like the Greek stoics, is to tough it out. Low-level evil has worn him down. 

To engage God in prayer about his wife’s attitude feels like opening up an old wound. Just telling this to God is frustrating because it feels so hopeless, the spiritual version of banging your head against the wall. It is simply easier not even to think about it. Mixed in with his frustration is guilt. Some of what she says is true. He isn’t sure where her sin ends and his begins. 

The husband also hesitates to pray because he’s been told that he shouldn’t try to control his wife. But the point of prayer is shifting control from you to God. Moreover, doesn’t the Father want all of us to become more like his Son? 

Where should the husband begin? Like a little child, he should ask God for what he wants. It might help to write down in a prayer notebook or on a card what he wants changed in his wife and to find a scripture that describes Christ in her. Then he could start praying that scripture for her every day and also invite God to work in his own heart. 

This prayer request will become a twenty-year adventure. The adventure begins with asking God, Do I have a critical spirit too? Do I respond to my wife’s critical spirit with my own critical spirit? Usually what bugs us most about other people is true of us as well. By first taking the beam out of his own eye (see Matthew 7:1-5), the husband releases in his wife’s life the unseen energy of the Spirit. The kingdom is beginning to come. 

The husband can let God use his wife’s criticism to make him more like Jesus. Instead of fighting what she says, if at all possible he can do it. We can’t do battle with evil without letting God destroy the evil in us as well. The world is far too intertwined…

The husband can’t leave a vacuum in his heart either. He must replace his critical spirit with a thankful spirit. One of the best ways of doing that is writing out on a card or in a prayer notebook short phrases of how he is thankful for her. By thanking God for specific things about his wife, he will begin to see her for who she is–a gift. 

At first glance this feels like the husband is whitewashing reality. Life feels uneven, unfair. After all, the wife is the one with the critical spirit; not only is he putting energy into reflecting on his tendency to be critical (which isn’t half as bad as hers), but he’s also working at being thankful for her. The only thing he has going for him is his pitiful little prayer. 

A thankful heart is constantly extending grace because it has received grace. Love and grace are uneven. God poured out on his own Son the criticism that I deserve. Now he invites me to pour out undeserving grace on someone who has hurt me.  Grace begets grace. This husband is taking a journey into the heart of God. 

Welcome to the life of God!  That’s what a life of grace feels like, especially in the beginning. That pitiful little prayer is tapping into the power center of the universe. If the husband hangs in there, he will be amazed at the creative energy of God. Grace will win the day.