we get to witness the slam dunk mirror miracles like you just talked about incredible and beautiful thing to and sometimes that we are longing for and hoping for and praying for. doesn't happen and that is the darker side appreciatingly panfall. You're listening to the Rule of Life podcast by Practicing the Way. In each season, we explore an ancient practice from the way of Jesus and its relevance for the modern era. This is Season 2, Prayer.
Welcome friends to the rule of life podcast by practice. This is season two on prayer and episode two. And I am not John Mark Comer. Are you sure? Yeah, I'm getting really used to following him. But my name is Tyler Staten, and I'm going to get to host us. For this particular session, I'm here with a cast of familiar characters to you at this point if you list episode one. Of course, John Mark Comer, founder of Practicing the Way.
Gemma Ryan of Oaks Church Brooklyn and Reward Sabanda who is a contributor to Upper Room in Dallas and our four-step process or four-stage process of prayer that we're walking through in both the practice And this podcast series goes like this, talking to God. That was episode one, talking with God, listening to God, and being with God. And up for today is talking with God. So we began the last episode with a few lines from Jesus, guarantees or promises as it relates to prayer.
And you know, when you read the quotes of Jesus about prayer, some will be enlivened by those and their faith will expand as they imagine prayer through the imagination of Jesus. But at least as many of us will be hurt or even angered by the promises Jesus makes when it comes to prayer. And that's because so much of the time our experience in prayer doesn't seem to be matching.
what Jesus has to say about it. And so there's this mystery that lies in our prayers. And the heart of this episode is to delve into both the mystery and wonder of prayer. Wonder meaning the incredible power of prayer and how prayer, maybe more than anything else, releases the power of the kingdom of God on the earth. and mystery because if you pray for any length of time you'll know that prayer maybe more than anything else becomes the source of pain when prayer seems anything but powerful.
And so we all bring questions into our prayer, questions like, Why does God seem to answer some of my prayers and not others? And why sometimes does God wait a long time to answer a prayer and then answer it? Like, is there some kind of divine equation of... asking the right amount of times plus the right method of asking plus the right amount of people asking that finally gets God's attention. Or why does God not answer all of my prayers for my lost friends and family?
I know that he is the son of man who came to seek and save the lost, and I'm praying in line with his will. I know that prayer is powerful, and so if both of those things are true, then why isn't it happening? I know that we have a spiritual enemy and that there's some level of contesting in my prayers. But if Jesus was victorious over Satan, then how does Satan still intervene or interfere with my prayers? The question that I'm circling around is something like this. Do my prayers matter?
Do they matter to God? And do they matter in the real world and the lives of real people? That's where we're going in this episode. But before we go a step further, John Mark, can you give us a recap of the teaching from session two? Yeah, so this podcast, as you know, for those of you that are following along with the prayer practice,
This episode is tied to session two on talking with God. And I kind of pick up right where we left off in session one, right after the Lord's Prayer in Luke 11. If you keep reading that teaching and that passage. Jesus goes straight from deliver us from the evil one into a parable about prayer of man kind of in the middle of the night you know with somebody coming over and says you know ancient Near Eastern hospitality kind of thing
and banging on his neighbor's door for bread, and the man getting out of bed, and then Jesus' famous line, ask and it will be given you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened. The Father loves to give good gifts to his children. It's that passage. And I just point out without being too dogmatic here that Jesus seems to assume that our prayer life will follow a bit of a slight.
where we begin by talking to God, by praying pre-made prayers, our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name, praying somebody else's prayer to God. But then he assumes that at some point you're going to start praying the details of your life to God, like my neighbor.
Our friend just showed up at my door late at night and I don't have bread and I need help right now. And you begin to ask and to seek and to knock. And so we're calling this talking with God. I break it down into three kind of subcategories. gratitude, talking with God about what is good in your life and world. Lament, talking with God about what is evil in your life and world.
And petition at intercession, asking God to fulfill his promises to overcome evil with good. Petition, of course, is when you pray for yourself and intercession when you pray for others. Paul Miller in his book, A Praying Life, you know, kind of sums all of that up and he writes, all of Jesus' teaching on prayer in the Gospels can be summarized with one word, ask.
So whether it's gratitude or lament or petition or intercession in particular, I do a bit on asking and kind of some major... theological indications from Jesus' teaching on asking, such as we should ask in Jesus' name. and I talk about how most people use in Jesus' name, they put at the end of a prayer, in Jesus' name, amen. To my knowledge, there's not a single example of that anywhere in the New Testament.
And it is most, not that it's bad, but it is most certainly not a magic incantation that you put on the end of a prayer to get what you want, like the open sesame of the kingdom of God. I have a quote in there from Larry Hurtado, who's that New Testament scholar, where to pray in Jesus' name is to invoke your royal status before God on Jesus' behalf.
So like a lot of New Testament scholars will use this metaphor, like you almost imagine it from like a fantasy movie where a beggar is like walking up to the palace of the king and he's like, stinky and covered in rags and the guards are like no no you're not allowed in here you can't come to the king and he says no i come in the name of and he names the prince or whatever and they're like okay and the door is open and he's ushered into the throne room of the king
It's like that metaphor, but theologically, you're not a friend of the prince. You're a co-heir with the prince. You've been adopted into the family of God. So to pray in Jesus' name means that you invoke his status before God. When we come before God to ask,
We do not come as beggars off the street. We come as adopted royal sons and daughters, princes and princesses in the kingdom of God. And so the second layer there is to pray in line with jesus nature like in the ancient world your name and your nature were almost synonymous so when i pray lord you know
cause that person who just cut me off to get in a terrible accident, that's not praying in Jesus' name. When I pray, Lord, help that person to be preserved and kept safe as they drive crazy down the freeway or whatever, that's closer to praying in Jesus' name. Jesus also teaches us that we are to ask like a child, we're to keep asking and not give up, and we're to ask in faith that prayer really does make a difference, even though most people don't believe that.
And of course that broaches the like very divisive topic in the modern church of kind of providence and sovereignty on one side versus free will and openness on the other side most recently. theological controversy between Calvinism and Arminianism. And that's just a massive area where followers of Jesus don't agree. We agree about most things, but that's an area where there's a diversity of thought. globally, historically, in different streams of the church.
where some streams of the church and some Christians emphasize more what they would call the sovereignty of God, God's kind of... ordination of the events and affairs of human life, and others would emphasize more kind of other wills of the enemy or human beings or the environment or whatever it is. And is there a way forward? And Tyler, learning a lot from you recently, you reminded me of Eugene Peterson's whole thing on prayer in the middle voice. And he was a scholar of both Greek and Hebrew.
And he writes about how in modern English we only have like an active voice and a passive voice in grammar. Like active is when you, the speaker, take the initiative and you do the action. Like I punch Tyler in the face. I don't know why that analogy came to mind. Yikes. Passive is when somebody else does the initiative, Tyler punches me in the face. I am punched by Tyler in the face. But Greek has this tense that we don't have in English called the middle voice.
where someone else initiates the action and then you join and participate in it with them. And the best way to make sense of prayer, in particular, petition and intercession, or asking, is in the middle voice. That God in the spirit, God is always the initiator. has initiated this action in the kingdom of God that is breaking through in all these crevices and crannies through our life and our world.
And when we pray, we are joining with and participating in the movement of God in the world. So prayer is both. something that we are doing with God and something that God is doing in us. And that's session two. The prayer practice is a four-week experience designed to be run in your church, small group, or community that combines teaching, conversation, and spiritual introduce you to this ancient discipline for life with God. If you come on the prayer practice.
You will not just learn about prayer. You will learn how to pray. The end goal is to integrate prayer more richly into your rule of life. so that you can arrange your life around God. The prayer practice is completely free, thanks to the generosity of our friends in the circle, a group of people from all over the world who give monthly to Practicing the Way. Available now at practicingtheway.org.
Which all brings us right back to do my prayers matter? Do they matter in the real world and do they matter in the lives of real people that I have real relations with? Yeah, so if there's
this mystery in the middle of our prayers. I guess the first question is why is there a middle at all? Why is there a mystery? It sounds very simple. Ask and it will be given to you. Right. I think of the story of Blind Bartimaeus and Mark 10 and that exchange between bartimaeus and jesus you know here is this guy crying out for jesus to heal him and then when jesus approaches him he asks bartimaeus a question he says what do you want me to do for you
And I read that and I think, well, wasn't it obvious? Like the man obviously was blind. Surely he just wanted you to heal him so that he could see. Why doesn't Jesus just presume? what he needed and do it automatically. I'm not sure Jesus has the gift of discernment. But I just think it's so, I mean, we can see this in our lives as well. Why does Jesus, invite us to ask him if god is all-knowing and all-powerful why do we even need to ask in the first place yeah
I think it's really cool. Tyler, you mentioned something in your book when it talks about relationships. And I think first of all, right, that relationship is our craving context when it comes to. Our faith walk, our faith dynamic. We're born into that perichoresis, right? As St. Gregory of Nazianza says, there's this dynamic, it's this dance that...
the Trinity, you know, has always been doing. It's kind of like, so we're getting a son, Pam and I. So what he is, he is very existing. It's not like picking one up at one. Exactly. Like Pam is pregnant. Exactly. Just for the record. That is true. My wife's pregnant, y'all. We're getting a son in February. But what I love about that is he is born into this relational dynamic. Our love is his cradling context. And that right there is the underscore of what Tyler was talking about.
Just the power of relationship. I believe he desires us to ask. because language is a basic unit of measure when it comes to relationship I like just as someone who hails from an African context. I love just the interesting aspect of ethnolinguistics, right? The relationship of people. with their culture and when it comes to language. And a fun fact, when I first came to the US, it was funny because I noticed very quickly there is a radical difference between English, right?
between American and between Texan. English, you think Shakespeare, you know what I'm saying? American, I'm sorry. We were just chatting in the pre-conversation of how different it would have been, you know, if you had immigrated to New York versus Texas. Yes, exactly, exactly. But I noticed that about just the power and the beauty of language in a lot of ways. And the more intimate you are with people, the more that language carries.
And this may be, I mentioned it before, this may be a little foreign to us within the Western context. right, because we're still a newer civilization, we're still building, so a lot of our language is utilitarian, right? It's like, tell me what you want me to know so I can go out there, I've got an empire to build. but a lot of more established civilizations like the Zuru context that I come from, like the Hebrew context that a lot of our Bibles sit in.
Language is used mostly for communion, right? Or connection and not necessarily communication. And when you think about that, when you think about that's the context, when you think about this beautiful dynamic between the Trinity that we're invited into, then for a fact you know that, oh, It's because of relationship that I'm brought in. The Trinity wants to be with you. Absolutely. Not just do something with you. Exactly. I am brought into, like I said before, into this beautiful cradling.
Context my credlin context is the love of the Trinity and I'm invited into that And then from that place, right, I think what's beautiful about prayer and praying for other people is the fact that I can leverage that, not in a weird utilitarian way, But I can leverage that aspect of relationship to use my language to then speak on behalf of other people.
And that's why Jesus talks about the joy of answered prayers, right? We see this with Jesus and his mother Mary to where he's got a timeline and she's like, hey, they don't have any wine, right? And so she uses relationship and this beautiful...
mix between relationship and language to get him to do something on someone else's behalf. We see this with Abraham and God. I always think about when we read it in utilitarian language, we always think of it was this cut and dry transaction to where it's like... Okay, save. What if I find this many people in Sodom and he's like, no, I won't destroy it back and forth.
But to me, I think that's the most beautiful power of prayer. We don't go deep into it. But what if Abraham had to lament and grieve and come up with names of how many people that he knew in that city and tell their context? And the Lord then shared his grief and said, no, this is what if that entire dynamic was like a day long.
discourse between relationship language right for the use of other people so i think when we make that our dynamic it's a beautiful thing We ask because we're in relationship and he loves to hear our voice, especially. Even the Abraham story is so, again, it's almost a disservice if you grew up reading it. I mean, it's great if you grew up reading the Bible, but sometimes we think we know a story, but I remember it just hit me once that
This is the ancient Near East, and like most of the East to this day, bartering is a part of the culture much more. It's not like you go on Amazon. It's like that's the price for the day. You barter, right? That's right. So, you know, Abraham has that whole thing when he's like, well, you destroy the city if there are 50 righteous people. And God is supposed to say, well, a hundred. There we go.
And then Abraham is supposed to say, all right, well, what about 80? And God says, ah, you know, 90. But God just keeps saying yes. Exactly. I've never thought about it. Well, what about 40 people? Yes. what about 30 people yes what about 20 yes what about god won't barter god just keeps saying yes yes so god is supposed to barter back and forth and he doesn't he just says That's a relational collaboration. And in a lot of buttering context, too, like buttering has nothing to do with the...
capitalistic or the utilitarian aspect of it. It's about building intimacy, right? We both had, came at a different space. We both moved back and forth until we arrived somewhere. So that is a It would take a Zimbabwe. I would never think of bartering that way. My wife and I argue about this because I kind of like to barter and I don't get to it very often. But if you're at a flea market or when you're traveling and she's like, honey, that's so real.
I'm like, no, no, no. It's like in the culture. Look at them. Everybody's arguing with each other, but they're having fun. And the inverse is true. But you're saying it's like drawing you into intimacy. If you don't barter, that's rude.
because right you're assuming that they can just be bought like you're cheapening that dynamic what they bring so the opposite is also yes so brodering is actually the language of intimacy in a lot of ancient cultures so i love that you brought that up i think asking is the language of intimacy in general like we're going out to dinner after this right when i'm at dinner with my wife at a restaurant
I will very freely say, are you going to finish that? And I will not do that with any of you. You're all my friends. But there's a level of intimacy. Asking reveals the level of intimacy. Like how, um... unabashed you are and you're asking is equal to the depth of intimacy. Or just the lack of social awareness. Yeah, that's true. This doesn't apply across the board. with sincerity I think this is one of the reasons I think it's the primary reason that God has written asking
Like Charles Spurgeon said, asking is the rule of the kingdom. So God has written asking into the way his kingdom comes because It is by asking that intimacy is cultivated. And we have to remember that intimacy is his end game. Relationship is what was injured in the fall. Relationship is what is fully restored in the Garden City at the other end of the story. But, you know, and this is not remotely to disagree. It's a yes and, not a yes but.
you know the telos the end goal isn't just being with god but it's doing something with god yes you know it's the garden of the garden city yes narrative of scripture so sometimes i find it helpful to like And we are at the Bible Project right now. I'm literally sitting where Tim Mackey does. I'm sitting where Tim is sitting. Okay, that's okay. I'm happy to be John. They're both brilliant.
Point being, you know, like I love how they will just zoom out and kind of do the meta level of scripture and then come back to a passage. And I think if you zoom out at a formational lens, like what is God doing right now in human history? in the cosmos. Best as I can tell, the main thing that God is doing in the world is he is forming a new humanity of people. Jew plus Gentile. We got two Americans, an Irish woman, and a Zimbabwean here, not based on ethnicity or nation-state citizenship.
or blood at all, but based on allegiance to King Jesus, a new humanity that we call the church. He is forming them into people who are pervaded by love and wisdom and power, as Jesus was, in order to one day co-rule with Jesus over the universe. That is the image at the end of the Bible. It is not just... a kind of Eastern, you know, kind of sense of losing ourself in the nothingness, the ocean of God. It is ruling over the universe with the Father and the Son and the Spirit.
And so when I think about prayer, I always like have that end, that telos in mind. And then I go back to the beginning, like Genesis 1, human beings are made in the image of God. And, you know, for the last couple of centuries in the West, A lot of Christians read that through the lens of the Enlightenment, and so the thought was kind of,
well, you know, God's rational and we're rational and that's what it means to be made in the image of God. Or we're moral creatures and God is moral. Animals aren't, you know, they're amoral creatures. That's what it means to be made in the image of God.
A number of scholars have basically thoroughly debunked that interpretation and I think conclusively made the case that biblically and historically... image of god in the ancient near east was a thing like the king or the queen was the image of god gods were localized by geography and so that local deity the king or the queen of egypt or babylon or persia was the image of that God. They were a mediator between that God and that people and that place, and their job was to rule.
over the people and over the place on that God's behalf. So when human beings are made in the image of God, I mean that's one of the most punk rock moments in the whole Bible. Because in the ancient areas, it was just the king or the queen that was the image of God, not the other people, which of course then gives you a worldview where you can enslave everybody else and it can just be...
the king or the queen and their oligarchy who are the image of God. So this is like the democratization of humanity. All people are made in the image of God. And we're made to rule. In theology, it's called a functional view of the Imago Dei. Like to be made in the image of God means that we were made by God to take the raw materials of the world.
and to form it into a garden-like place for human beings to thrive with God, one another, and the earth itself. So obviously since then something has gone horribly wrong. And as best as I can understand it, prayer is a relational collaboration with God by which we partner with God to bend or re-bend human history back into the direction of his will, into his kingdom coming.
and through prayer not only are we learning to rule with Jesus which we will do for all eternity but we are becoming the kinds of people who have been so formed in our inner woman or man into the image of Christ that we have the character and the capacity. to rule with god which is why prayer is both about what we are doing with jesus and who we are doing it with yeah yeah so prayer is asking it is the the language of intimacy prayer is also
Power. It's the language of empowerment. It's co-managing heavenly resources on the earth, bringing about the Garden City. But prayer is also a profound act of humility. Yeah, I was just going to jump in and say that I think that you know intercession like any kind of asking whether it's like petition asking god for our own needs or intercession asking god for the needs of another
I think both involve acknowledging that we're finite, we're limited. It's an expression of humility because it expresses our dependency. on God's power and provision and our interdependency, like how we actually need Which we don't like. We don't want to be dependent. Right, exactly. We much prefer to be, you know, my badge of honor here. I'm so in control. I've got everything figured out myself.
But I also think the very fact that God invites us to intercede for others is a demonstration of His humility, that God invites us to partner with Him in His work of redemption in the world. He desires our participation in it. And I think that's really beautiful. Yeah, I love Richard Foster's definition of intercession because he talks about how love is the beginning point or the origin point of all of the powerful intercession that flows from us who rise.
If we truly love people, we will desire for them far more than is within our power to give them, and this will lead us to prayer. intercession is a way of loving others intercessory prayer is a selfless prayer even a self-giving prayer In the ongoing work of the kingdom of God, nothing is more important than intercessory prayer. And so for Foster, he's helped me have this understanding of... Intercession for someone else being nothing more than a combination of sincere love and sober humility.
I love this person and the need in their life exceeds my capacity to fulfill or to meet. And so what lives in that space between honest love and sober humility, it's prayer. That is the space that prayer occupies.
Which makes me think of something that Strawn said when I got to sit down with him and interview him. And in context, we were talking about contemplative prayer. And, you know, a lot of times in the contemplative tradition, people kind of almost like... phase out of asking God for anything anymore and prayer is just all silence and presence to God which I don't think is right because Jesus clearly said ask and keep on asking and so I asked him like what does this type of prayer
look like from a contemplative perspective and he said this if jesus words are anything to be to be believed and i i fully believe they are then they that has made its home the trinity father son and spirit has made their home within us This is crazy. This should stop everybody in their absolute tracks. This is madness. I mean, we're talking about humans here, right?
I don't know about you, bro, but I don't wake up feeling like a very perfect person ever. And most of the days I put my head on the pillow and I think about, oh, I should have done that differently with my sons or whatever. And yet, in the midst of that imperfection and brokenness, The very God who created the cosmos, who could be and do and sit wherever he wants, has decided to live here.
And I think that for me, this journey into union with God is a journey into really realizing how majestic that is and to stop being so casual about it you know we say it so casually oh yeah god lives in me and it's like man think about that for a second And so... To me, Priya, I think... 100% the primary purpose of the gospel is to restore this intimacy with God that is like beyond anything we can imagine.
God sent Jesus to invite us into himself and the primary purpose of prayer is to come into that reality at deeper and deeper levels or another way of saying it is just to say yes to God. Jesus says, I stand at the door and knock. He's the initiator. He's there saying, Strawn, I want you. I want to live in you. I love living in you. My desire is to soak every cell up in your body with my love and presence. Will you say yes?
And so the prayer for me has always primarily been yes, come and soak me to the core awaken me to your love and let me be like you and that out of that union out of that place of God wants to be that my every minute every second of the day sort of experience comes this over the second yes this overflow of yes to you arriving to the world through me to healing or to loving others Gemma, I love what you were saying about how...
God is just so amazing that he could clearly run the universe much better without us. But he has chosen to freely share his rule with us and to let us and invite us and even at some point. make it contingent upon us in our participation. But I think we come back to it. I think we just have to say this clearly before we move on. because it's so foundational and so fundamental and so few modern Christians actually believe this.
that you have to begin from a starting line where you believe that prayer really does make a difference. So, you know, when Jesus prays, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Unless if I'm wildly off base, he is assuming that, one, the kingdom of God is not here in full. Hence the prayer for it to come. and two, that the will of God is not being done, at least in full. Hence the prayer, may your will be done. And three,
that by praying, something about that reality is going to shift, change, whether it be incremental or dramatic. And so few modern, at least Western, Christians actually pray. There is an undercurrent. I think that's not a critique. It's not anger. No, that's accurate. I think that's very true. There is a deadly undercurrent.
of determinism in the philosophical sense in the modern church that you would hear in popular cliches like God's in control, a phrase never once used by any writer in the entire library of scripture. And it doesn't mean it's not true. You have to define what do you mean by that. You mean when evil happens, when there's a natural disaster or a tsunami or the world, that God's in control. What do you mean? What are you saying there?
Or, you know, the popular Everything Happens for a Reason, and they read Kate Bowler's book. Best title ever. No. Everything happens for a reason and other lies I have. Oh, yes, yes. And it's amazing about her journey into stage four cancer. And, you know, that's a side rabbit hole.
fascinating idea so so many people live with a sense that god is going to do whatever god's going to do with or without our prayers And again, on one hand, there is a genuine spectrum of diversity of thought in the Christian tradition about how in control or sovereign is a word that would be used by a lot of modern Christians. And there's a diversity of thought. But Jesus clearly seems to teach. And I think if you don't believe this, I don't.
I think this is what Christians believe. That prayer actually, wherever you fall on that spectrum, I have genuine respect for people across that spectrum. of God's will to human will. that prayer does make a difference in what does or does not happen. Yes. You know, I think of that Willard quote I used, I use it in the session, God's response to our prayers is not a charade.
He does not pretend that he is answering our prayer when he is only doing what he is going to do anyway. Our requests really do make a difference in what God does or does not do. The idea that everything would happen exactly as it does regardless of whether we pray or not is a specter that haunts the minds of many who sincerely profess belief in God. Then he writes this. It makes prayer psychologically impossible, replacing it with dead ritual at best.
Of course, this is not the biblical idea of prayer, nor is it the idea of people for whom prayer is a vital part of life. So I just want to, I think we just, I wanted to like just put that line in the sand that we believe, the four of us around this table. That however you interpret events of life and however exactly your theological system is set up, that when we pray, something is actually happening. And when we don't pray, possibly that same something is not happening.
And that is a foundational bedrock to prayer. Practicing the way nonprofit made possible by The Circle, a group of people from all over the world. I believe deeply and give monthly. integrated into the church at large. I'm Leanna from Oslo, Norway. and part of this community to join myself and others in the circle or to share a one-time gift. at practicingtheway.org. So prayer begins with asking God. That is the repair of the broken intimacy between us and God in the fall.
but then prayer spills out from that into loving others. Intercessory prayer is praying the will of God into the life of another person that's the repair of the broken intimacy between Adam and Eve the broken intimacy between people that was lost in the fall And I think for us, when we look at things from our capitalistic framework, I feel like we miss something incredibly fundamental, which is the power of what happens when we petition on behalf of others. People in prayer.
But I don't think it's even uniquely Western within this context. When we go back in the Bible, when we look at... I still remember when I was coming up, one of my questions was always, why was Israel? Why were they so drawn to Baal worship? Why were they so drawn to this deity? Why did they keep going back? When I look at it now with the modern lens, I understand that, hey, we are privy to the exact same thing. It's what I call the curse of causality, right? So if event Y follows event X,
Therefore, event X caused event Y, right? Does it make sense? And so I see this. So Baal was the god of fertility. He was the God of rain. He was the God of all those things. So without an accurate understanding, without zooming out from that meta perspective, for example, if I go and just before dawn, for whatever reason in this context,
I cry out to the sky, and lo and behold, magically, five minutes later, the sun lights up the sky. From causality, after a point, I'm going to be like, hey, you know what? I'm the Sky Summoner. And I essentially do these things and I go from here and I do this. So I think that when it comes to a lot of what we're talking about, we rationalize away the need to pray for other people. We're like, hey. As long as I'm good, as long as I don't have to deal with other people.
then I don't have to pray. I can fix it with money like that Paul Miller quote of what it essentially is to say. But what I love about just after Jesus, we talked about in the last one, teaches on the Lord's Prayer. He goes a step further as if to say the praxis to what I just taught you. is the simple fact that there are people in the world, your neighbors, right, who are without brand. And you can use the relationship that you have with me, right, to essentially...
get that for them and what it looks like. A great example of this is I had gotten to the point to where I was just like, hey, you know what? God's going to do what he's going to do. I don't have to do it. And I still remember my sister, she had been battling with diabetes for over 10 years. And she was on dialysis and she had gone through like organ failure.
And so I remember the doctors were like, hey, we have used the last track, basically. After this, she is just going to go the way of that. So I want you and your wife to drop everything because we were the only people that she hadn't seen. in over a decade. And we want you guys to get on a plane and come say your goodbyes. And so I still remember it was just after Alpha Conference and I'd met a guy called Pete Craig and he had given me this book called Dirty Glory.
And for comfort more than anything, I start reading this book and I just get my mind rocked and my perspective recalibrated to the simple fact. that God still responds to bold prayers on behalf of other people. so right there in the air i still remember where i got on the wi-fi mobilized people prayer warriors africans whoever i knew and i was like hey i want us to pray for this and when we landed
Can I tell you that a miracle had happened? It's documented. The doctors were like, we don't know what happened. But I know that's essentially because When we go past our utilitarian framework, we begin to ask God for the prayers of other people. incredible things happen. Reward, are you saying that living in America for that decade or whatever the time span was there, that something about being a part of the American church caused you to stop?
asking God to do something specific. Absolutely. And that was my point to the causality statement. I was like, oh, this person is this way because they vote this way or they're going through this because they made the wrong decisions. And I stopped thinking about the power of actually petitioning God on behalf of them.
And I was just like, well, there is no point because if you're getting fixed with money and medicine, then it probably wasn't supposed to be fixed anyways. And that at a core level. It's so recalibrated my perspective on prayer and on communal petitioning that I wasn't even able to do it. Yeah, that makes me want to weep at the state of the American church.
That part of our influence on those coming in might be that they stop praying. Yeah, your prayers become so vague that you would never know if God responded or not or that you begin to pray less. It's interesting, like, you're like, You just had-
when I wanted to start praying for my sister, I called my African friends. Exactly. I mean, seriously, you know what I mean? It's like when you pray for healing, I call all my Pentecostal friends because they actually believe in that stuff and they'll actually pray and not like other people pray like... Lord, just whatever you do, give them grace to handle it. I'm like, no, no, no. I want you to pray for healing. Like,
If it doesn't work out, then we'll pray for grace to handle it. But right now, I want a different kind of grace, a grace to command power. And there's so much clarity to that, to that simple fact that If I'm asking on behalf of someone else, the very nature, like what you were saying, the very nature of God is communal. He wants me to pray for other people. And so we always have call sheets for the type of people that want to pray when it comes to those things.
Yeah, you know, Reward, you began by referencing how we see this way of prayer grounded in the scriptures. And one of the things that I've noticed in the scriptures, particularly when I read Paul's prayers in the epistles, is that biblical prayers begin with promise, where most of our prayers, or maybe the way that I inherited to pray, began with problem. That most often we begin to pray, it's in reaction to a problem, right? A relational conflict that we don't know how to mend.
or an anxiety about an undesired situation, a need within my own life, or a need presented by someone else. And so that, my problem, leads me to prayer. But Paul's prayers, even his prayers from prison, When life seems quite problematic for him, they begin with promise. In fact, it seems to me like... At least 50% of the Pauline prayers recorded in Scripture, or each of his prayers, at least half of it is just praising God and getting in touch with the reality of his promise.
It's almost like Paul is both reminding himself of what god has promised and reminding god and holding god to god's own promises in a particular situation. Which sounds so weird, but that's a very biblical motif. I remember reading Moses. Moses is quoting God back to God. Right, in Exodus 33. You said, now do it. I was like, wait, what? And Tyler, what you say is so incredibly important because a lot of marginalized society, the framework, their framework for asking is always problems.
Because to some degree, if you're marginalized, maybe you don't even think that you have access to the promises aspect. So I love that what you just said. You're saying that's not just an American thing. No. That's true in Zimbabwe or whatever. Marginalized community. Because the first side effect of poverty is it attacks that imago Dei, the healthy self-image, the value system. inherent value system that you have.
until you begin to think that you're not worthy of a lot of things. That's why intercessory prayer is so rampant in a lot of marginalized or developing communities because they have no problem believing for you. But when it comes to the simple fact is, Can I believe the promises of God for myself? then it's something that they're like, they don't even feel like they're worthy. So I love the fact that you actually recalibrated that and said, hey,
It's promise first. And if we're more in touch with the contested place of this world than the heavenly reality. then we're primarily praying for problem removal. And the only problem with that kind of prayer is that even if God answers it, there's another problem. It's whack-a-mole. It's like, great, enjoy your 30 seconds until the next one comes. Exactly. but instead if instead of praying problem removal we learn to pray promise application then we have a much more holistic
And I would say biblical way of prayer, we're praying heaven to earth in me, in my thoughts, in my inner world, in my emotions, and in the world around me, in the lives of others. But we have to start by getting in touch. with the reality of heaven. But of course there's another side to this whole coin. and that is that
while there are stories like the one you just shared about your sister reward. That isn't every prayer story. Sometimes, the hardest experience that we have in prayer, I would say. is when we really do pray with all of the hope and faith that we can muster, and yet it seems like our prayers are falling on deaf ears. I think there is a balance of unanswered questions. It's a the processing. I said no. And if he said not yet, I need to say.
I aggressively give this to you Jesus. And that's how I'm working through it right now in my life. onto Jesus every day and I alluded in the previous episode to our journey with infertility.
um and you know we read right at the beginning of the biblical narrative god says you know be fruitful and multiply surely asking for a baby is in line with god's will scripture says the children are a heritage from the lord offspring a reward from him here we are surrendering everything to follow you asking according to your promises our community are interceding for us and believing for us and it feels like god you're completely ignoring us about the thing that actually matters most to us and
Maybe for the first few months, it's possible to continue to be full of faith and have this sense of expectancy. But what happens when the months become a year and the year becomes five? How do we continue to journey and trust?
hope when we're wrestling daily with the pain of disappointment and confusion and grief how do you thrive in a relationship where you feel ignored I remember walking into our church Seven years ago in Brooklyn Tyler was teaching he started saying some of those verses that he referenced at the beginning Versus like ask whatever you will in my name and it will be done for you and these hot angry tears
just started streaming down my face I was so angry I couldn't even stay in the room I just walked out sobbing uncontrollably and those hot tears were not because I had never believed those words of promise. It's because I had. And now I was just standing in the midst of these ruined hopes and dreams. had been praying for someone I loved who was very sick with cancer. She was in her early 30s, married a few short years. Her son, my nephew, was just a baby.
And I was praying for her one day and I had this vision of God healing her entirely. And so I prayed in faith, expecting to see the unfolding of this, believing that God was going to miraculously heal her, similar to the story that you shared about your sister. And then I stayed at her bedside a few short months later.
And I watched her life slip away a week before her son would celebrate his first birthday. What do we do with those kind of experiences of prayer? What do we do when we're left wondering? If maybe God wasn't powerful enough. Or if he was powerful enough, then I'm forced to ask a question which I think is an even worse question to consider is, is he just not good enough or loving enough?
Did I just not pray the magic words? Was there a formula that other people are privy to that I just didn't know? Maybe I just wasn't on his list of favorites. I felt like the prophet jeremiah who cried out you deceived me lord and i was deceived um so sometimes we get to witness the slam dunk mirror miracles like you just talked about and it's the most incredible and beautiful thing to witness and sometimes
The miracle that we are longing for and hoping for and praying for doesn't happen. And that is the darker side of prayer that we often don't talk about enough. It is excruciatingly painful. We know a lot about the sovereignty of God and for me, I started to become more acquainted with the suffering of God. It was knowing Jesus.
the man of sorrows fully acquainted with grief that was That was most comforting to me at that time knowing Jesus as Emmanuel God with us and our suffering him weeping God grieving with me I think of jesus in the garden of gethsemane that he also prayed take this cup from me but not my will but yours be done and Jesus' prayer for that cup to be taken away wasn't answered either. And I felt this sense of... Or worse, it was answered in the negative. Right. And I know for me...
There were times during that season of my life when I felt like it would be so much easier to just walk away from God entirely. I was just like, this is the moment, this is the moment when my whole life up until this point is going to change and I am just going to walk away from everything that I've known. Because God in those seasons feels more like pain than like comfort. Right, right. And maybe this isn't everybody's experience, but my experience was that I...
I felt so tethered to God. God had proved his love for me over and over and over again. was very it was very hard to walk away from that I had to stay and do the wrestling which I wanted to avoid because wrestling is really hard and yet I think that when love has been proven That is really where we have to trust when we don't understand, when we're forced to be confronted with the mystery and that really dismantled.
my illusions my illusions about myself you know i always thought i'm just going to be this christian and hard things are going to come along and i am going to be so strong and i i was like peter after his denial i was just like i i'm not that person i am a a shell of a human right now i don't even know if you exist i don't know what i think about you And I also...
you know had to look at that the the illusion of control this the sense that i somehow thought that i could control and what was going to happen and i think every loss that we experience and In prayer, you know, it involves this kind of surrender, this relinquishment of control, dying to my own desires, my own designs. And in many ways, it did feel like God was more absent than present in that season. And I, you know, like Jesus cries out on the cross, why God have you forsaken me?
And yet in many ways, I think I look back and see that, you know, it wasn't that God... had disappeared, but my concepts and images and sensations of God up until that point. had been dismantled and I had to relearn who God was to me and who I was to God and and that requires a lot of wrestling and a lot of work. Yeah, you know, we referenced a couple of times that many, many people, we referenced Rollheiser, but many people have said something along the line.
that the only rule of prayer is to show up And Gemma, having walked some, having gotten to walk all of that journey with you, actually, that you just recap. You stayed in the room with Jesus. Like... No one else I've ever seen as you went through that. And I feel like I have gotten to witness. The hard-won reward of becoming a wounded healer. Because it is through... You have lots of miracles.
that I know but it is through the most painful thing you've ever been through with him that I've watched others come to and drink from like a well from your life and find healing of their own. And something similar could be said out of Pete Gregg. who wrote that incredible book, Dirty Glory, the irreference reward. And he also... As a friend and mentor in my life has said to me, the most important book I ever wrote was God on Mute, which is a book about unanswered prayer.
And I got to sit down with Pete, who's the founder of 24-7 Prayer, the 24-7 Prayer Movement, if you're not familiar with him. And he had such a helpful paradigm for how we make theological sense. of unanswered prayer. There are some reasons for unanswered prayer that we can answer. Some people just think it's all mystery and we've just got to shrug and hope for the best. But there are some things that we need to talk about. C.S. Lewis is brilliant on some of this.
You know, in the book I talk about God's world, God's will, God's war. God's world, first of all, God has just set the world up to abide by certain principles. So I support a soccer team called Portsmouth that often loses soccer matches. And if I'm crying out, you know, for them to win a match and then the other side, the supporters are crying out. God's not going to intervene. He's not going to micromanage. He's just going to let the best team.
And so, you know, the law of gravity, you know, God loves us to be. But if something heavy is dropping towards that big toe, he's not going to make it float. So, you know, miracles have to be rare. That's what C.S. Lewis says. And some preachers make out that they're not, that miracles are there if you just... pray in the right way and you know you always and it's just not true it's also not biblical by the way because a miracle fundamentally
violates the laws of the universe. So if that were to be common, it would cease to be a miracle. By definition. And I would want to, without wanting to go too esoteric, I'd want to step back and say what could be more miraculous than waking up as a sentient being. in a body, on a rock, in this stunningly beautiful universe. I mean, life is a miracle. So we even need to reframe, you know, is the law of gravity not kind of miraculous? So, you know, yes.
So there's God's world works in certain ways. And as Christians, we're not immune from the overarching principles of lack. And then there's God's will sometimes, and this can hurt like hell. God's will is that we suffer. And we have to have a theology of the cross. We have to have a theology of suffering. so many Christians don't.
You know, we may not understand sometimes why God has made us go through things. The ultimate example is the one I just gave you, Jesus saying, take this cup from me. But that unanswered prayer becomes the greatest miracle, the greatest answered prayer. for humanity ever, because through Christ's death, you know, forgiveness, salvation comes. So, you know, Billy Graham's wife...
said she's very glad that God sometimes says no to our prayers or she'd have married the wrong man three times. So, you know, God's will. And I don't say it glibly because sometimes it can be agony when God wants something different to what we want and need. but then and this is important the third one and this is the one that a lot of christians miss out they're fine with what i've said so far but is god's war we have to understand
That there is an enemy still at loose, still working in our world, who is contesting the goodness of God's will all the time. And what that means is terrible things happen that God doesn't want to have. And, you know, we see this all around us all the time. There are things that are clearly not the Word of God that go on in the world. And so that's one of the reasons we have to keep praying and sometimes we have to persevere in prayer, as your book says, because
It is a battle, Ephesians 6. Our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers in heavenly places. And so God's world, God's will, God's war. And a lot of things we're struggling with, we can categorize in one of those three ways. So what a helpful paradigm for us to understand that when we pray that there's these three different factors at play. There's God's will, God's world, and God's war.
And I think we mostly understand God's will, that God has a particular plan of redemption for the world that he is enacting. And in order to see prayer answered, It has to be in line with his will. In alignment with that. Yeah, and I think we also mostly understand God's world, that God has... set up laws that govern our world. So for something to happen that's miraculous, by definition, it has to be abnormal. It has to be supernatural. And if the supernatural was just constant,
It would no longer be supernatural, and there really wouldn't be clerical laws governing the world. Don't you think a lot of times we don't think about that, you know? Like when we're praying, you know, God, let me not miss my flight. Sometimes I just want to step back like, what are you praying? Like I did last night? Are you praying for God to make everybody else like this?
are you praying for like god to bend the time space universe arc in the right direction so like you can slip in like a inception or interstellar movie or whatever like you know i mean god's built the universe such and then to make it much more Like I'm thinking of all through COVID when you're praying, let me not lose my job. There is a sense of God's world. Like this is an economy and it's based on certain aspects of the economy. And when you have a global pandemic come and things shut down.
It doesn't mean that God can't answer that prayer. It means you're living in a world that has ways of being in it that our prayers have to interact with. Yes, and I would also say with that, though, to just err on the side of asking. I think some people get paralyzed by their own motives and they're like well, wait, why do I really want to ask this? And then they almost never pray. Oh, yeah. No, I'm not saying. No, but I'm saying you delved into the what am I really asking by asking.
Lord help me not miss my flight. And so it is through prayer that we get into those moments. Don't pray to not miss your flight. My point is, Should said prayer not be answered? It's hard to fault God. And we're trying to emotionally make sense of that or theologically make sense of that. Yeah, my point's on the backside of it.
you live in a world that has these ways these laws of the universe and so on yeah so there's God's will God's world and then lastly there's God's war and this seems to be the one that Maybe as calmly thought of the least at least within the American context that I have occupied as a pastor But we see it all over the pages of scripture. In the book of Daniel, there's that incredible moment where Daniel prays. Then an angel shows up three weeks later and says
I was dispatched the second you prayed, but I was held up in a 21-day struggle with a demonic force on my way here. With the Prince of Persia, which sounds like some kind of spiritual being. spiritual authority over a geographic region and a people group. Right, and that's not just... And that's not just one particular eschatological prophet in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, we're told that our primary struggle is against principalities and powers in the heavenly realms.
There is a cosmic war that... God's will is in conflict against and our prayers are a participation in a fight and a struggle. for rule over the world. And so we have to understand that when we're praying. that all these factors are at play. And we may not know the exact recipe in terms of how much of this is at play here versus this versus this. It can be all of these things. Right, but it's all involved.
And prayer is not only the means by which God gets his work done on the earth or we participate with the work God is doing on the earth. It's also the means by which we participate with the work that God is doing.
in us yeah that's such a good repeat actually in that I'm gonna keep riffing on this book because it had such a visceral kind of impact on me you're talking about which book Dirty Glory Dirty Glory yeah there's a part in there and kind of tying it to what you said to where he's like Basically, prayer is when we harness our wills to God's will to resist Satan's will.
And so he kind of puts this whole, like, there's three wheels, right, at work at any given time in any given situation. And for me, that was mind-blowing. I almost had a visceral reaction to that because... Within the charismatic movement in a lot of ways actually sat through true story a cringe-worthy service to where Someone within the church their kid had died And so the pastor had dispatched people and said, you're going to go raise the den, right? You're going to go raise them.
And so they essentially went and it was like, for whatever reason, right, it was not successful. And so the service I came to, he was publicly reprimanding and saying, because you did not have faith. This child was not raised. And so within a lot of the faith movement and charismatic context, like what you were saying, Gemma, why that was so powerful and beautiful. it's because we're not taught that we're taught that It was me. It's never gone.
Right, and for some reason, we never really mess with the devil. So you're saying some traditions of the church, maybe that Gemma and I have been in, we blame God, but other traditions of the church... you blame you absolutely there's something wrong with you something wrong with your prayer god is sacrosanct we don't touch god right and the enemy there we just have this complicated relationship relationship with him so it's always us
So the people in a lot of those are always going I didn't have enough faith And we never hear the other aspects of that dynamic to where there's the enemy's will, there's God's war. And the other thing about God's war is, and I have to remind myself of this all of the time. But often, spiritual warfare is not a biblical term, but we kind of know what we mean by that. But if you want to talk about this category of spiritual warfare, we have not just one enemy.
the demonic or the devil but we have biblically at least three we also have what Paul calls the flesh we have what he calls the world so our war our conflict or our struggles is Paul's word is not just against Satan and the demonic spiritual evils of the world it's against the flesh and it's against the world and these things of course it's not nearly this cut and dry so like I think a lot about
I'm praying for my kids a lot right now. I have teenagers. And that's an interesting theological question. When I pray for my son to make good decisions, What exactly am I praying for? Like, even if I know what I'm praying for is God's will, that he would make good decisions and follow Jesus. First off, I'm really praying that God would override his will. That's right. That's interesting. So like when we pray for the lost, so to speak.
What are you praying? Are you praying that God would override someone's human agency? Or are you praying that God would woo their heart? It gets into these complexities of God's will and human will. And there is a flesh in myself and my son and each one of us and everyone around the world that is in us that we cannot blame the enemy for, that is resistant to God's will. I feel it in my own body.
And so prayer gets us into the complexities of all these different wills that are in tension with the will of God. You know, there's this Really interesting chapter in Frank Laubach's book, Prayer. where he talks about that exact thing. Okay, I've read his other stuff, but I've not read this one. Yeah, he has this book, Prayer, that's just titled Prayer. I think it's Prayer subtitled, The Most Powerful Force in the World. But he has a paradigm where... When we pray for someone else,
we are praying our spiritual openness to God into them. So his understanding would be like, between, maybe in this example, one of your children's decision making and God's wisdom is a blockage. And so God is getting around that blockage through your prayers.
and gaining access. Because you, in praying for him, when I pray for my son, and Jude, if you're listening, you're awesome and I love you. Let's say there's a hypothetical scenario where there's a blockage between his will and God's will. If I'm open, to god's will then i'm praying that openness into my son's heart yes exactly so that would be god is never withholding his pursuit of jude but you are giving god access to jude that he doesn't have apart from your prayers for you.
That's beautiful. So we definitely believe and know that that prayer is the means by which God gets his work done in the world, or at least a means by which God gets his work done in the world. But it's also a way that we partner with God getting his work done within us. Yeah, I think the reality is that whether our prayers are answered or unanswered Prayer is always forming us. Our spiritual formation happens right now.
in the middle of our everyday existence, in the midst of trials and troubles that pervade our reality god forms us in Christlikeness, not in spite of our suffering, but through our suffering. I think he weaves his redemptive purposes even with the threads of pain that we experience with unanswered prayer. And I think one of the great mysteries of life actually is the way in which we are formed through struggle. We see it.
We see it all around us in nature actually. I mean like butterflies exert tremendous effort to wrestle and emerge from their chrysalis. grapes that struggle to grow at high elevation that produce wine with intensified character. There's so many ways in which we see struggle, mothers and babies laboring together to bring forth new life.
And I honestly believe that if prayer were always easy, don't know that we would become fully formed there's something mysterious about struggle that is actually necessary for our formation like my one of my twins you know, is crawling.
and a couple of weeks ago he you know he was feeling very frustrated he couldn't reach certain things you know But if I had just... if I had just jumped in and made it easy for him to reach it I actually think in some way it would be detrimental to him like developmentally
need to kind of allow him to struggle a little bit in order for him to crawl and to do something that's really important for his development and I think it's really important Also to recognize the reality that that pain has the capacity to diminish ourselves. and even destroy us I know Ronald Rollheiser says that any pain or tension that we do not transform we will transmit which is always like hits me I've never done that ever but
it also has the capacity to grow us and enlarge us. If we're willing to host the pain and absorb it into our lives, if we can let What is dad? birth something new. I think loss and pain doesn't have to make us last.
I know that Jerry Sitzer talks a lot about that. I was just thinking of that. It's golden. But, you know, he talks about the way that we can sort of mysteriously, like, absorb the pain, like the way soil... receives decaying matter until something new grows and and so I think we're always being formed I think we we often come to a place where we have to choose am I gonna let this diminish me or am I going to let it grow me wow that's powerful yes I think in closing
we should just return to the character of God. Because in talking about prayer, we've been talking about God as... the victorious warrior who is winning back all of creation. And... Gemma shared that beautiful insight about in the midst of the pain of prayer, meeting him as the man of sorrows. And this is who God is revealed to be in Jesus. He is. the victorious God who dances on his own grave, the resurrected king, and he is the suffering servant.
who washes the feet of his disciples and allows himself to be crucified in order to win the greatest victory. And I believe this is what makes God worth trusting it's what makes God worth staying in the room with through the pain of unanswered prayer And it's what makes God worth hoping in again on the other side of my pain or disillusionment or disappointment. that in Jesus we are not revealed a God that we can always understand, but we are revealed a God that we can always trust.
Because I trust the God. who does not lob platitudes down at my pain from a safe distance, but crawls down into the mess with me, feels the pain that I feel, and sustains me through it. and bring our