Combining Spiritual Thoughts with Spiritual Words

"Some friends and I are getting together to pray and I would really love for you to come," my friend Lisa said, "but, just so you know, we aren't going to share any prayer requests." She must have seen the puzzled look on my face, Lisa could always read my face, because she explained, "we're going to wait on the Holy Spirit to tell us what to pray about."

Now I'm a naturally skeptical person, and her comment produced such an uneasy skepticism in my gut that you would have thought she was inviting me to a seance, instead of a prayer meeting. Maybe this sounded just a little too mystical for my upbringing, but I decided to give it a try anyway.
We met on the floor around a coffee table, some of us were stretched out, some leaning over the table, some with our heads leaning back on the couch. We were silent and we waited.

I don't think I had ever been to a prayer meeting that didn't spend the majority of the time sharing requests. To be honest, I think that was the part I preferred, because I always seemed eager for the prayer time to end. As I sat there, I could see that I was clearly in the habit of waiting, but not on the Spirit. I was used to waiting for who would pray next, used to waiting for my turn to pray. (Remember how you could pass prayer around the room like a game of electricity, tapping the person next to you if you didn't want to pray) I was especially used to waiting for the clock, waiting for the typically 10 minutes of scheduled prayer to be done.

After waiting out all those things I was used to waiting out, I found myself relaxing into an easy place of waiting. What I experienced was a prayer time like I had never known before. My heart and mind had never felt so quiet, never felt more free of my flesh.

Ephesians 6:18 tells us to "pray at all times in the Spirit". Do you think by that we can infer it is possible to pray in the flesh?
Jesus warned against praying like the Pharisees or Gentiles.
"And when you pray, you are not to be as the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners, in order to be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will repay you. And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition, as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words. Therefore do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need, before you ask Him." Matthew 6:5-8

When I pray I do a lot of thinking. I think about what I'm going to say, about what others will think of my prayer; I think about how long that person is praying, about how I wish I sounded as worshipful as she does. I can be  thinking about what I'm going to do after this prayer time is over, about what I want to say to the person next to me, about my next task.
If I'm really being fleshly, I'll be critiquing what others are saying, thinking about the prayer requests and how trivial it seems, thinking about the mess other people make of their lives, judging them for their failures. I'll be waiting for my requests to be prayed for, comparing whether equal time was given for my concerns, for my needs, wondering why people don't care about me, or think about me as much as the other person.

That's what I mean by being burdened by my flesh when I pray. Frustrating indeed!
On this unprecedented occasion, the patient waiting succeeded in letting all that thinking in the flesh to slip away and in it's place I found myself listening. Now I'm not the best of listeners. I talk to think, which results in a lot of talking. When I'm talking, I'm mostly not listening, and when I'm not talking, I'm mostly thinking about what I want to say next. So whether I'm talking or thinking, I don't do much listening, ok, I don't do any listening.
You know how it is when someone is talking at you, not with you? Prayer is a two way communication that often looks just like that, just like us talking at God. How much do we listen to God? Do we expect Him to have anything to say back to us?

Usually I hesitate to welcome other people's ideas because I'm pretty satisfied with my own; I think they are good, maybe even the best. Why would I want to consider another idea when I'm not interested in changing mine? Do I come to God that way when I pray? How interested am I in what God thinks, in what's on His mind? Maybe I don't want to know; maybe I don't want to change my plans.

In the book "Experiencing God", Henry Blackaby suggests that "what God says in prayer is far more important than what you say." I hate to admit this, but Blackaby jabbed me just where I needed it. I had always felt that what I had to say was very important, so it had never occurred to me to consider God's part of the conversation as more important than mine. What was I doing in prayer, trying to communicate to God what was on my mind or trying to listen in order to learn what was on His? Which is more important, that He know my will, or that I know His? Doesn't He in fact already know what I am thinking, know even the motives of my heart far better than I know them?

Our prayer life and our thought life are intertwined. This chapter is not on prayer, but on how the Spirit is absolutely indispensable in both prayer and our minds. Has God made it possible for us to know His will, to know His mind, and how important is that in our prayer life?

"Just as it is written, 'things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love Him', for to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man, which is in him? Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words." 1corinthians2:9-13

"And in the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should,
but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God." romans8:26-27

It would seem to me that I'm not going to know one tiny smidgen of God's will without the Spirit, whether it be through His inspired written Word or through prayer, so it begs the question about my prayer life.
Whose mind or thoughts am I expressing when I pray?
Do I start praying by admitting my incapacity to know how or what to pray?

I love this story Blackaby tells of when his son was six years old, and he bought him a blue Schwinn bike, only his son didn't know he wanted a blue Schwinn bike. He kept asking for smaller, more inferior toys, but Henry kept working to get his son to want a blue Schwinn bike. By the day of his birthday, his son had asked for a blue Schwinn bike. Blackaby says, "The bike was already in the garage, I just had to convince him to ask for it."

The Holy Spirit knows the mind of God, essentially saying, the Holy Spirit knows what God already has planned for us "in the garage". When we learn to wait on Him in prayer, to want God's will first, the Holy Spirit will convince us of what we should ask for, and we can be certain that the Spirit of truth will not lead in opposition to the Word of truth. The only way to truly pray according to the will of God is to pray in the Spirit.

"Prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." 2peter1:21
It strikes me how the same might be said about prayer, that no request has its origin in my will, but has come from God through the Holy Spirit.
Maybe we need to reverse the customary order and pray first, share requests later.

Dead Men don't wear Fig Leaves

Reading fiction was my addiction. I could read for hours, losing myself in the imaginary world of my books. It was a horribly annoying thing to be abruptly called back to reality in order to do some boring chores.  That is exactly what my mom would do, without fail, if she discovered me reading.
I hated it!
I would read where she couldn't see me, and if I heard her moving about, I would think to myself, "please, don't let her come in here and find me, pleeease". Even those tense moments, when I would almost hold my breath, were rain on my party. I wanted to be left alone to do what I wanted, free even of the fear of being discovered.

When the Spirit pricks my conscience, I am a little annoyed, to say the least, at His persistent interference with my pursuits. My flesh wants to be left alone, and  my pride pouts at being judged, at being told to stop doing what I like. I try to brush away the Spirit as if it were a bothersome mosquito buzzing in my ear. I want to silence the conviction because guilt is annoying; it makes me feel bad about myself. I want to return to thinking positive things about me, return to freedom from guilt and shame, return to feeling good about me again.

We humans would like to be left alone to do as we please without any consequences, without unwelcome interference, without anyone making us feel guilty for doing what we want. We are offended by our "judgers and punishers". Their judgment and punishment annoyingly break up our pursuit of happiness. In fact, just knowing that someone can judge us is enough to take the fun out of our self-centered pursuits and make us angry. We would like to be left alone to feel good about ourselves, to feel confident and strong.

So naturally, we're tempted to hide from the Spirit. We look for a private place to  lick our wounds and indulge in our pleasures. After awhile, when we feel a little better and our wounds of regret don't sting quite as badly, we'll sheepishly open the door a crack to see if the coast is clear. Full of positive thoughts that this time will be better, "this time I'll succeed", we tip-toe back out and hope that all has blown away, that no one noticed our absence, that we can move on as if nothing has happened. We feel ready now, feel strong enough to do this. Our confidence is back and we think "this is who I really am."

Maybe God won't notice the fig leaves I'm wearing.

As far as I can tell, Herman Melville was not a religious man, yet he writes a chapter he titles "The Sermon" in his whaling tale called "Moby Dick". In this sermon, his preacher character, Father Mapple, tells an imaginative version of Jonah's experience in the Bible, a very appropriate choice for a whaling ship. He concludes his sermon with this:
"Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the fish’s belly. But observe his prayer, and learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment."

Remember that look from mom or dad when you had gone too far? Suddenly, you've been grabbed by the arm and you start pleading "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry", hoping that they will have pity on you. You are too busy clamoring for pardon to even think about repenting.
Imagine if you came to your mom or dad, punishment in hand, and said "thank you".

"Repentance does not cause a sense of sin - it causes a sense of inexpressible unworthiness. When I repent, I realize that I am absolutely helpless, and I know that through and through I am not worthy even to carry His sandals. Have I repented like that, or do I have a lingering thought of possibly trying to defend my actions? Get to the end of yourself where you can do nothing, but where He does everything."
Oswald Chambers

You just blew it.
Maybe you lost your temper, yelled at your kids, lied to your boss or parents, looked at porn, got  jealous, whatever it was, you blew it. What now? You might feel sorry, mostly because you've embarrassed yourself, exposed yourself to the possibility that others will think less of you, so you retreat to your sulking room where you alternate between convincing yourself that you aren't that bad, fretting about what others think, giving reasons for your lapse of perfection,  saving face or beating yourself up for having failed to keep it all together. Wasn't it just two days ago that you said you weren't ever going to do that again?

Too often we retreat until the bad feeling passes, when we should turn to God and admit defeat. Like the prodigal son who comes to his senses, we should drop the slop and return to the Father, broken and humble.
Retreating is easier than accepting defeat, but it doesn't produce any real change of heart. That's why we so often find ourselves repeating the same sins over and over again.

To pick up your cross you have to put something else down.
Put down your rebellion.
Put down your sin.
Put down your pride.
Put down that thing you refuse to give up.
Put down those other loves.
To walk in the Spirit you have to put it down and turn around.

Repentance is turning yourself around and standing before the One greater than you, the One who has the right to judge you, and saying, "Here I stand Lord, wretchedly out of reach, with no hope of crossing over to You, here I stand in the stench of my filthy rags of sin. What an offensive mess I would bring into Your presence! No Lord! I am undone, I have sinned against you, and you are right to call me out on it, right to punish me for it."

True repentance sees my sin as He sees it, without trying to justify it. True repentance acknowledges God's perfect justice and rightness in punishing my sin, abandoning all hope of being able to 'make things right' and throwing myself on God's grace and mercy. True repentance recognizes that I am hopeless to recover in any way from my sin, making my appeal based on who God is, not on anything that I have done.

True repentance is action.
It's bending down in submission to accept the cross that identifies you with Christ.
It's  dying to self, it's freedom from sin, and it's every step of walking in the Spirit.

Too much talk, Not enough walk

Venting has been the excuse for saying some pretty harsh things in my life. As a teen, I said many things that hurt my mom, and even though the wounds my words inflicted were visibly apparent, I refused to apologize, preferring instead to retreat to my room and wait for the dust to settle.  In fact, apologizing was so rare for me, I vividly remember how it felt the first time that I sought her out to say I was sorry. She herself had gone to her room, and all the way there the words rehearsed themselves in my mind, but when I opened my mouth, nothing came out. It seemed that my vocal chords had no muscle memory for them. Talking is as natural as breathing for me, but I realized that saying "I'm sorry for..." was never going to be natural, never going to be easy.

“Sorry”
 a word that by itself says very little.
A simple "sorry" could mean "excuse me".
Oh,... sorry.
We tell a child who has made some other child cry, "Say you're sorry".
"Sawwwy" he says,
but what does he think that means? Does he think it is a magic word like "please"?
"Sorry" could be the means of avoiding punishment, a loophole that gets you out of trouble.
“I’m sorry”
but not really.

Once I thought I would see if my daughter knew why she was sorry, so I asked her to say "I was wrong for....". You would have thought her vocal chords were glued shut. Her problem was just like mine!
No surprise there!
Try it yourself.
It is much easier to say a generic "I'm sorry" than to admit what you did wrong.

I wonder about all this sorry business.
If I feel sorry, does that mean I've repented?
What am I usually sorry for?
I might feel sorry for getting caught, for letting myself down, for disappointing myself. I often feel sorry for making a mistake, for being less than perfect, for opening myself up for blame, criticism, or judgment. I feel sorry for myself when I make someone angry at me. I feel sorry for the consequences of my mistakes.
Do any of these mean I have truly repented?

A dictionary definition would say that repentance is sincere regret or remorse.
I'm familiar with this feeling of regret, familiar with reliving, over and over again, each of my regrets.
Why didn't I learn faster? Why didn't I shut my mouth before I said those things? Why couldn't I have done it right? Why did I get so jealous? Why wasn't I strong enough to avoid severe depression? Why did I lose my temper?  Why was I so destructive to others and to my relationships? Why did I eat that donut? Why didn't I say "no"!
Regrets. First they torment, then they anger.
I deeply regret my failures because I want to think of myself as a better person than that, because I fear that others will think of me as less than what I want them to think of me.
My regret is always sincere, does that mean I have repented?

The Biblical definition of repentance is very different from one you will find in the dictionary.
Biblical repentance means to change your mind and turn to the Lord, but this concept was lost in the Latin translation, so that today, all we have is this idea of feeling sorry and regret.
The problem is that regret and remorse don't really have anything to do with repentance.

Charles Spurgeon describes well this conflicting nature of repentance in his book "All of Grace".
“I hear another man cry, “Oh, sir my want of strength lies mainly in this, that I cannot repent sufficiently!” A curious idea men have of what repentance is! Many fancy that so many tears are to be shed, and so many groans are to be heaved, and so much despair is to be endured. Whence comes this unreasonable notion? Unbelief and despair are sins, and therefore I do not see how they can be constituent elements of acceptable repentance; yet there are many who regard them as necessary parts of true Christian experience. They are in great error. Still, I know what they mean, for in the days of my darkness I used to feel in the same way. I desired to repent, but I thought that I could not do it, and yet all the while I was repenting. Odd as it may sound, I felt that I could not feel. I used to get into a corner and weep, because I could not weep; and I fell into bitter sorrow because I could not sorrow for sin. What a jumble it all is when in our unbelieving state we begin to judge our own condition! It is like a blind man looking at his own eyes. My heart was melted within me for fear, because I thought that my heart was as hard as an adamant stone. My heart was broken to think that it would not break. Now I can see that I was exhibiting the very thing which I thought I did not possess; but then I knew not where I was. Remember that the man who truly repents is never satisfied with his own repentance. We can no more repent perfectly than we can live perfectly. However pure our tears, there will always be some dirt in them: there will be something to be repented of even in our best repentance. But listen!
To repent is to change your mind about sin, and Christ, and all the great things of God. There is sorrow implied in this; but the main point is the turning of the heart from sin to Christ. If there be this turning, you have the essence of true repentance, even though no alarm and no despair should ever have cast their shadow upon your mind.”
― Charles H. Spurgeon, All of Grace [With CD]

The main point is the turning of the heart from sin to Christ.
Why do we linger and stumble and get stuck in groans and despair about our sin, all the while claiming that we want to be forgiven, but insisting we don't feel it?
Why don't we know true victory from sin?
Why does all our efforts at repentance seem to only serve to distance us from God?

The first principle of repentance is to turn, but the problem is that I can sit in remorse and regret indefinitely, without ever turning around. What's worse, they can be born exclusively out of the flesh, born out of self-love, self-hate, and self-centeredness. Fleshly regret and remorse dump me in a cesspool of guilt and shame where I wallow until the bad feeling lessens and I feel strong enough to keep on going.

We are dead men walking, and I don't mean the zombie kind. We are as those who live every day with a death sentence, every day we pick up the dying of Jesus, and that means every day we embrace weakness, expect suffering and choose humility.
There is one more step included in this life of dying and that is repentance, the critical step between dying and walking. Without repentance, there is no real change of heart, without repentance, you are still going the wrong direction, without repentance you can't be walking by the Spirit.