By: Paul E. Miller
NavPress:2009, 279pp
[5 STARS!]
Here it is, a book for Christians “struggling with life, who pray badly yet long to connect with their heavenly Father.” I’ve collected lots of book on prayer over the course of my guilt-ridden life, driven to do something about my substandard ‘prayer life’. I’ve started in to read the classics by the ‘famous’ Christians who knew how to pray and could lay out the ‘doctrine’ of it thoroughly and without a loophole. And I’ve read some ‘loopier’ modern ones-- that imply that God is always talking to me and if I’ll just learn to tune in, I can ask anything I want and voila! I’ll have the answers I’m seeking. It’s just that easy. But buying books on prayer is kinda like buying art books—it’s easier to spend the money collecting the books than the time learning to draw. Prayer comes down to that, spending time talking, and listening, and being conscious of God’s responses as they’re woven into my days.
What’s neat about this book is that it’s not only inviting to read because it’s built on the real life experience of the author (and his family), but it also makes you want to pray, to stop reading and start in, right now! Life-as-is becomes the starting point for coming like a dependent child to a Father who cares intimately about everything and desires to meet my needs. It’s not so much a matter of discipline once I recognize my utter need for God’s intervention in my days. Prayerlessness implies that I’m trusting in something else—my money, ability, spouse, fate?…to get me through without God. Anxiety is the tell-tale sign of my misplaced confidence. The circumstances of life are better seen as an invitation to talk to my Father about everything.
Paul Miller is not afraid to tackle the hard questions.
--What do we do with Jesus’ seemingly extravagant prayer promises?
--How do we avoid the extremes of not asking at all vs. asking selfishly?
--What are we to do with our own cynicism-- that dogged tendency to doubt God’s active goodness on our behalf in response to our prayers.
--And what about the messiness of ‘unanswered’ prayer or answers that seem to be the opposite of what we wanted?
He doesn’t offer pat answers. His hasn’t been a life of miraculous ease, all troubles removed in response to prayer. But his teaching gives witness to a God that delights in us and is weaving His story through our lives in response to our trust, as expressed in prayer. This can be hard work. It may mean laying down my will for God’s better will. “The praying life is inseparable from obeying, loving, waiting, and suffering.” (197)
When our hopes and our prayers do not change the reality we face then what? An excellent chapter is devoted to this topic. Our other options are denial (side-stepping suffering by insisting I’m well, for instance), determination (I will make this suffering go away--by prayer, by sheer will, by expending every means at my disposal), despair (the dead-end of determination gone awry; it avoids the pain of hoping in the face of failure), and one more. We can choose with Abraham to do our time in the desert, keeping one eye on reality but staking our lives on the sure hope to come? Miller wisely states that “God takes everyone he loves through a desert. It is his cure for our wandering hearts, restlessly searching for a new Eden.”(184) In the desert of deferred hope, he says, we give up fighting, let go of our idols, and come face to face with our helplessness, the crucial ingredient of a spirit of prayer. Here our priorities begin to change; praying continually becomes reality as we depend on God’s presence like never before. The desert is His gift in answer to our prayers. This is not the loaf of bread we asked for. Neither is it a stone. It is the bread of life by which we are transformed!
The final section of A Praying Life offers practical suggestions for developing prayer tools, specifically prayer cards and a prayer journal. While cautioning against a robotic use of systems, Miller holds that we will create systems to manage what is important to us. Our unbelief will be the biggest obstacle to creating a system of Word-based prayer requests for those we love. He shows how these work for him in just enough detail to make me want to get making my own! Do we really need to write things down? Consider it the next time you hear yourself saying: “I’ll keep you in my prayers”. Roughly translated perhaps what we mean is: ‘I have every intention of praying for you, but because I’ve not written it down, it is likely I will never pray for it. But I say it because at this moment I do care, and it feels awkward to say nothing.’ (Our 21st century version of ‘Be warmed and filled’—James 2:16) (229)
I can’t say enough good things about this refreshingly candid, practical, and inspiring book. It’s one that I will be adding to my collection of books on prayer, but with the difference that this one won’t make me cringe with inadequacy or guilt. Even a child can pray and it’s not too late to turn the details of today into an opportunity to pray. I'm ordering a copy today, and another to give away. And say, I think I'll request that our local library purchase a copy too!
--LS
P.S. The disadvantage of a library copy is not getting to underline the best morsels. These are they:
“If you try to seize the day, the day will eventually break you. Seize the corner of his garment and don’t let go until he blesses you. He will reshape the day.” (233)
“Anxiety wants to be God but lacks God’s wisdom, power, or knowledge. A godlike stance without godlike character and ability is pure tension.” (70)
“Instead of hunting for the perfect spiritual state to lift you above the chaos, pray in the chaos. As your heart or your circumstances generate problems, keep generating prayer.” (72)
“When you stop trying to control your life and instead allow your anxieties and problems to bring you to God in prayer, you shift from worry to watching” (i.e. watching God weave His patterns in your lifestory, 73)
“Instead of being frozen by your self-preoccupation talk with God. If you don’t begin with where you are, then where you are will sneak in the back door. Your mind will wander to where you are weary.” (33)
Come as you are—“Private, personal prayer is one of the last great bastions of legalism.” (32)
“If we separate our mundane needs (doing) from God’s best gift, his loving presence (being), then we are overspiritualizing prayer.(122)
“Christians rush to ‘not my will, but yours be done’ without first expressing their hearts (Lk.22:42). They submit so quickly that they disappear. Overspiritualizing prayer suppresses our natural desire…. When we stop being ourselves with God, we are not longer in real conversation with God.” (122)
“Trying to dissect how prayer works is like using a magnifying glass to try to figure out why a woman is beautiful. If you turn God into an object, he has a way of disappearing….The only way to know how prayer works is to have complete knowledge and control of the past, present, and future. In other words, you can figure out how prayer works if you are God.” (128)
“Our dislike of asking is rooted in our desire for independence.” ‘The human ego assumes its self-sufficiency and self-mastery and imagines itself secure….It does not recognize the contingent and dependent character of its life and believes itself to be the author of its own existence.’Reinhold Niebuhr) (125)
“Frankly, God makes us nervous when he gets too close. We don’t want a physical dependence on him. It feels hokey, like we are controlling God. Deep down we just don’t like grace. We don’t want to risk our prayer not being answered. We prefer the safety of isolation to engaging the living God. To embrace the Father and thus prayer is to accept what one pastor called ‘the sting of particularity’(125)
“The most precious things in life can’t be proven or observed directly, but we know them as surely as we know that the sun and moon exist.” (127)
“Suffering is God’s gift to make us aware of our contingent existence. It creates an environment where we see the true nature or our existence—dependent on the living God.” (126)
“Asking in Jesus’ name isn’t another thing I have to get right so my prayers are perfect, it is one more gift of God because my prayers are so imperfect.” (135)
“At the center of self-will is me, carving a world in my image.
At the center of prayer is God, carving me in His Son’s image.” (156)
“The great struggle of my life is not trying to discern God’s will,
it is trying to discern and then disown my own.” (157)
“Until you are convinced that you can’t change your child’s heart, you will not take prayer seriously.” (167)
“I often find that when God doesn’t answer a prayer, he wants to expose something in me. Our prayers don’t exist in a world of their own. We are in dialogue with a personal, divine Spirit who wants to shape us as much as he wants to hear us. For God to act unthinkingly with our prayers would be paganism, which says the gods do our will in response to our prayers.” (168)
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