An Experiment in Prayer

I have heard dozens of teachings on "the Lord's Prayer" (also called "the Model Prayer") found in Matthew 6:6-13. This is in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, in a sequence of statements in which Jesus says "you have heard" some teaching from the Old Testament or the Pharisees, "but I say to you" something even more demanding for righteousness. In this particular paragraph, He's teaching about prayer. He then tells them to pray "this way," and begins the familiar prayer, "Our Father in heaven, may your name be honored..." Or perhaps your more familiar with a different translation, "Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed by Thy name..."

In these dozens of teachings, I heard very careful (and accurate) analyses of each phrase and how we ought to pray that way, because Jesus said, "Pray this way." I value all the teaching I've received on this.

But I want to add a different angle to the mix, not to replace the good teaching, but to supplement it. Given that Jesus is continually discipling His followers to form them into people who resemble Him well, we can assume He is doing this formation as He teaches us to pray. So, in this model prayer, He's not only telling us how to approach God in prayer, but He's also trying to form us into a particular kind of people. Through praying, He wants us to be changed. He gives us prayer not only as a way to dialog with God, but also as a means to be discipled into Christlikeness.

So, let's look at the Model Prayer in terms of what Jesus wants us to become, and then look at how it might affect praying for something specific. For our purposes, I choose a troubled relationship to pray about as an example.

Fearing (Our Father in heaven, may your name be honored,)

God wants us to be fearing, to be people who fear, honor, and respect God with a sense of awe. This opening to the prayer is not instruction on how to "butter up" God for your requests, but to be a particular kind of person, approaching Him in prayer with a particular attitude and self-awareness.

In the example of praying about a strained relationship, I might pray, "Father, may the way I approach this relationship bring you honor. May our friendship be worthy of Your awesome and mighty name. Make me to be a person who brings honor to You with my friendships." This is a very different prayer than, "Lord, change this person" or "Father, help me to be more tolerant of this jerk."

Missional (may your kingdom come,)

God wants us to be missional, to have His Kingdom be our life goal, our every aspiration. He wants us to carry out the Great Commission of making disciples of all nations. He wants us to use our time, talents, and treasures for the good of His Kingdom, to live here and now based on the Kingdom's values, and to bring tangible elements of the Kingdom to those around us - for His Kingdom to manifest in part now and then to come in full later.

Therefore, I might pray, "Lord, my relationship right now is not running according to the character of your Kingdom. May your Kingdom come into this relationship, and may the two of us collaborate to advance Your Kingdom. May our relationship now be just like it will be when Your Kingdom has fully arrived." This is more immediate than praying that the end of time would come soon so that the Kingdom would be fully established, and then I don't have to suffer this person's annoying behavior any longer!

Submissive (may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.)

God wants us to be submissive, to surrender our will to His. Jesus did this beautifully in the Garden of Gethsemane just before He was crucified by praying, "Not my will, but Yours be done."

I could pray, "Lord, I'm not really submissive to you right now in my relationship with so-and-so. Regardless of this person's problems, I'm not really pulling for your will in this - I want mine. Change me to be eager for Your will in this relationship. I surrender ... I want to be a fully surrendered person, even in this." Wow - this one hurts when praying about a relationship!

Dependent (Give us today our daily bread,)

God wants us to be dependent, which is brilliantly captured with the idea of daily bread - the stuff I need to get through just one day. And then the next day, I'll depend on God some more. This is the kind of person God wants us to be.

So, my prayer changes. "Father, I have been relying on myself and on my fleshly strength, and worse, I have been pursuing what my selfishness wants in this relationship. You want me to rely on You for this relationship, for You to give me the love, the patience, and the attitude. I need You for this relationship to be healthy. Help me to love well. I depend on You for this relationship. Let me walk dependently in all my relationships."

Free (and forgive us our debts, as we ourselves have forgiven our debtors.)

God wants us to be free - free from our sins ("debts") through forgiveness, but also free from the sins against us (by our "debtors") through forgiving them. Only through forgiveness that we first receive and then grant can we be truly free people.

Then I should pray, "Lord, the relationship between You and me is based on forgiveness. In this case, it's all You forgiving me. My relationship with this other person will only be to Your pleasure through the same forgiveness. But in this case, that's each of us forgiving the other. Help me to be changed by Your forgiveness, to grant forgiveness freely to the other, and even to receive the forgiveness that the other offers me. Help me to be a forgiving kind of friend always."

Holy (And do not lead us into temptation,)

God wants us to be holy, to avoid sin and to escape the temptations to enter into sin. His forgiveness makes us holy through the blood of Christ, but holy living on a daily basis as our practice requires us to change our practices, too. In the Model Prayer, Jesus instructs us to pray for God to help us be holy.

So, I would pray, "Father, in this relationship, I have impure, hurtful, judgmental, and sometimes hateful thoughts. Lead me away from that, not just to have a better relationship, but because of who You want me to be in this relationship - a person who lives according to holiness, even in my friendships."

Rescued (but deliver us from the evil one.)
Finally, God wants us to be rescued (which is what deliver means in this verse). In other words, He wants us to live knowing that He rescued us from ourselves, and so we are a perpetually rescued people, in God's blessings only because of his mercy to rescue us. It's the blood of Jesus that rescued us, so every breath we take was purchased by the rescuing blood. We have an enemy who opposes us because we follow Christ - we have been rescued from him, but also need daily rescue from his continued attacks. We live perpetually with a rescued identity, which should keep us humble.

Therefore, my prayer might be, "Lord, I need rescue in this relationship. Satan wants to have us at each others' throats, and frankly, I've been pretty accommodating. I need rescue from my anger and my desire to 'even the score' with this person. But I have been rescued by Christ, and I also need rescue in this moment. Help me to always live out all my relationships as a rescued one."

# # #

This is not radically different from other teachings we've received, and I would be worried if it was. It is, rather, a different entry point into the same model prayer - to focus the ideas of this prayer onto who God wants me to be, to see the characteristics Jesus is developing in us by praying as He prayed and turning those characteristics into the heart of prayer.

So, I'm conducting a little experiment for a while. Not forever. I'm not saying that this is the way for me to pray for the rest of my life. But I'm going to experiment until the experiment runs dry by intentionally praying along these lines. Already I've seen some barriers broken in my prayer life and in my daily life, simply because I'm praying in a different way. I'm eager to see how the experiment goes.

For this experiment, I've printed out the following list just to remind me. You might print this out and stick it in your Bible and guide your prayers through this for a while. Experiment some yourself.

God wants us to be:

Fearing (Our Father in heaven, may your name be honored,)
Missional (may your kingdom come,)
Submissive (may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.)
Dependent (Give us today our daily bread,)
Free (and forgive us our debts, as we ourselves have forgiven our debtors.)
Holy (And do not lead us into temptation,)
Rescued (but deliver us from the evil one.)

It's a Coverup!

I apologize upfront for a somewhat morbid illustration, but please indulge me because I think it makes the point well.

Imagine your child comes to you and has wounds on his or her face. There was an accident on a bicycle and then a fall into a rock. As a result, some chipped teeth, a black eye, a cut on the cheek flowing blood, and some swelling. So you, being the good parent that you are, apply makeup with expert care to cover up the wounds. In fact, you do an amazingly good job of it - hardly anyone will notice.

Ridiculous? Of course it is. No good parent would do this. A good parent would take the child to the right doctors to get wounds treated, teeth repaired, and so on. No amount of makeup, regardless of how good, will make the child well. And your concern as a parent is your child's wellness. If the child asked you to do nothing more than apply makeup, you would still go to the doctor because of your commitment to that wellness - you want the child's health to be transformed.

When we go to our heavenly Father with our wounds, our hurts, our sin, our addictions, our anger, our unforgiveness, our jealousy, and our judgmentalism, do we ask Him to just apply makeup so that hardly anyone will notice? Do we ask Him for every kind of "fix" except transformation? Do we ask Him to take away the bad consequences, to take away the bad emotions, and even to take away the bad behavior without asking Him to heal us and transform us?

In Christ, we have been transformed. But also in Christ, we still need to be transformed. There is still an abundance of ways we need to be healed and changed. Our attitudes still need to be transformed, our thoughts still need to be transformed, our words still need to be transformed, our money management still needs to be transformed, our prayer life, our family life, our work habits, our ethics and morals, every corner of life - all of it still needs to be completed in our transformation.

Then why do we ask God to just apply a little more makeup?

In the Old Testament, they had the "Day of Atonement" (Lev 16), called "Yom Kippur" in Hebrew. "Kippur" means "to cover," and was also the name of the lid to the ark of the covenant - the "cover." That's what the OT sacrifice did - it covered sins, but it didn't transform souls. That's what makeup does. And that sometimes what we ask God to do.

Jesus came and offered to transform us. To heal us. Not to cover it all up, but to take it all on Himself and then transform us.

When you come to the Lord in prayer about your brokenness, your sin, your need for healing, pay attention to what you say. Listen to yourself. If you are stopping short of asking to be truly transformed, go deeper in prayer. Keep going deeper until the guttural cry of your heart is, "Father, covering this up is not enough! Not this time! I need to be transformed!"

We would never just slap makeup on our children's serious wounds. May we be so insistent with our own souls.

Watching My Not-Dadd

A lot of you know that my father has been in the hospital and then in residential physical rehab for more than a week. I have appreciated the well-wishes, prayers, and questions on Dadd's behalf. Yup ... "Dadd." We call him "Dadd" and my mother "Momm." It comes from the way he insists on spelling his nickname, "Budd."

His anesthesia is taking a long time to leave his system, while he is also being given some strong pain meds. The combination of the two means that he has not been able to be himself cognitively. It looked like him, but it wasn't him - not the man we know. The foreign substances in his system caused him to manifest in a completely different way than the man who insists on two d's in his nickname.

While he has been in this state, I could have chosen to treat him according to how he manifest himself to be. Or, I could treat him according to who I know him to be - I could just be patient and wait for him to "show up" again.

His body, like his mind, has had it's struggles. As we age, we just don't bounce back from major surgery as quickly. So, I also watched Dadd struggle physically. But my Dadd's body is not my Dadd. When his body is weak or broken, that doesn't mean he is weak or broken as a person. When his fingers aren't as nimble as normal, that doesn't mean he's less of a person. These are just how his body manifests itself under the circumstances.

I could choose to treat him according to how his body is doing, so that when his body betrays him, I treat him as less of a person. Or I can choose to treat him as who I know him to be. I could just be patient and wait for his body to heal (but even then, I know that age hounds each of our bodies).

In any given week, I see several people say and do things that are not according to who I know them to be. They are bright, decent people with high moral standards, but manifested themselves in ways that were not rational, good, right, clear, or moral. No one is always good and kind, but we can also tell when someone's behavior is worse than their character, when they are not being themselves.

I could choose to treat them according to their behavior as if that's who they are. Or I can treat them according to who they really are - imperfect but decent people. I can be patient to wait for them to "show up."

We are fallen. Because of our refusal to completely be and do as God desires, we are fallen. We have fallen minds, fallen bodies, and even fallen situations. Fallenness affects our behavior, thoughts, and words - how we manifest ourselves. We are still responsible for our actions, but our fallenness means that we can't even behave as good as our fallen selves are, let alone perfection. Just like my Dadd's mind and body during his recovery.

I believe that only in Christ will we ever be transformed into our full capacities as human beings, but I also think many would agree that we all have sinned and fall short of the full capacity of man, not to mention short of the glory of God. Even our best behavior is fallen, and our best behavior is rare.

I can choose to treat people only by how they manifest themselves. Certainly, we do respond to people according to how they are presently behaving - liars should not be trusted, thieves should be jailed, and gossips should be quieted. But I can choose to limit myself to treating them according to only how they manifest. Or I can choose to treat people according to their full capacity ... even though they never reach it. I can treat people more according to who God can make them to be. How I treat them is my choice to make.

I chose not to treat my Dadd according to his hampered capacities (although I did have to accommodate them), but for who I know him to be. I chose the path of patience. I want to consistently choose the same for others.

Peace in the Pieces

Life has pieces. Sometimes the pieces are all over the place, and sometimes the pieces are in fairly decent order. Sometimes the pieces seem to form a recognizable pattern, and sometimes they look totally random. Some pieces have rounded, harmless edges, and some pieces are dangerously sharp without mercy. But always pieces.

The humanist goal, then, would be to hold your pieces together. It's your job and yours alone to hold them together. Whoever does the best job of holding them together wins. Those who hold the pieces together well are the examples to follow, the inspiring stories, the stuff of legends. We particularly love the stories of those who had the most jagged pieces and then figured out how to hold them together with excellence. Indeed, there is much to commend, here, but one way to look at humanism is in terms of it's goal of holding the pieces together well.

The goal of religion, then, is to hold your sanctified pieces together. Religion is a baptized humanism, because it's your job and yours alone to hold those religious pieces together. Whoever does the best job of holding them together wins a golden crown, or something. The religious folks love to hold up such people as the examples and the inspiring stories, especially those who started with the most jagged pieces.

One slice of the religious community is the word-faith folks, otherwise known as the "prosperity gospel" or "name it and claim it." Their goal is for God to hold your pieces together so that you will win the same game as the humanists. As humble and righteous as it may sound that God is the one holding those pieces together, it still comes down to the same goal: to win by having your pieces held together well.

Jesus doesn't play these games. Jesus doesn't exist to hold these pieces together for you. He didn't come to earth to pick up your pieces, rearrange them, and then give you something prettier than what you started with. Rather, He says, "Your pieces are broken. I will dwell among them with you. Dwell with me among them, too. Eventually, I will replace them." Yes, he does clean some of them up and hold them together for us. Yes, we are more able to hold some of them together because of Him. But it's not the goal to hold those pieces together. That's the difference.

We dwell among broken pieces, and denying that truth leads to all kinds of false plans to reach false goals. His goal in our lives is not better management of the pieces, but rescue from them and full restoration. His method is to dwell in the broken pieces with us (for now), using those pieces as props in order to renew us. His goal for us is not better pieces, but to be a renewed people. In fact, He chose to take on broken pieces when He took on a fully human nature in the Incarnation to rescue us.

Since we will always have the pieces in this world, we can either deny the pieces or dwell in them with the One who chose brokenness with us. We will be renewed only by dwelling with Him there (for now).

Your pieces right now may seem overwhelming, and I have no intention of minimizing the anguish they cause. Quite the contrary - I'm embracing that anguish. The anguish is the intensity from which Jesus can rescue, restore, and renew. There is peace in the pieces.

"Stay in the Shade!"

Drinking a shake at McDonald's in the urban core, not a common habit of mine, became a vivid reminder for me last week about our posture before those around us.

My goal was to read. I had time between appointments, which I intended to spend by catching up on a reading assignment for an upcoming conference. Successful reading for me requires either silence or a steady background of noise. Instead, I got alternating waves of the shouts and whispers commonly heard in the core - bursts of laughter, exchanges across the dining room, advice, criticism, and all manners of life lived out loud, interrupted by pockets of nothingness.

The woman at the counter trying to get the attention of the worker, whose back was turned, because she needed a tray for the drinks since she was walking home to her son and her mother. The job applicant's boyfriend jawing about when he used to work in this restaurant years ago and the people he used to know. The older couple, he in suspenders and she in a wheelchair, in loud whispers recollecting faceless names. The lady with the wide hat three tables away talking to me about the weather.

People's lives lived out loud, louder than I'm accustomed to. Details of their lives I didn't ask for, and didn't really want to know. "I don't care!" I wanted to shout. I didn't. Not really. "I. Don't. Care!!! So stop telling me, and everyone, about the details of your life that we have no business knowing."

The lady in the wide hat told me it was warm outside. Actually, it was cooler than it had been, and was quite pleasant. So I said something stupid: "Actually, it's not that bad out there today, for August." She insisted it was hot, and I kind of blew it off. I could have proved her wrong with the temperature and humidity data if I wanted to.

Here's what I missed: She had been walking all morning because her daughter failed to pick her up, and she was about to walk a couple miles at two in the afternoon to her son's job so that he could drive her home. She was right, and I was wrong - it was hot that day ... for anyone who had to walk for miles during the hottest part of the day. That yesterday was a more typical August day was irrelevant. It was easy for me to say it wasn't that hot because I had so bravely walked from my air conditioned car for the ten seconds it took to get into the air conditioned McDonald's so that I could buy myself a cold shake.

I was wrong because I didn't listen. I had the data to prove my argument, sure, but I never listened. I didn't want to because I. Didn't. Care. She had told me earlier about walking, about her life in that moment, just like everyone else in the restaurant had been doing so loudly. Unlike what I'm accustomed to, people were freely and loudly sharing their lives. And I wasn't listening or caring.

The woman told me something about her life: she had to walk because her daughter continually runs late, she has a son, he has a job (I even know which furniture store) and a car, he's kind enough to give her rides, and she had a warm walk ahead of her because she wants to get home. Her hat is wide because she regularly walks for miles in the sun. The cup tray lady has a son and a mother living in her home, which obviously is nearby enough to be within walking distance, and she was bringing them something cool to drink. Suspenders man gently cares for his wheelchair-bound wife. Job applicant boyfriend remembers his coworkers and is doing what he can so his girlfriend can find work, too. He had spent the last two years in Arizona and just came back to KC in May in order to work.

I was right on the statistics, but wrong on a person's real, daily life because I didn't listen. I was in a place where life's details are shared freely, people telling me about themselves, and I acted like I was in the quiet, "polite" place where you talk softly about coffee flavors or how good your seats were last night at the game or you don't say anything at all.

I'm not suggesting that everyone should share their lives more openly and with more volume. I am suggesting that we tune our ears off of our own frequencies and onto the frequency of those who are speaking. I could argue the effects of relative humidity (listening to her, but tuned to my frequency) or I could be part of this woman's distress (listening to her, tuned to her frequency). How hot I thought it was didn't change the walk she had ahead of her, and it sure didn't help her get home.

As if to salvage myself, I did muster a "stay in the shade" as she collected herself to leave. I had heard her, a least a little, and I entered into her experience, at least a little.

We're Fixers Because We're Pharisees

In the church, we love to "fix" things. A problem comes up, we immediately try to fix it. Someone expresses a spiritual doubt, we immediately try to fix it. A couple gets into a spat, we try to fix it ... and especially right away. A child does something disrespectful, and we try to fix it, no matter whose kid he or she is. Our elders often talk about their own tendency to want to, and in some cases attempt to, fix almost every situation that comes our way.

Part of this tendency is well-motivated. We have a vision for how things ought to be, we see things that aren't as they ought to be, we don't want to be callous and ignore the problem as if we didn't care, and so we get right on the task of fixing. On rare occasions, we have what it takes to "fix" something, but in many cases, we don't really. We can't really fix a child's misbehavior. We can regulate it. We can induce guilt or shame because of it. But most of the time we can't get to the core issue that manifested itself in a behavior we deemed inappropriate. But we want to fix it! We're fixers!

I was talking this over with our Lifestyle Discipleship Coach, Jimmy. As we talked this out, another strain of conversation we'd been having collided with this one. We are Pharisees. We are Pharisees because we judge others on our righteousness scale. We often ignore the idea that we're Pharisees because we don't hold to same outrageous rules the Pharisees in the Bible had. We don't have rules like that, so we must not be like them. But we are.

We constantly judge people. I'm not just talking about discernment, where we rightly and soberly assess sin as sin. I'm talking about judging. We see what people do, and we go far beyond discernment right into internally declaring them unrighteous. What they did was wrong and that determines how I should respond to them. I will criticize them, think less of them, and mentally categorize them as people "who need help." Often, my help. They need fixin'! And so, I try to fix them.

That's what Pharisees did. They tried to fix people with their rules. We try to fix them with rules, correction, "advice," arguments, and meddling. Their behavior is distasteful to us, and in order to get distasteful things away from us, we fix. We become very self-centered in fixing others - trying to manipulate their lives so that we don't have to endure something we don't like. We are far more like Pharisees than we care to admit. And we're fixers because we're Pharisees.

The alternative is not that we should pull away and be uninvolved. Rather, we should commit to not fix them, but be with them in the mess and draw them to the only One who can fix anything about any one of us. The behavior is only a manifestation of something far deeper, and although man can help with many issues, ultimately only God can fulfill the deepest needs of the human soul. We can offer counsel and share what we've learned from experience. We can educate and encourage. We can do things that actually do help. But we can't "fix," and to try to fix is to point them away from the only One who can.

Now, when I read what Jesus said about removing the plank from our own eye before removing the speck from our brother's eye, I realize how brilliant Jesus is. Removing that speck is fixing, and you have plenty of fixing you need done before you ever think about fixing someone else.

There. I hope I fixed this situation.

And I would be guilty of my own rant if I stopped here.

Our tendency to fix, our Pharisaism, is itself something I can't fix in you or you fix in me. The Pharisee's rules and our tendency to fix are both rooted in unbelief that God actually does transform those who come to Him. Because we don't trust Him to do so, we make rules or try to fix. Our first step is to trust that He will. If anything needs fixin', it's our tendency to disbelieve that God transforms people in Christ.

That's Just Nuts!

Last week, the Washington Post published an article about a woman named Harriet Glickman, who in 1968 was so taken by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that she was compelled to do something about it. You can read the full article here: http://tinyurl.com/o2qnx5h .

But what could she do about a nation in a crisis of race relations? She was "just a schoolteacher." She decided to write some of the nationally syndicated cartoonists, such as Charles Schulz, who wrote about Snoopy and the gang in Peanuts. Her request to the cartoonists was simple - it would be a great step forward if they included African-American characters in their strips (the common term of respect in that day was "Negro"). There was some initial pushback (not because of bigotry of the cartoonists but because of the trouble it would cause from the intolerant crowd), and yet she persisted.

And that is how the character of "Franklin" was introduced into the Peanuts gang. It caused some trouble for Schulz, but he stayed with it. We cannot measure the impact of such a move, but certainly the way Schulz treated Franklin was a demonstration of normalized friendships between people of different ethnicity.

Two angles on this story fascinate me. First is that a person without a national platform developed a terrific idea and persisted through the barriers in order to make positive change at the national level. She was logical, persuasive, and respectful. She didn't try to shame or manipulate anyone. She was undeterred by difficulty. As a result, the entire country was introduced to a positive and popular display of good race relations, and this was an influence that was before an entire nation day after day. She was a schoolteacher who used the persuasive power of the pen.

The other angle is how Schulz used his work and his giftedness to address a problem that had nothing to do with his job, so to speak. He was not a policymaker or the leader of a movement. He drew cartoons because he was a cartoonist. He didn't use his platform to trash anyone, foment anger, protest, or judge anyone. He drew cartoons because he was a cartoonist. He just used his ability to draw cartoons to contribute to the positive change of his culture.

We are all gifted with talents and abilities. We all do something with some skill. Whatever those abilities may be, I can almost guarantee there's a way to use those abilities to contribute to positive change in your neighborhood, city, state, nation, or world. It doesn't have to be through grabbing a loudspeaker (although there are times for that). It can be through what you choose to do with your abilities, and the manner you choose to use them.

How can your giftedness be used like Glickman's and Schulz's to bring change through the work you are skilled to do?