Prayer-less

I'm not sure exactly what's going on with people at Oak Mountain Prez and Paul Miller's book, A Praying Life, but putting the two together is powerful. Today, I started teaching a Sunday School series based on the book in the Generations class, and many of the us were deeply moved by the lesson. I was caught off guard by the emotions people were feeling, and I had to slow down with what I was focused on and pay attention to what was going on in the room. This is similar to what happened when I taught on prayer this past winter to another class. That was by far the most I had ever seen a class moved by what we were studying.

"For you, what about prayer is hard?"

My guess is that it comes from the deep sense of failure most of us feel about prayer. We know we don't do it well. Our lives are messy and confusing, and slowing down to pray about these things just makes us realize even more how out of control we are. Then, evil comes in and puts us to shame: "You know better...," "You should pray more...", or "God's not really listening...".

I'm thankful that there's hope ahead for this class.

Desiring Prayer

Several people in my class wrote how they struggled with even having the desire to pray. I read those cards this morning, and then asked my class how they would respond with grace and in humility. The image here shows most of their responses, and I thought they had a real beauty to them. As the discussion continued, one man summarized the discussion well with the thoughts in the square in the image. He was hearing how God constantly allows us to lose control in life, which then causes us to surrender in the futility, and then we pray. All we have to do to realize our desire to pray is to simply pay attention to the brokenness in life. 

Messy Prayer

I really do love teaching Sunday School, especially at a grace-centered church at Oak Mountain. Imagine a place where people talk about their struggles and questions as they wrestle to find the truth. Only in a place like that would I admit to having the kind of prayer life shown in this diagram. Yep! That's pretty much my typical prayer time during my devotions. (Click on the image, and I bet it will pop up bigger for you.) Do they make a special ADD medicine for people who only get ADD when they pray? I'm usually a really focused person until I start praying.

This morning, I started the lesson with a brainstorm about how the gospel of grace makes us free. I really enjoyed hearing what people had to say. That's on the left side of the white board picture below. Then we brainstormed the right hand column, taking what we know about how the grace makes us free in general and applying it to how grace frees us up in our prayer lives. I wanted people to be able to see prayer, which Paul Miller calls the last bastion of legalism, in light of gospel freedoms that they were beginning to really know in other parts of their lives.

Dependence and Prayer

Yesterday's Sunday School class was on how the Father molds the circumstances of our life to keep us dependent on him. But, that's not to cripple us. In the context of "a praying life" (not a prayer life, as Paul Miller puts it in his book in Part 1), that dependence is what should cause us to learn to pray continuously, like breathing, throughout the day.

I decided to start the lesson by asking, "How did children come to Jesus?". The responses in purple on the white board were what the class came up with. I then asked, "Why do children ask as they do?". Those are the responses in blue around the outside of the board. Of course, getting our heads around how messily children came to Jesus and how they ask without shame or inhibition was a good way for use to begin to process how we don't usually pray that way. We so often believe that we have to clean ourselves up and get our prayers right. If we can't do that, we stay away from Jesus until we can get ourselves together. All the time, he's saying, "Child, come."

One of my favorite things about teaching at The Oak is the honesty that grace has given us. As we got into the lesson, I guided people to see that the messiness and brokenness of life is what often draws us to pray. When I asked them, "What are the messy places in your life?", I got answers like the ones in black in the center of the board. The first one was "screaming at my children," and the man who said that wasn't trying to be funny. He said his answer with a tone of how wrong he was to talk to his children that way. He lead out with courage and humility in talking about our lives honestly, and the other answers posted in black then flowed. 

And then, I think God's Spirit moved among us to draw us to his Son in our humility and poverty of spirit. We are broken people with messed up lives. We need to pray, not because we're spiritual and disciplined, but because we're desperate. I closed the lesson with the Jesus Prayer from the Orthodox church: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner." That prayer is something I've learned to breath throughout the day in the quiet desperation of my life, and God draws me to himself and comforts me when I come like a child.

Intro Lesson on Prayer

[I originally posted this as a Facebook note. Just now, I realized that I should probably blog my reflections on each lesson, and then link them back to Facebook. plm]

I'm teaching a Sunday School class on prayer at Oak Mountain Prez in January and February. We're using Paul Miller's A Praying Life as our resource for looking at how to pray in a gospel- and grace-centered way. On Jan 9, I taught an intro lesson designed mostly to help me take the pulse of where everyone is regarding prayer and how they want to grow. See the attached picture for the white board from the lesson. Around the edges are the answers to, "For you, what's hard about prayer?". In the center was the analogies for their prayer life that many people threw out. I covered briefly key content from Part 1 of A Praying Life. The next lesson will be on Jan 23, and it will focus on Part 2 of the book.