Nathan Nettleton
Pastor, South Yarra Community Baptist Church

Melbourne, Australia

Last Tuesday Margie, my wife, asked me to drop a quiche of at the
home of her friend Sue who had just had a baby. She gave me a quick
explanation of how to get there: "Down Malvern Road and just across
Burke Road you go over the bridge and its in there somewhere near the
old College." That made sense to me, Margie and I first met one
another at that College.

Well I am very thankful that she also gave me the address and that I
had the map book in the car, because the place I had to deliver the
quiche to was actually off High Street about a kilometre and a half away
from the old College and on the opposite side of the main road.
Fortunately I learned a long time ago that when it come to geography and
sense of direction, some people have it and some people don’t. And
Margie’s one of those who don’t. If you’re trying to understand
adolescent psychology, Margie’s a good person to ask. But if you’re
trying to work out how to get to Sue’s place, get the address and a map
book.

Prayer, real prayer, is something that takes us into unfamiliar
territory. And the deeper we journey into the experience of prayer, into
the experience of intimate communion with God the more unfamiliar the
territory becomes and the fewer and fewer people you will find who’ve
actually been there. And so the question arises: how will we find our
way? How do we negotiate this unfamiliar terrain when we haven’t been
there before?

Sure we could just hang around in our safety zones, going no further
than we’ve been before and making sure we never go over the crest of the
first rise so that we can still see where to run back to at the first
sign of anything scary. But I suspect that most of us aren’t long
satisfied with just doing that. I know I’m not. I often feel inadequate
about my prayer. I often feel a hunger to go further, to connect with
God more deeply, to journey into the mysteries of God that lie beyond
the end of my safety rope.

A quick show of hands. Who’s with me in that feeling? Who else
sometimes feels inadequate in their prayer and yearns to go a bit
deeper???

And who feels entirely satisfied with their prayer as it is and
doesn’t see any need for anything more???

I thought so. So how do we proceed? Well, what is the number one
means by which we learn things? How did you learn to talk? How did you
learn to cook? How did you learn to drive???

That’s right. You found someone who already knew a got them to teach
you. I wouldn’t have needed the address and the map book to get to Sue’s
place if Sue had been with me. She would have just shown me how to get
there.

Do you remember how our gospel reading started before. Jesus was
praying in a certain place and after he had finished, one of his
disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray. John the Baptizer
taught his disciples. You teach us." Sounds to me like we’ve got
some fellow travellers here. We are not the first ones to want to grow
in our prayer and not know how to proceed. And what did the disciples do
about it. They saw Jesus praying and said, "Teach us how to do
that."

There are countless books around on prayer and how to pray, and many
of them are very good. There are plenty of courses around on prayer and
how to pray, and many of them are very good too. But there are some
serious limitations to how much they can help you. Can you imagine
learning to drive a car from a book? Or by attending lectures on
driving? I’ve no doubt that it’s possible, but I don’t think anyone
who’s ever driven would recommend it as the preferred learning method.
Can someone have a go at identifying for us what it is that makes
learning from another driver so much better than trying to learn from a
book or a class???

That’s right, it is having someone watching exactly what you’re
doing and providing direct feedback. I’ll give you another example of
this. Margie and I both enjoy telemark skiing, but Margie had about
twelve season’s head start on me. But Margie was self taught, and I went
out and got lots of lessons from qualified instructors. I caught up to
her standard in about three seasons. The difference was that I had
someone who knew what to look for watching me and telling me what I
needed to do differently. And then telling me again when I still didn’t
quite get it right. And then giving me a pat on the back when I got it
right. I could read in a book that I needed to angle my hip towards the
slope, but the book can’t watch me and tell me whether I’m angling it
right. Margie’s since gone and got lessons and overtaken me again.

Learning to pray is not that much different. You see, your
particular set of strengths and weaknesses is unique to you. You have
all sorts of idiosyncrasies that make up the unique human being that you
are. And so the ways you relate, the ways that you express yourself to
God, or anyone else for that matter, will be unique to you. And the
things that will cause you difficulties will not be exactly the same as
what causes anyone else difficulties.

When Margie and I wanted help to further develop some areas of our
relationship last year, we went to a specialist relationship counsellor.
Now we didn’t do that because we needed to seek out expert advise on
relationship theory. Margie’s a counselling psychologist and I’m a
pastor. Between us we have heaps of knowledge and a library full of
books on relationship skills. The problem for us was not lack of
knowledge. We had far more knowledge than we will ever be able to put
into practice. What we needed was someone who would spend some time
looking at the unique contours of our relationship and make wise
suggestions as to what bits of knowledge we needed to put into practice
right now. We might have eventually stumbled across the right
suggestions in a book, but we might not have even recognized them when
we did. But after a few sessions Tom was usually able to put his finger
on what was going on and then help us to see for ourselves how we might
address it.

If you want to learn how to pray, how to make real advances in the
depth and intimacy of your relationship with God, then I can’t recommend
highly enough that you do something similar. That you find someone who
has gone further on the journey than you, and who is a person of wisdom
and maturity, and most of all who will listen carefully to you, taking
the time to pick up the unique contours of your spirituality and the
subtle whisperings of the Spirit in your soul. If you can find such a
person and entrust yourself to them, you need to make an agreement to
meet with them on a regular basis, once a fortnight or once a month at
least, so that they can do that listening and help you to see what the
ways forward are for you. There are books full of generations worth of
accumulated wisdom on prayer, but you don’t need someone who has just
read some books and is full of pat answers and pious cliches. You need
someone who will be a probing listener and a wise guide.

There are some people around who are especially gifted in this, and
some who have done special training and do it professionally. In some
traditions they are called spiritual directors, in others soul friends,
in others spiritual mentors. I don’t much care what you call them or
whether they are professionals or not, if you want to journey more
deeply into prayer there is nothing I can recommend more highly. John
the Baptizer did it for his disciples. Jesus did it for his disciples.
You need someone who will do it for you. If you want to know how to find
one for you, come and ask me and I’ll help you find someone.

Although there is nothing I can recommend more highly that that,
there are a couple of other things that this gospel reading points to
which I can also recommend. What is the first example we heard of Jesus’
prayer guidance???

That’s right. The prayer we know as the Lord’s Prayer. "Pray
like this," Jesus said. Now there are two ways we can take that,
and I think they are both right. The first is we can take it as a model
prayer, as an example of the sorts of things we should pray about and
ways to express them. I think that’s right. And although at one level I
agree with that piece on the front of the notice sheets about how you
can’t pray it until you live it, at another level I think it’s bad
advice. You need to pray it because you can’t live it yet. If you don’t
even notice the discrepancy, that’s hypocrisy, but if you do you keep
praying it in your desire that it will become true in you. You keep
praying your life until eventually you are living your prayer.

The second way we can take Jesus’ guidance here, and I think this is
also right is as an endorsement of the use of well constructed set
prayers. The Lord’s Prayer is only one of many prepared prayers in the
Bible. The book of Psalms has another 150 of them and there are various
others scattered throughout the scriptures. Outside the scriptures there
are many other books available with collections of really well written
prayers. Those of you who lead worship here know that I’ve got dozens of
them and we often pray such prayers from them here on Sundays.

Now the objection that is often raised to the use of set prayers is
that they can become just routine things that we say without thinking,
and that is undoubtedly true. They can. But that’s not the whole story.
You see, if you were to ask Luciano Pavarotti or Dame Kiri Te Kawana
whether singing scales can become just routine things they do without
thinking, they would certainly tell you "Yes". But they still
sing scales. Regularly. Singing scales was where they started to learn
and no as the best singers in the world they know that they still have
to sing scales to stay at their peak.

Praying set prayers is a bit like singing scales. Even when they’re
not really expressing the fullness of your prayer, they are an exercise
that help keep you in shape for praying things that are more specific
and heartfelt. Now I’m not sure exactly how this works. Maybe if we got
a neurologist in here, they’d be able to explain it for us. But it does.
You can see this if you get together with a group of elderly people who
are all in the advanced stages of senile dementia or Altzhiemers
disease. You might have half a dozen people who can’t even remember the
names of their own children, but you start singing Amazing Grace or
praying the Lord’s Prayer and just like that the lights come back on and
for a few moments they’re right with you and they know it as well as you
do.

If you want to learn to sing you start with scales. If you want to
learn to pray you can do worse than start by regularly praying the
Lord’s Prayer and the Psalms till they start to wear tracks into your
brain, because it is along those tracks that your deepest yearnings will
be able to find expression in spontaneous prayer. Without the well worn
tracks there probably won’t be much spontaneous prayer either.

One final thing that I can recommend, and although it gets the most
space in our reading I’m going to give it the least here. The
recommendation is hang in there. Persevere. You don’t build your
relationship with God in one enthusiastic burst any more than you can
build a marriage by having an intense honeymoon and then just resting on
your laurels for the next ten years.

God is good and will neither ignore you nor give you what’s bad for
you any more than you’d give a tiger snake to your kids when they asked
for a puppy. But just as you know that if you give children exactly what
they want exactly when they want it you just end up with spoilt rotten
kids, so too God will not spoil you. You are told "search and you
will find" because it is not always going to be handed to you on a
plate. As in many other areas of life you will sometimes benefit more
from the actual searching than you will from the eventual finding.
Although as Abraham showed us, there is no reason why you shouldn’t
argue with God or seek to change God’s mind, more often than not it is
us who are changed in the course of praying and short cuts would often
mean being short changed.

These three recommendations are not unique to prayer as you have
probably noticed. They would hold good in just about anything that you
were feeling a bit inadequate in and wanting to get better at. As most
of you know, I’m a passable but fairly pedestrian guitar player. I can
strum along OK but I’m certainly no Tommy Emmanuel. I would love to be
able to finger pick instead of just strumming along, but I can’t. It’s
not that I don’t know how to. I do know how to. I own several books on
it and I’ve read them. I know how it’s done but I can’t do it unless I
concentrate really hard and go really slowly. I can’t do it because I
have never got myself a teacher who would watch me and guide me and hold
me accountable. I can’t do it because I have never worked away at the
basic exercises and scales until they came naturally. And I can’t do it
because even when I have decided to start with the exercises and scales
I never persevered for more than a few weeks.

Two years ago my praying was even more pedestrian than my guitar
playing, but I could no longer hide from the hunger. Today my praying is
a little better than my guitar playing and it is certainly developing
faster. The reasons are all indicated in this gospel story. I’ll
probably go to my grave a pedestrian guitar player, but I hope that by
the time my body gives the game away I’ll have journeyed so much further
into the life of communion with God that I’ll hardly notice the
transition. If the hunger for God, the hunger for prayer, the hunger to
lose yourself in the mysteries of the cosmos is growling away inside of
you and you can’t fight it off much longer then come and talk with me,
because I too am looking for fellow travellers on the journey.

Related Articles:

• Michael Hardin, The Jesus-Driven Life: Reconnecting Humanity with Jesus
• The Jesus Driven Life
• Paul: ‘inspired’? What does that mean?
• 25 LISTS OF EVERYTHING INTERESTING/IMPORTANT
• Miracles and the Virgin Birth etc.

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.