This is an odd assortment of various sermons and teachings I have given over the years, as well as articles I have written. They are all copyrighted. To receive permission to reprint, please e-mail Alison L. Barfoot
"Lord, teach us to pray!" While that statement may be a quote from Scripture, it is equally the frustrated cry of many Christians today who long to know how to pray, who yearn to live the whole of their lives in the presence of God. Sadly, though, much teaching on prayer boils down to a simple exhortation to pray! A vicious cycle, indeed.
When Jesus' disciples asked him to teach them to pray as John the Baptist had taught his disciples to pray (Lk 11.1ff), Jesus did not give them new techniques of prayer. In giving them what we now call the Lord's Prayer, he was giving them a new relationship in which to pray, a domestic relationship of intimacy with his Father. In doing so, Jesus could assume that his disciples were already fundamentally pray-ers, that is, people in touch with their human spirits.
Unfortunately, today we cannot make that assumption. To learn to pray requires that we be spiritually healthy individuals, people whose human spirits are active and functioning. But, in our Western scientific and materialistic world, our culture has completely dismissed the spiritual realm.
By definition the spiritual realm is non-material. It is devoid of form or matter. Therefore, it cannot be quantified or tested empirically, nor can it be mass produced for consumption. For those reasons we in the Western world really have no categories in which to even think about or account for the spiritual realm. So, our physical bodies may be vibrant and fit from the exercise and nutrition revolution, and our psyches may be healthy from the rise of counseling and psycho-therapy, but our spirits languish in atrophy from wholesale neglect.
Furthermore, we are often under the misguided notion that we human beings consist of body and mind until our conversion, at which time we then consist of body, mind, and Holy Spirit. But, in fact, we are spiritual creatures irrespective of any relationship with God! The Scriptures say that God is spirit (Jn 4.24), and we know that we are made in the image of God. Therefore, by definition any human being is a spiritual creature. The question then becomes, "How spiritually fit are our spirits?" Why that question? Because our ability to pray directly hinges on the health and vitality of the human spirit.
God speaks to his creatures spirit to spirit. Paul writes, "For what person knows a man's thoughts except the spirit of the man which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God." (1Cor 2.11) It is the human spirit which knows all about the human being; it is the spirit in God which knows all about God. Therefore, if God is going to commune with us, then God, by his spirit, will commune with our spirits -- our essential nature. And, that essential spiritual nature is more amenable to the knowledge and awareness of God than our physical bodies. We cannot see God with our eyeballs. But, with the eyes of our hearts -- our spirits -- we can see God who is himself spirit. That is what seeking silence in the prayer of silence is all about.
Most of us live most of our lives in various roles -- husband, wife, mother, father, son, daughter, employer, employee, neighbor, friend, etc. We have to relate that way because that's the mode in which our society operates. Likewise, most of us have some standard against which we judge ourselves in those various roles. "Am I being a good husband/wife? A productive employee? A loyal friend?" These roles are the self-images we have of ourselves. But, beneath them all is an essential creatureliness which is fundamentally spirit.
Silence is the only way to get in touch with our basic human spirituality. If we have any ulterior motive, then we will defeat the purpose of silence. We must not pursue it in order to feel better about ourselves, to improve ourselves, or to even become holy. If those are our motives, then we will constantly be judging ourselves, "Am I a better person yet?". And, we will miss our fundamental creatureliness because we are still stuck in our roles and self-images.
The horror of Hanoi's prisoner of war camps was the place Gerald Coffee and many other P.O.W.'s were confronted with their creatureliness and human spirituality. At Christmas time, two years into his seven year captivity, the guards gave Coffee a candy bar wrapped in red and silver foil. Folding it into a simple origami design, he decorated his small, cold, damp cell for Christmas. "I thought about the simplicity of Christ's birth," he wrote. "Here, there was nothing to distract me from the awesomeness of Christmas -- no commercialism, no presents, little food. I was beginning to appreciate my own spirituality, because I had been stripped of everything by which I had measured my identity: rank, uniform, money, family. Yet I continued to find strength within. I realized that although I was hurting and lonely and scared, this might be the most significant Christmas of my life."
Because of our materialistic culture, we are much more comfortable with doing things. We are an activity-oriented society, populated by doers. God appreciates our activities and our service in his name. But, in prayer, God's delight is in us. He is less concerned with us as doers fulfilling roles and self-images, and more interested in us purely as his creatures. When we present ourselves to God, he wants us simply to come as we are -- as be-ers.
This art of seeking silence is not so much a matter of doing nothing as it is of not doing. It is work! It takes effort on our part to become quiet, still, silent. The ability to be still and enter into the prayer of silence is a prerequisite to true prayer because to seek silence is to make ourselves "user-friendly" for God.
The work of prayer in the case of silence is to deal with all the distractions that clamor for attention the moment we try to be quiet. They may be external in the environment or internal within ourselves. A distraction isn't necessarily always a bad thing. The grocery list and the agenda for tomorrow's business meeting are as much distractions as is unconfessed anger.
Furthermore, the internal distractions are actually much harder to tame than the external. We cannot completely rid ourselves of them all; absolute, pure silence is impossible to attain. But, we can begin to discipline ourselves to push our self-images, roles, and sinful nature to the periphery of our attention. If they persist, we may have to speak directly to them: "Yes, I know the agenda for tomorrow's business meeting is important, but I'm not putting an agenda together now. I won't forget about it. Right now, though, I'm seeking to be silent."
The first step in becoming a pray-er is to be still, to seek silence. The Psalmist quotes God when he writes, "Be still, and know that I am God." (Ps. 46.10a) When we are simply who we are without any pretensions or hidden agendas, quiet in our essential creatureliness and attuned to our spiritual selves, then we are ready for God, who is spirit, to reveal himself to us. The second step is to simply invite God to be God. We often limit God by our past experiences of him. We may have known him to be our healer, but if we always come before him in that capacity, then we are likely to miss the fullness of his presence.
God wants to show himself to us, to comfort us with his presence all the time. The reason we don't experience him is not because God doesn't desire it, but because we are not "user-friendly." The prayer of silence, though, must never be used to manipulate God into revealing himself. Even that must not be an ulterior motive for the discipline of seeking silence. We want only to be alive in our spirits -- that is, healthy spiritual creatures -- and, therefore, "user-friendly" for God to make himself known to us.
The experience of Christians throughout the ages has been that when we are practicing the art of silence God is more apt to quietly show himself to us in ways we might not otherwise recognize. That's the connection between the art of seeking silence and the prayer of silence.