Growing in Intimacy with God - Prayer as Dialogue

Today we're going to talk about reimagining prayer as dialogue as opposed to monologue. Prayer is communion with God, which is relationship-building. Prayer is where intimacy with God is forged. And as such, prayer is meant to be a two way communication with God. And that’s really different from what I had always thought and from what I’d always been taught. And what I’m gonna describe here is what’s called contemplative prayer. And Christians have been practicing contemplative prayer for well over a thousand years. But you hardly ever hear about it in evangelical circles.

The truth is that our prayer lives tend to evolve over time, and go through a few predictable stages:

1. The first way we often approach God can be thought of as saying your prayers. In other words, talking at God.
2. The second stage in the evolution of prayer is talking to God. As we mature in our relationship with God, we become more comfortable finding our own words to speak to him rather than using the ready-made prayers of our childhood. And so we quit talking at God and we start talking to God, speaking to him from our hearts and telling him all about the things that are going on in our lives right now.
3. So that brings us to the next stage in the evolution of our prayer life, which is listening to God. Instead of a monologue, prayer becomes a dialogue. We’re still talking to God, but we’re also learning to listen.

Learning to listen in relationships is important. One of the first things marriage counselors often have to spend time on when a couple comes to see them is communication. And a big part of that is helping them develop some active listening skills. Because too often, couples just don’t listen to each other. When one starts speaking, the other immediately starts formulating their response (or rebuttal). But the mark of a mature person, at least when it comes to communication, is the ability to really listen. And that’s true also with my relationship with God.

And just like in any healthy relationship, learning to listen involves shutting down my own inner monologue and learning to be attentive to the other person. So to do that with God, we’ve got to learn to embrace quiet.

I don’t think it’s news to an of us here that we live in an insanely busy society. Or at least we did until the pandemic hit. And I use the word insanely on purpose. The frantic and overly scheduled way some of us have been living our lives is just not sane. There are countless studies and articles demonstrating that. Richard Foster, in his wonderful book A Celebration of Discipline, wrote, “In contemporary society, our Adversary majors in three things: noise, hurry, and crowds. If he can keep us engaged in “muchness” and “manyness,” he will rest satisfied . . . Hurry is not of the Devil; it is the Devil.” Foster wrote those words in 1978! That’s 42 years ago! And I think we’d all agree that things have only gotten worse. We’re too busy and hectic and distracted and overwhelmed. And we feel it, but most of us don’t have any idea how to live differently.

But decluttering our lives isn’t what we’re discussing today. Today, let’s start with learning to declutter our minds a bit when we spend time with the Father. Let’s start with learning to embrace the quiet there. In the quiet, we engage the deepest parts of our soul and invite God into the midst of it. And that is where intimacy happens. And it’s where transformation happens.

In the podcast, I describe what this usually looks like for me.

So, what does God sound like? What should I expect? So rather than being an inner, audible voice, I and a good many others have discovered that God’s voice in our heads and hearts sounds more like a flow of spontaneous thoughts. In fact, I think this is the normal way God speaks to us. The Lord will speak to us in other ways, if necessary, but I think he’d rather we learn to discern Him speaking in spontaneous thoughts through His Spirit from within our own hearts.

Now what do I mean by spontaneous? Well, the voice of God is Spirit-to-spirit communication, the Holy Spirit speaking directly to my spirit. We sense it most often as a spontaneous thought, idea, or word. Thoughts from my own mind, on the other hand, tend to be analytical and cognitive. I reason them out; one thought logically follows the next. The best way I can describe it is that occasionally when I’m in prayer or reading Scripture, I’ll have a spontaneous thought that I know didn’t come from me. It’s not the direction my mind was going; it’s nothing I’ve thought before, and often, because of my own biases or predispositions, it’s not really something I would think of on my own. It’s a bit of an unexpected surprise.

Characteristics of these spontaneous thoughts that help me recognize and have confidence that they come from God:

1. First, they’re like my own thoughts, except that they come from a deeper place. In other words, they’re qualitatively different from my normal thoughts. But because they come from within me, they’re similar to my own thoughts. Deeper, richer, but similar.
2. God’s voice is often soft and gentle and easily cut off by any exertion of self. If I interrupt the spontaneous, intuitive flow with my own analysis, God usually does not try to shout above the noise to regain my attention.
3. God’s voice often has a deeper, richer content, meaning it is better and somewhat different than my own thoughts. God’s voice is wiser, more merciful, more discerning, and much more aware of motives. Sometimes, like Jesus often did with his disciples, God will ignore the question you ask and address the real heart of the issue.
4. God’s voice often causes a special reaction within me. These spontaneous thoughts often produce a deeply emotional response. And see, my own thoughts don’t. I don’t know that I’ve ever moved myself to tears. But God has. There’s sometimes a sense of excitement, conviction, humility, awe, or peace that results from hearing God’s voice.
5. God tends to speak with love in a way that leads us to freedom.

So, when you think you’ve heard something from God, what do you do with it? People often get tripped up by the uncertainty of knowing how to sort out whether what I’m “hearing” is God or myself or even Satan? Those are good questions to ask. And just like learning any new language, this takes patience, discernment, and attentiveness. But let me give you some suggestions.

1. First of all, compare what you think you’re hearing with the Word. Paul says that “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (2 Tim. 3:16-17). The greatest protection we have on our spiritual journey is the Word of God. Scripture is our plumb-line. God will never contradict Scripture. But if you don’t know Scripture, how will you know if you’re being led astray by the voice in your head? A good knowledge of the Scriptures can save us from a host of errors and heartaches. You’ve got to have a knowledge of the Word of God.
2. Secondly, check out what you’re hearing with others. Find a few trusted and spiritually mature brothers or sisters in Christ who know you well, who love God deeply, and who love you. Tell them what you think God is saying to you and ask them to pray about that and help you discern whether it’s God’s voice or not. Because listen, I am so self-absorbed that there is virtually nothing I can’t talk myself into and turn it into the will of God. And the only protection I have against that willfulness is the Word of God and the wisdom of the spiritual community around me.
3. Thirdly, does it line up with the character of God? Is this something God would say? We know God is holy. We know God is loving. We know God is righteous. We know he is redemptive in nature. Does what we think we’re hearing mesh with what we know about his character? Or does it seem slightly out of character? If so, there are two options: 1) Maybe you don’t understand God’s character as well as you think you do. Or 2) maybe you’re hearing your own heart and your own will. Again, most of us are highly skilled at taking our own self-serving thoughts and baptizing them with righteousness.
4. Number four — and this mostly pertains to those times when I sense God directing me to do something (which honestly isn’t often for me)— does what I’m hearing pertain top an area for which I am responsible? As a general rule, God tends to give revelation only for the areas in which He has given authority and responsibility. Stay away from ego trips that looks for revelation for areas in which you don’t have authority. Don’t look for a “word from the Lord” for someone else, unless God has placed you in a position of responsibility for that person (like your children, for instance). If you think you hear something for someone else, be extremely cautious about sharing that, especially without running it past your spiritual community first.
5. Number five — Will this produce good fruit and lead to freedom? God will never instruct you to do things that don’t bear good fruit, and he will never lead you into bondage. He will speak life and peace and love into your life. He will instruct you toward things that bear good fruit. “The fruit of the Spirit,” we’re told, “is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” (Gal. 5:22-23). God will lead you in those directions — always!
6. Number six — Will this lead me to humility, and does it inspire greater trust of God? I have found that God is constantly calling me to greater levels of trust and humility. He will always lead you toward greater dependence on him. God has vested us with a measure of self-determination and free will, but that is best enjoyed within the context of a dependence on God. If what you think you hear leads you away from that, it’s most certainly not of God.

Now, what about the devil? This is a little tricky, and I’m not going to say a lot about it except to say that I do not believe the devil lives inside our heads. If you’re a Christian, the Spirit of God lives inside you, and I do not believe the devil is allowed a place there. I believe that’s scriptural, but it’d take more time than we have to flesh that out. But I will give you one passage that suggests that: 1 John 4:4, which is kinda our theme verse in the Jesus Society. It says, “You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.”

Some Final Thoughts:

1. Don’t expect to hear his voice every time you pray. I have not found God to work that way. In my experience, God is not “chatty.” He doesn’t say a lot, but he can say more with a few words than anyone I’ve ever met. And those words will carry you for days, weeks, months, and years.
2. Most of you have already heard from God; you just may not have recognized it as God. And not everyone hears God the same. My wife tends to hear him in songs. He often brings songs to mind as she’s in prayer that speak to her deeply. But . . . she has the entirety of Christian hymnody memorized, so of course God would use that to speak to her. The point is, God speaks to us as individuals.
3. And another thing — there are some things that in my experience God is just not interested in talking about. If you go to God with questions about the future or “what’s going to happen,” (which is what most of our questions involve), God tends to go quiet. And I think I know why. In my experience, anytime you ask God to give you information that undermines trust, God tends to be silent.
4. Remember that God’s goal for you is your transformation. He wants to lead you to greater holiness and to untwist all of those little twisted places within you and to demolish all those hidden alliances you carry.

I’ve got some more book recommendations for you if you want to go further into all this stuff. I can vouch for every one of them. They’re all books I’ve read and they’ve all proven tremendously helpful to me in building intimacy with God. You'll find them below under Resources.

In the end, you can only learn to encounter God by encountering God. Again, the quote from Arthur Miller that I gave you last week is helpful: “How does [God] so communicate with you? How will you know? Because God has designed your frame and understands how you are put together, and how you function, what you notice and what you ignore, what you read, what you hear, and what gets your attention. Because the Spirit of God is resident within you and has a job to do as you do yours — leading, nudging, instructing, guiding, opening new doors, reminding, questioning, affirming, prodding, sometimes engineering circumstances — strange, extraordinary things happen. If you need a knock on the side of your head, or a sense of God’s love that will take your breath away — that will happen in God’s time and in a way only you will understand.” - Arthur F. Miller, Jr.

Thanks for listening, and I hope you’ll be back. And remember, you are greatly loved.

Resources for today’s show:

1. Armchair Mystic: How Contemplative Prayer Can Lead You Closer to God, by Mark E. Thibodeaux SJ (2001, updated 2019)

2. Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God, by Dallas Willard (2012)

3. Walking with God: How to Hear His Voice, by John Eldredge (2016)

4. Soul Work: Confessions of a Part-Time Monk, by Randy Harris (2011)

5. Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God’s Transforming Presence, by Ruth Haley Barton (2010)

6. Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation, by Ruth Haley Barton (2006)

7. The Way of the Heart: Connecting with God Through Prayer, Wisdom, and Silence, by Henri J. M. Nouwen

8. He Loves Me: Learning to Live in the Father’s Affection, by Wayne Jacobsen (2008)

9. The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery, by David G. Benner (expanded ed. 2015)

 

Music and Sound by Nathan Longwell Music