During seminary I spent a semester as a hospital chaplain, serving eight hours/day in a large metropolitan medical center.
Never in my life had I been exposed to situations of life and death or the emotional stress felt by patients and their families. I felt inadequate and exposed, often with no idea what to say to them. I wished I had never signed up for this experience.
I met weekly with a supervisor, who kept encouraging me to try harder. Now I’m definitely a “try harder” kind of person, but unlike earlier challenges in my life, this time trying harder didn’t help me. In fact, I felt even more inadequate.
When my frustration finally erupted into “I give up!” during one of our meetings, my supervisor gently helped me understand his admonitions to “try harder.” He wanted me to realize I couldn’t do this work in my own ability, no matter how hard I tried. I was trying to do for God what only God could do in and through me.
I wish I could say this lesson from 40 years ago has guided me ever since. The truth is I need to keep re-learning it!
This “try harder” story takes on greater relevance when most Americans are home-bound doing far less than normal (unless we’ve got kids at home 24/7!) With time on our hands to “slow down and ponder,” perhaps we might ponder if “trying harder” is really the best way toward spiritual transformation.
Paul tells us spiritual growth is “putting off the old self” and “putting on the new self” (Col. 3:11).
Spiritual masters speak of Disciplines of Abstinence and Engagement. Disciplines of Abstinence help us STOP doing things that are spiritually bad for us. Disciplines of Engagement help us do MORE of what is spiritually good for us.
Dallas Willard in The Divine Conspiracy suggests how this might happen:
“So, basically, to put off the old person and put on the new we only follow Jesus into the activities that he engaged in to nurture his own life in relation to the Father. ”
We’ve already looked at two disciplines of abstinence (Solitude and Silence and A Simpler Life). Today we look at the first discipline of engagement practiced by Jesus to nurture his own spiritual life: prayer.Let’s look in some detail at how and why he did so.
1) Jesus often prayed by himself in solitude
- Mark 1:35 – “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.”
- Luke 5:15-16 – “Yet the news about him spread all the more, so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses. But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.”
I said a couple weeks ago that solitude is the basket which often holds many other disciplines as well. So it was for Jesus, who regularly sought solitude to pray.
2) Jesus prayed when he needed guidance:
- Luke 6:12-13 – “One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God. When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles.”
3) Jesus prayed when he needed strength
- Matthew 26:36 – “Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.
Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”
4) Jesus prayed when he felt a range of emotions, even forsaken:
- Matthew 27:46 – “About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”–which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
5) It was during prayer that the Father revealed himself to Jesus:
- Luke 3:21 – “When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.“
What can we conclude? Prayer was not a part of Jesus’ life. Prayer WAS his life.Richard Foster writes: “To pray is to change. Prayer is the central avenue God uses to transform us.” If you are interested in “putting on the new self,” prayer is a place to begin.
I was in a small group discuss these spiritual disciplines when a man observed, “What these disciplines are all about is muscle memory.” Roger Federer is on the court hitting balls every day, training his muscles to react automatically when he doesn’t have time to think in a match. It’s the same reason Michael Jordan was still shooting free throws when the rest team was in the locker room, or Jerry Rice was still running pass routes when the rest of the team had left the field.
Might we not have spiritual or emotional muscle memory? Whether we react in situations with kindness or short-temperedness, with envy or affirmation, with pride or humility, has a lot to do with habits ingrained in us. To change how we think and act means we must create new spiritual muscle memory.
Simply “trying harder” to be a good person in the moment of decision will often not be enough. We must put in our time on the practice courts when no one is around. It’s slow, tedious discipline, but (as we observe in Jesus) this is how prayer changes us:
- Over and over seeking and depending on the Father’s strength rather than our own.
- Over and over listening for the Father’s guidance rather than barging ahead on our own.
- Over and over reminding ourselves that the Father has the best possible life for us, rather than the one we try to cobble together from what the world offers.
Does this mean we should “try harder” at prayer? No!
We make prayer our next self-improvement “project.” We think it is all up to us, that we must somehow “perform” well. Prayer becomes something we do for God, rather than God working in and through us. For Jesus, prayer was not a project but a living, ongoing conversation.
As we simply do what he did–bring all of our lives into this conversation with the Father–eventually (usually without realizing it) we find ourselves slowly beginning to think and respond and act more like Jesus.
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