A Seat in the Heavenlies

For many years of my Christian life, I did not understand prayer. It was a mystery to me. I loved the Bible, but my experience of prayer was a thousand miles from the prayer I saw described in it. I knew I should pray, would try to pray, and desperately wanted to pray; but it was like making a phone call where I was never quite sure if there was anyone on the other end of the line or not. If I prayed out loud, as a friend suggested, I felt silly. But if I prayed silently, my mind would wander and I would end up thinking about things like whether or not Pittsburgh would make it to the Super Bowl.

I had dozens of questions over the years. Why did I feel so reluctant to pray? Why was prayer the easiest discipline to ignore and the hardest to practice? Why did I either pray the same things over and over again, or else run out of things to say? Why did I have so little expectation that God would hear and answer? Why did I feel so far away from Him – like my prayer didn’t even rise above the ceiling, let alone ascend to Heaven?

I remember reading Matthew 21:21-22, the passage that says if we
ask with enough faith, we can cast a mountain into the sea and have anything we ask for in prayer. What!? Prayer so effective you could order a mountain into the sea!? I was a person who got bored and discouraged from a 30-minute prayer meeting – and we’re talking about moving mountains? If this Scripture was the measure of the prayer expected from me, I was defeated before I even started.

It seemed to me that the Scriptures made a lot of claims about prayer that were not only beyond my experience, but hard to believe. Yet the more confused I was about the matter, the more I yearned to talk to God as Abraham did – friend to friend.

Then one day, totally by chance, I was reading and came across a quote that changed my whole way of thinking. Richard Foster, theologian and author of Celebration of Discipline wrote:

"I determined to learn to pray so that my experience
conformed to the words of Jesus rather than try to make His
words conform to my impoverished experience.”

A light came on in my soul. Foster had absolutely, oh-so-accurately, described my frustrating prayer life. I had an up-side down, unsatisfying, ineffective, impoverished experience of prayer because I had never concerned myself with conforming my prayer to the words of Jesus and to the words of the Scriptures He authenticated.

I had read the Bible fairly regularly for years, but after pondering this quote, I began to read it looking for anything connected with prayer. Each time I found something, I would mark it with a yellow highlighter and simply turn to God in my heart with the attitude, “LORD, I want to learn to pray like this. Would You show me how to pray?”

Father,

You told Jeremiah, “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.” LORD, I want that same thing. I want You to tell ME great and unsearchable things! And anyone who takes the time to read this book wants them too. So many of us are shriveling on the vine for want of this.

Father, will you show us how to pray?