By Greg Chandler
Zeeland Record
For the past couple of months, the small group that I facilitate at our church has been reading the book “Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools,” by Tyler Staton.
It’s probably the best book I have ever read (outside of the Bible itself) about prayer. It tackles head-on a lot of the issues that Christians and non-Christians alike have struggled with over the years.
This book thoughtfully and with great sensitivity addresses questions or statements like: If God is all-powerful, why does he need my prayer? How do I know he hears me? God is much too big for me to bother him with my little problems. Why does he seem silent when I pour out my heart to him on a situation in my life? Why didn’t he protect my loved one who died tragically?
Staton pastors a church in Portland, Ore., and is the U.S. national director of the 24-7 Prayer movement, an international movement that dates back to a student-led prayer vigil in England more than a quarter-century ago. In the opening chapter of the book, he shares the story of when he was 13 years old and with the encouragement of a mentor, he would walk around his middle school every day for the whole summer, holding a folded-up copy of his school’s directory, praying for each and every student from his eighth-grade class.
And something really amazing happened as a result of Tyler’s prayers. He ended up leading a Christian outreach meeting at his school an hour before the start of the class day. By the end of that school year, one-third of Tyler’s classmates had become believers.
Understand, Tyler didn’t know a lot of the basics of being a Christian at 13. He himself was a skeptic. He took on this experiment as a way of answering that deep question within his soul about God: “Are you for real?”
In this book, Staton asks two major questions about prayer: Why don’t we pray, and why pray?
On the first question, Tyler gives us a four-part answer, but all four parts have something in common: the word “fear.” He writes, “Prayer itself makes us anxious because it uncovers fears we can ignore as long as we don’t engage deeply, thoughtfully, vulnerably with God.”
We don’t pray for fear of being naïve: Tyler writes, “To pray is to risk trusting someone who might let you down. To pray is to get our hopes up.”
We don’t pray for fear of silence: we fear real interaction with God, apart from all the noise in our world.
We don’t pray for fear of selfish motives. Tyler cites the example of someone who is praying for their roommate who doesn’t know Jesus. Why does this person REALLY want their roommate to find God? Is it from a pure desire for their roommate to experience God’s love, or is it just trying to get them to reach the same conclusion they themselves have made?
My favorite: We don’t pray for fear of doing it wrong. We hear others at church or in our small groups who pray the most eloquent, beautiful prayers. And some of us struggle with prayer because we can’t come up with our own words to express what we feel.
Then on the question of why we should pray, Staton gives us these bullet points:
Pray because you’re overwhelmed: Our tendency is to pray safe, calculated prayers that we think will shield us from being disappointed if they’re not answered.
Pray because trust comes before faith: He writes, “Before we can have faith that God will answer a given request, we simply have to learn to trust the character of God we’re talking to.”
Pray because complaints are welcome: For the longest time, I was afraid to tell God how I really felt about something because I had it in my head that my complaints would be seen as rejecting God. Then I started reading some of the Psalms David wrote. For instance, check out Psalm 55:4-5: “My heart is in anguish within me; the terrors of death have fallen on me. Fear and trembling have beset me, horror has overwhelmed me.”
Pray because the only way to get it wrong is by trying to get it right: Tyler says just be real with God. He cites as his example, right smack dab in the Lord’s Prayer: “give us this day our daily bread.” After we pray about his majesty and his holiness, God invites us to tell him what we need for this day.
Staton goes on to say that’s okay for us to tell God when we’re angry with him, when we’re disappointed, when we don’t know what to believe. More than anything else, God wants a relationship with you and me, and real relationship can only come when we are fully free to say what is on our heart.
The Lord is near. Don’t be afraid. He loves you more than you can ever imagine.
Zeeland Record
For the past couple of months, the small group that I facilitate at our church has been reading the book “Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools,” by Tyler Staton.
It’s probably the best book I have ever read (outside of the Bible itself) about prayer. It tackles head-on a lot of the issues that Christians and non-Christians alike have struggled with over the years.
This book thoughtfully and with great sensitivity addresses questions or statements like: If God is all-powerful, why does he need my prayer? How do I know he hears me? God is much too big for me to bother him with my little problems. Why does he seem silent when I pour out my heart to him on a situation in my life? Why didn’t he protect my loved one who died tragically?
Staton pastors a church in Portland, Ore., and is the U.S. national director of the 24-7 Prayer movement, an international movement that dates back to a student-led prayer vigil in England more than a quarter-century ago. In the opening chapter of the book, he shares the story of when he was 13 years old and with the encouragement of a mentor, he would walk around his middle school every day for the whole summer, holding a folded-up copy of his school’s directory, praying for each and every student from his eighth-grade class.
And something really amazing happened as a result of Tyler’s prayers. He ended up leading a Christian outreach meeting at his school an hour before the start of the class day. By the end of that school year, one-third of Tyler’s classmates had become believers.
Understand, Tyler didn’t know a lot of the basics of being a Christian at 13. He himself was a skeptic. He took on this experiment as a way of answering that deep question within his soul about God: “Are you for real?”
In this book, Staton asks two major questions about prayer: Why don’t we pray, and why pray?
On the first question, Tyler gives us a four-part answer, but all four parts have something in common: the word “fear.” He writes, “Prayer itself makes us anxious because it uncovers fears we can ignore as long as we don’t engage deeply, thoughtfully, vulnerably with God.”
We don’t pray for fear of being naïve: Tyler writes, “To pray is to risk trusting someone who might let you down. To pray is to get our hopes up.”
We don’t pray for fear of silence: we fear real interaction with God, apart from all the noise in our world.
We don’t pray for fear of selfish motives. Tyler cites the example of someone who is praying for their roommate who doesn’t know Jesus. Why does this person REALLY want their roommate to find God? Is it from a pure desire for their roommate to experience God’s love, or is it just trying to get them to reach the same conclusion they themselves have made?
My favorite: We don’t pray for fear of doing it wrong. We hear others at church or in our small groups who pray the most eloquent, beautiful prayers. And some of us struggle with prayer because we can’t come up with our own words to express what we feel.
Then on the question of why we should pray, Staton gives us these bullet points:
Pray because you’re overwhelmed: Our tendency is to pray safe, calculated prayers that we think will shield us from being disappointed if they’re not answered.
Pray because trust comes before faith: He writes, “Before we can have faith that God will answer a given request, we simply have to learn to trust the character of God we’re talking to.”
Pray because complaints are welcome: For the longest time, I was afraid to tell God how I really felt about something because I had it in my head that my complaints would be seen as rejecting God. Then I started reading some of the Psalms David wrote. For instance, check out Psalm 55:4-5: “My heart is in anguish within me; the terrors of death have fallen on me. Fear and trembling have beset me, horror has overwhelmed me.”
Pray because the only way to get it wrong is by trying to get it right: Tyler says just be real with God. He cites as his example, right smack dab in the Lord’s Prayer: “give us this day our daily bread.” After we pray about his majesty and his holiness, God invites us to tell him what we need for this day.
Staton goes on to say that’s okay for us to tell God when we’re angry with him, when we’re disappointed, when we don’t know what to believe. More than anything else, God wants a relationship with you and me, and real relationship can only come when we are fully free to say what is on our heart.
The Lord is near. Don’t be afraid. He loves you more than you can ever imagine.
