HOMILYFROMTHEPEW

Two things increasingly strike me as expressions of spiritual arrogance.

Doing life without God.

And relating with people without first relating with God about them.

I struggle to understand how a man or woman lives without prayer.

And when I say prayer, please, I am not talking about hitting our heads on the ground, shouting or yelling as though God were deaf.

I am not talking about religious drama or theatrics.

I am talking about a walking-talking relationship with the Father.

A consciousness.

An awareness.

A cultivated dependence upon Him.

Simply acknowledging Him in all our ways.

Father, I am about to do this. What do You think?

I am about to make this move. Is this the right direction?

I am about to have this conversation. Is this the right time? What should I say? What should I not say?

Because how do I have a consequential conversation with a human being that I have not first had with God?

I do not care who that person is.

My wife.

A friend.

A colleague.

Even my own four-year-old son.

If I am about to have an important conversation with my four-year-old, why should I not first speak with God about it?

God is the Maker of his soul.

He knows him more completely than I ever can.

He knows his heart, his temperament, what he needs at that moment, what words may reach him and what timing may be appropriate.

So before I speak to the child God gave me, why would I not speak to the God who made him?

Nehemiah gives me one of the clearest pictures of the kind of prayer I mean.

He was standing before the king when the king asked him what he wanted.

Scripture records:

“Then the king said unto me, For what dost thou make request? So I prayed to the God of heaven.
And I said unto the king…”
— Nehemiah 2:4–5, KJV

There it is.

The king asked. Nehemiah prayed. Then Nehemiah answered the king.

No theatrics.

No ceremony.

A man standing before another man, but conscious that there was Someone greater above them both.

Before he continued his conversation with man, he had a conversation with God.

That is the consciousness I am talking about.

But I also understand why this can be difficult.

We speak freely with those we trust.

We trust those with whom we have built relationship.

And relationship takes time.

My own father died in 2009 at the age of 82.

I was 39.

Yet in all those years, I cannot remember us ever sitting down and having a real father-and-son conversation.

I do not remember him sitting me down to instruct me about life.

We lived together, but that relationship was not there.

I learnt, in a sense, to do life without a father.

To live with that internal sense that nobody was coming for me and that I had to find my own way.

So when I became a person of faith on February 16, 1997, relating with God as Father did not automatically come naturally to me.

How do you readily trust and converse with a Heavenly Father when conversation and relationship with your earthly father were never part of your experience?

It has taken me years deliberately to build that relationship with my Heavenly Father.

To learn to trust Him.

To talk with Him.

To depend upon Him.

And I tell you:

It is still a work in progress.

That is my story.

Someone else may struggle with prayer for completely different reasons.

If everyone on earth wrote about this, we might have billions of different stories.

I can only speak from mine.

And perhaps that is one reason I am so intentional about having conversations with my own son.

I want him to know what it means to talk with his earthly father.

To ask questions.

To be heard.

To receive guidance.

To know that he can come to me.

Because perhaps, in some small way, a healthy experience of relationship with his earthly father can help him understand what it means to have a relationship with his Heavenly Father.

And I believe God desires our dependence.

Not because God suffers from low self-esteem.

Not because He is a control freak who needs to be consulted to feel important.

He desires our dependence because He knows that without Him we can do nothing.

Dependence upon God is not designed to diminish us.

It is one of the ways we maximize the lives He has given us.

Paul understood something of this.

He pleaded three times concerning his thorn in the flesh.

Yet the answer was not simply the removal of the weakness:

“My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”

There is grace here.

There is strength here.

There is help here.

Jesus says:

“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

Come.

And that invitation is always open.

His resources are not scarce.

His wisdom cannot be exhausted.

His grace cannot be spent.

His strength does not diminish because I draw from it.

Jesus spoke of rivers of living water flowing from within.

Available.
Unlimited.
Abundant.

So why would I refuse to drink?

Why would I walk through life thirsty beside an inexhaustible river?

Why would I struggle alone with what I have been invited to bring to Him?

God did not consult me before creating this world.

He did not consult me before creating me.

Yet I can arrive in the world He created, occupy the life He gave me, relate with people He created, raise a child He made, love a wife He knows completely, make decisions with consequences I cannot foresee—and somehow conclude that I can navigate all of this without checking with Him.

For me, that is arrogance.

But I know something else now:

Independence can sometimes be something we learnt in order to survive before we ever understood what it meant to depend on a Father.

For me, prayer has therefore also been a journey of unlearning that independence.

Prayer is humility.

Prayer is relationship.

Prayer is dependence.

It is the daily admission:

You made me.
You made them.
You know what I do not know.
You see what I cannot see.
Your wisdom is available.
Your grace is sufficient.
Your strength is inexhaustible.

So, Father, before I do life, let me talk to You.

And before I talk to them, let me talk to You about them.

DEPENDENCE.

Perhaps that is the invitation.

Not to perform prayer.

Not to dramatize prayer.

But to learn, deliberately and daily, to do life with the Father.

MinistryOfClarity

Follower of Christ. Husband. Father. Egalitarian. Goodwill Investor. Attorney. Author. Thriver. Culture-Edge Family Strengthening and Child Safeguarding Pioneer, Innovator and Practitioner. Value-Based Parenting Ideologue. Change Agent.
Rebel with a Cause. Three Decades in the Saddle.