conversing with God

What is prayer? The simplest answer is “talking with God.” But what sort of conversations do I have with God?

I have a tendency to think about my conversations with God as if they were business meetings. Business meetings need to have an agenda and some sort of productive result. But is God a high-powered businessman with a very full schedule and very little time for small talk? Is prayer like a board meeting with Donald Trump? And if I’m not effective enough will he say, “You’re fired”?

When I’m hanging out with friends, on the other hand, there’s no pressure to have a resulting action item. I’ve never had a friendly chat end with, “So what’s our takeaway from this time together?” The conversation meanders and is about anything that we find pleasing to both of us. Or the topic may be something that’s important to one of us, and as a result it’s important to the other person, too.

I often begin my prayer times by repeating to myself the phrase “your quieting love”, taken from Zephaniah 3:17: “he will quiet you with his love.” God loves to have me spend time with him, not because he has an agenda for me to accomplish, but because he loves me. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t think that I need to change or that there aren't things he wants me to do. But what can be more life-changing or empowering than spending time with God and baring my soul to the transforming power of his Spirit? Prayer can be a conversation between friends that encourages, heals, and challenges. The shorter the business meeting, the better. But “pray continually.” (I Thessalonians 5:17)

about Pharisees

Jesus tells a story about a tax collector and a Pharisee who go to the Temple to pray. In Jesus’ day, all of his hearers wanted to be accepted and honored like the Pharisee. Tax collectors were thought to have turned their backs on any effort toward religious respectability. So Jesus’ hearers were stunned when Jesus said that God was more interested in what the tax collector had to say than in the Pharisee's prayer.

But now we hear this story very differently. Preachers hold up the Pharisees as the enemies of Jesus and examples of how baldly legalistic the religious establishment of Jesus’ day had become, making the Pharisees fair game for youth pastors everywhere. We think that we can now see through the Pharisees’ religious game-playing and power-grabbing. No self-respecting American evangelical would aspire to be like a Pharisee.

So maybe we need to re-cast this story. Instead of the Pharisee and the tax collector, we could call the story “the good Christian and the Pharisee”. And we’ll all be surprised that God is more interested in listening to a Pharisee who has a change of heart than in a good Christian who is locked in her/his ways.