“There are plenty of problems facing the world today. We can worry about them. We can talk about them. We can protest in the streets. We can form organizations that pressure politicians to solve them. We can give money. We can write blogs. The one thing we must do is pray. If Samuel does not pray, David is never identified as the solution to Israel’s problem. Do you see the connection? Are you frustrated with your nation’s chief executive? Pray. Are you fearful concerning your city’s poverty or crime sprees? Pray. Are you worried about your nation’s moral fiber? Pray. Are you fretting about your children and their walk with God? Pray. Pray and listen. The two go together. Then be ready to act—not to rush out and solve the problem yourself.” — Fearless by Faith: How to Fight Today’s Spiritual Battles by Brother Andrew, Al Janssen
Triangular Communication
In some social systems (families in particular) it is customary to participate in triangular communication. I grew up in such a family and have much experience with this ineffective communication style. In my family, this type of communication was the go-to means of passing on information, especially when there was a need to confront an issue.
Triangular communication is where A wants to get a message to B, but rather than talk to B directly, A sends the message through C. Not only is it inefficient, this type of communication tends to be destructive to all parties concerned.
There are several reasons why triangular communication is destructive. Here are some that come to mind:
- When the message is passed through an intermediary, the message may be changed in subtle or significant ways. This adds confusion on top of the hurt that already exists.
- It involves the third party who didn’t need to be in the middle of the dialog. It spreads the hurt to another who should not be involved.
- It is dismissive of the one who is to receive the message. It communicates the message that the recipient is not worth the effort to contact directly.
So this means of communication is not good and should not be practiced between humans.
But on my bike ride this morning, I thought of one instance where triangular communication is beneficial. That is when the third party is God.
It is never a bad plan to bring the issue to God before confronting another human. Here are some reasons why I hold this opinion:
- If my anger is inappropriate or out of proportion to the offense, God understands and allows me to vent my frustration in prayer. The Psalms have many instances of this type of prayer. I have an outlet for my anger and frustration that doesn’t damage my human relationships.
- Only God can change hearts. If the other person is a believer and in relationship with God, I can trust God to convict that person in his own time and in his own way.
- God loves the other person perfectly and he is the only one who can confront in perfect love. No matter how objective I try to be, my confrontation is always tainted with self-interest.
It is a good idea to spend time in prayer before confronting a friend or family member. While praying, it would be beneficial to ask God to reveal any ways that I have contributed to the perceived offense. My guess is that if I pray in this way, when I do finally confront, I will be much closer to having the kind of love that God has when he confronts.
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Martyn Lloyd-Jones again on Prayer
Martyn Lloyd-Jones said this about prayer in a sermon on John 17:
“Our whole idea of prayer is false. We think of prayer only as guidance and requests. Now if you were to put that into practice in human relationships you would regard it as insulting. No, the thing the saint wants to know above everything else is that all is well between his soul and the Father. There is nothing the saint delights in more than to know God as his Father. He likes to maintain the contact and communion, to assure his heart before God and in the presence of God. The saint is in this difficult world, there are temptations from the outside and the whole world is against us, and the saint is tried – sometimes he almost despairs. So he goes to God immediately, not to ask this or that but just to make certain that all is well there, that the contact is unbroken and perfect, that he can assure his heart and know that all is well.”
This quote was found in The Assurance of Our Salvation (Studies in John 17): Exploring the Depth of Jesus’ Prayer for His Own
which is a collection of Lloyd-Jones’ sermons on John 17.
Jesus tells us that we are to approach God in a childlike way. What is more childlike than to look to our father to assure us that everything will be OK?
Life as a flawed human in a flawed world is often difficult. But, for the Christian, we have the assurance that God will see us through to the end. I don’t think it is possible to over emphasize what Paul tells us in Philippians:
“I am sure of this, that he who started a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 1:6, CSB)
We have been told this, but we have a patient Father who is willing to tell us over and over again that he is with us and all will be well.
Beware the leaven . . . thoughts on contemplative prayer
There has been some discussion lately about the danger of contemplative prayer in the Church. While I understand that some proponents of this practice lean heavily on eastern religious practice and error has crept in, I am concerned that an over-reaction is taking place.
There was one group that Jesus singled out in his warnings, the Jewish religious leaders. Jesus did not say “beware the leaven of the philosophers.” Nor did he warn us against the leaven of the false religions. He warned his disciples to “beware the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (Matthew 16:6). We have been warned against the leaven of the Orthodox, the Biblically correct, the ones who should have known better. Jesus warned us against smug confidence that we have all the answers.
Now I’m not saying that orthodoxy does not have value, it does. Nor am I saying that eastern religions provide adequate answers to life, they do not and we should be wary of anyone who wants to borrow from eastern religions. We do have an obligation to be sure that our belief and practice correspond to the revealed truth of the Bible.
What I am saying is that rather than decrying the wrong ways to pray, it is more profitable to teach the valid ones. Let us not have a knee-jerk reaction to error and throw out the good with the bad.
The good part of the discussion about contemplative prayer is the move to make prayer less transactional and more relational. Too often in the prayer meetings of my youth, prayer consisted of listing situations where God’s help was required with a good bit of advice for God on how he should handle those situations.
There is mystery in prayer that much of the doctrinally correct, Bible believing church has lost over the years. Say what you want, but Psalm 46:10 tells me that I need to spend more time listening and less time talking to God. Whether you call that contemplative prayer or not, I need to stop striving and listen.
My own experience is that when I take the time to ask God to instruct me he does. When I take the time to meditate on a verse and seek deeper understanding of what it is telling me, God is faithful and often provides the insight. When I focus my attention on God, as he has revealed himself to me in Scripture, then my prayer becomes less transactional and more relational. When I am in the right mindset to listen, God answers.
When a finite human interacts with an infinite God, there is bound to be mystery. When we, being bound by time and space, interact with a God who is outside time and everywhere, there is bound to be mystery. We cannot fully understand God, our vision is like the view in a foggy mirror (1 Corinthians 13:12). We cannot take the mystery out of prayer; prayer in its very nature is mysterious.
While we cannot remove the mystery, we can confront known error. But error can only be effectively confronted by replacing it with truth. If people are looking for relationship with God through prayer, we should encourage this with the focus being on the nature of God as he has revealed himself in Scripture.
Instead of spending time condemning contemplative prayer in its entirety, we need to do the hard work of understanding what practices which claim that title are wrong, but also which are right. Our response then is to jettison the wrong and embrace the right.
We don’t want to throw out the wheat along with the chaff.
