A Relational Approach to Prayer

Any approach you take to deepen your relationship with God can become mechanical if you let it. The tool itself can become a substitute for deeper intimacy with God. “Of course, I have a personal relationship with God,” you might say. “I read the Bible. I pray. I go to church. What else is there?” Well, companionship, for one thing. It’s a fact of 21st century spirituality that many have a personal relationship with God that is anything but personal. It’s so easy to check boxes, doing the “good things that good Christians are supposed to do: read the Bible, go to church, pray before every meal and so on. We would never say this, but somewhere in the back of our minds is the idea that because we do these things, God is more likely to give us what we want (When the Soul Listens by Jan Johnson, p. 5).” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used prayer simply to get God to intervene in some situation, solve some problem or tell me what to do instead of using prayer as a tool to simply be with God.

It’s the weirdest thing really, how often we try to use God to get quick answers and blessings. Then we’re left to wonder, “Will God do what I want? Will he come through?” This mechanical approach often leads to a consumer-based version of God-on-demand. For some of us, we can actually begin to think of God as an opponent who needs to be manipulated or influenced or conquered. If we pray in just the right way, God will begin to see things our way and he might do what we want. But, when we shift from a mechanical approach to a relational approach to life with God, prayer becomes a place of meeting God, a means of interacting with the lover of our souls.

Let me borrow an image from author Jan Johnson to illustrate the difference between a mechanical and a relational approach to prayer. Pretend for a moment that you’ve figured out how to get written directions from God to go anywhere you might want to go. You could get in your car, pull out the directions and set off on your own. That’s precisely what many people want from God and nothing more. “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” “But,” as Jan Johnson wrote, “Jesus will not have it. Jesus is relentlessly relational.” He gets in the car with you, takes the instructions out of your hands, and grins as he tears them up. "Start the car," he says. You’re uncomfortable. You’d like to know where you’re going. So you say, “If I don’t know where we’re going, I won’t know where to turn.” He smiles and says, “I’ll tell you when to turn. Start the car!” You protest again, “But I need to know ahead of time.” And he replies, “Trust me. We’re going to stop at restaurants that you’re going to love; we’re going to see beautiful places; we’re going to stop along the road to help people you can’t stand. It will be wonderful. Start the car!” If you’re wise, you start the car and lean into a moment-to-moment life with God (When the Soul Listens, p. 6-7).

Are you living a moment-to-moment life with God? God created you to be a communicating, listening, cooperating, collaborative friend, not a map reading, rule following, self-determining automaton. He wants a personal relationship with you. He likes you. He loves you. And he loves loving you. How do you learn to live moment-to-moment with God? Well, practically everything I’m going to talk about in this blog helps answer that question but, at a minimum, we need an…

Awareness of God’s ever-presence

To cultivate that awareness, I’ve been practicing what some call contemplative, abiding, or listening prayer. Our word, contemplative, comes from the Latin words…

Con and Templa

Con, meaning “with,” and “templa,” meaning, “the place where God dwells.” It’s the same word from which we get the word “temple.” I want to live and move and have my being in the place where God dwells. Where does God dwell? God has made his home in our hearts. The Spirit of God has taken up residence within us. How do we establish this personal connection with God? That connection takes place as we still our thoughts and emotions and focus on God’s own self in an unhurried way. The stillness of contemplative prayer helps make us aware that God is truly with us and allows us to hear when God nudges, guides, directs, or even challenges us.

Again, we’re trading a mechanical approach for a relational one because we want our relationship with God to be personal. So it isn’t so much about doing the practices as being present with Christ in the midst of them, being attentive to him, making yourself available, allowing him to use these practices to draw you ever nearer to himself. What would it be like if you could learn to relate to God in an unhurried way, without lists, beyond words when words are not enough?

Here are a couple of simple tools I’ve been using to great effect to practice his presence. First, I would encourage you, as part of your prayer time, to take a few minutes to simply sit with God in loving adoration. In response to a question posed to him by the Pharisees, “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the Law?”, Jesus replied, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the first and greatest commandment (Matthew 22:37-38)."

Love should be our first concern, and all other things will fall into place. How long do you think it takes to love God? It takes but a moment. You only have to reach out and express your love for God. You can do this whenever you want, throughout the day. I’ve found that expressing my love for God reminds me I, too, am loved. This is the very simplest of tools, but what a difference it’s made for me. You can do it in silence or you can simply say aloud, “God, I love you.” When you do this, you’ll notice, as I have, that you’ll want to repeat it over and over again. This is such a good place to start. Sit with him, quiet your heart, and say, “God, I love you.” What started as something I did in my prayer time quickly became a part of my everyday life, a brief act of love offered in the middle of a busy day pursuing God’s call on my life. “God, I love you” helps me practice his presence in my quiet time and it helps draw my heart back to him when I’m going about my day.

Another practice I’ve discovered is using a name of God to express my desire for intimacy. It needs to be something personal between you and him, a name of God that means something to you, that expresses your affection. I’ve been using the name Adonai, a Hebrew word that means “Lord or Master.” You might use Abba, Father, Master, Savior, Lord, Jesus or Friend. Remember, your relationship with God is meant to be personal. When you repeat this name, you’re expressing your affection for him, your connection to him, contemplatively loving God throughout the day.