25: Relational Approaches to Prayer (Jumpstart Your Prayer Life, Part 2) | S4E25

(00:00) Stephanie Warner: Welcome to Season 4, episode 25. Hello, Father.

(00:04) Marcus Warner: Hello, Daughter. Here we are diving into the topic of prayer once again.

(00:08) Stephanie Warner: Yes, I’m so excited. I’m so excited. The goal of the series is to help everyone go deeper on your walk with God, specifically in your prayer life. So for this series, I just want to direct your attention to one of the links in the description where you can find your free Listening Prayer Starter Kit. It walks through three approaches to prayer we hope you find helpful. Last episode we started talking about the theology of prayer, and we camped out on the idea of God’s sovereignty, and I really enjoyed that conversation.

And this episode we are continuing to look at some theology, but also looking at the relational aspects of prayer in terms of God as Father. And then we’re also going to unpack a little bit the five levels of prayer which is all a relational lens. On that note, Father, one approach to prayer is to consider anything you might schedule time with a king to discuss, which we covered a little bit last episode. Is there anything more you want to say on that before we talk about God the Father?

(01:26) Marcus Warner: Not a lot. I think just connecting that to what we’re talking about.The emphasis was on king because we’re talking about the theology of sovereignty. But as we all know, God is presented as more than just a king, he’s God, right? Which is where you get into temple.He is also presented as a shepherd. He’s presented as Father. Jesus said, I called you my friends. You have more intimate pictures of God as well, besides these exalted ones. And so I think that’s what we want to dive into today.

(02:06) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, anything you might schedule time with your father to discuss.

(02:09) Marcus Warner: Yes, imagine.

(02:11) Stephanie Warner: What? I love it, I love it. All right, so talk more about that. What does prayer look like in terms of talking to your dad?

(02:22) Marcus Warner: I grew up with a father who was the president of a college and was one of the most important people in every circle I was in. He was like this important person. And so there was this sense of, kind of growing up with this dichotomy of somebody who has a high status, but is also your dad. I think I am old enough to…John F. Kennedy was like president and became president shortly after, well, let me think about this. I think he was actually president when I was born.

(03:02) Stephanie Warner: I can’t fact check you live on that one.

(3:04) Marcus Warner: So I wasn’t aware of this. Anyway, he was elected that year. I don’t know if he was actually in office till the next month, but anyway.

(03:14) Stephanie Warner: Details.

(03:16) Marcus Warner: That was a lot of detail on a very side point.

(3:19) Stephanie Warner: What about JFK?

(3:20) Marcus Warner: What about him? One of things that endeared Kennedy to the public was that he was a young president with a young family. And so you had his kids running around the White House and their stories of Kennedy in the Oval Office. Perhaps the most powerful  position in the world, and his little boy is playing under the desk, playing hide and seek and talking to him. It was a beautiful picture that a lot of pastors used when I was growing up. Combining the idea of our powerful, powerful God that we’re talking to, with also a playful father who loved us and wanted to spend time with us. And I think that those things come together very nicely. I also think that “father” in the ancient Near East was a little bit different thing than “father” in modern America.

We’ve spent the last generation making fun of fathers in modern America. Whereas in the ancient Near East, the father was basically a king. He was the king of his clan, of his family. And so there was a lot of overlap between this idea that you would go to your father for the things that you might also go to a king for, provision, protection, and  perspective on things. But then there was also always an understood sort of a playful dimension of your relationship to your father. And so I think that’s partly what’s carried over. And so when God says, “I’m your father”, there is a kingly element to that, but there’s also this very relational kind of playful, I want to enjoy being with you. And also, the I love you and I know who you are. I know what’s best for you and I want what’s best for you. And so that is a big part of that imagery of a father as well.

(05:25) Stephanie Warner: It’s a more intimate imagery versus, anybody could theoretically schedule an appointment with a king and be like, hey I need I need an audience. Please sign me up

(05:37) Marcus Warner: Yep. You don’t know who I am, but please help. Versus father, yeah. Much more intimate.

(05:45) Stephanie Warner: Yeah. So what kinds of things would we go to Father for in prayer?

(05:50) Marcus Warner: I think when Jesus taught us to pray,”Our Father who art in heaven,” you don’t see anybody addressing God as Father in their prayers in the Old Testament, that I can remember all top of my head. If there’s an exception, I don’t know what it is. But it was a really revolutionary idea. And I think what he meant by that was, you’re going to somebody who cares about you. You’re not just talking to the Almighty over the universe who lives out there in the stars somewhere. You’re talking about somebody who knows when a sparrow falls to the ground and in the same way, knows what you want even before you ask, because he is paying close attention to you.

And again, you can take that in a fear bonded way or a joy bonded way like, my father is paying close attention to me, Oh no! Or that my father actually cares so much about me that he’s already made preparations for what he wants to do. He’s already thought about this. He knows I’m about to come to him to ask about it. He’s already been thinking about this and has a plan. So that’s what I think we’re supposed to have, the imagery we’re supposed to have when we come to God as Father. Someone who is paying attention to us in the sense that he knows what we need, and has already given thought to how to provide for us. He has already given thought to what he wants to do and wants to have a conversation with us. So… I think that’s where my mind goes when I think of coming to God as Father.

(07:20) Stephanie Warner: Well, and I also just want to reiterate something that we mentioned in the last episode, which is he meets us where we’re at. So much of prayer in the Bible that we see is people just pouring out their hearts to God and just being raw. Like, the “how long”, or the “why”, or the “this isn’t”.

(07:44) Marcus Warner: Like Hannah uttering her prayer so deeply, no words are coming out..

(07:47) Stephanie Warner: Right. And he meets us there and he loves us there and he instructs us there, but it’s also okay to just get with God and pour your heart out.

(08:05) Marcus Warner: Yeah. You don’t have to worry about making a wrong step or a wrong move.

(08:12) Stephanie Warner: Every prayer isn’t transactional. It’s not like, I’m only gonna come to you if I really need something and will you give it to me? There are times when you’re like, hey God, I really need something. But you can talk to him even if you’re not trying to make some sort of transaction.

(08:32) Marcus Warner: I remember seeing this a lot in the movies where people go like, God, I’m sorry to bother you. You know, it’ll be years till I ask for anything else. So could you just help me out this one time? And I’m like, well, that’s sort of the opposite of what we’re after. And in our self-sufficient American culture especially, there’s this sense of I only go to God when I really, really need something. And that is not the kind of relationship that he wants. No dad would want to be in that relationship with their child and say, hey, only talk to me when you’re really in bad shape and you really, really need something, that’s not really what we’re after.

(09:08) Stephanie Warner: Yeah. We want to cultivate that conversational lifestyle with him and that’s a good thing. So why don’t we…, Oh, do you have a thought?

(09:19) Marcus Warner: Well, my thought was like beyond father though, there’s these other images of God. Shepherd comes to mind. In fact, I always think of Elaine Pakala when I think of father and shepherd because she had a father who was abusive. She worked with a lot of people with whom “father” was not a happy word. And so they couldn’t talk to God as father; it was not a good thing. And so she used to have them substitute the idea of shepherd.and pray, my good shepherd, my good shepherd. And her words were, I haven’t met anybody yet who was abused by a shepherd. So maybe that’s just in America.

But what helps me when I think about God as shepherd is I pray through Psalm 23 often, sometimes several times in a week. I’ll just pray through it in my mind, “The Lord is my shepherd”. And because of that, I don’t have to be afraid that I’m going to go without something. You think about what a shepherd does, his whole job is to take care of a sheep that can’t really think for itself, can’t really strategize for itself, and can’t really plan through how to get what they need.

And so in the same way, if a shepherd will do that for a sheep, what is God going to do for me, and for us? I think of it as someone who’s already thought through how he’s going to take care of me at night. How he’s going to get me to water, how he’s going to get me into the food that I need, how he’s going to get me from point A to point B. He’s already thought through whether or not that path is going to go through a rocky place and we need to do this fast or we need to do this slow. He’s already thought about where are we most likely to run into wolves and all these other things. And it’s been his job to pre-think all of that.

And then what he has asked me to do is follow him and trust him. And so I feel like when I talk to my good shepherd, I particularly think in terms of provision. Somebody who has seen ahead, like forethought, somebody who’s given forethought to the journey already. And so I can talk to my shepherd about what’s coming next and the provision and the strategy and stuff like that. So that’s where my mind goes.

(11:49) Stephanie Warner: I love it. I was just thinking too about God as a friend. I think about sometimes when I get a little playful in my Bible journaling, and we’re just going back and forth. Like, oh wow, what did you do right there? Or like, oh, I saw that wink, that was fun. You’re just staying in relationship. Just keep it in mind. Talking about praying through Psalm 23 is actually a nice segue into the five levels of prayer. So Dawn Whitestone first coined this idea in her book, Strategic Business Prayer, of the five levels of prayer. And I know you explain it in different ways, but along the same lines. So would you walk us through just a brief, what do we mean by five levels of prayer?

(12:44) Marcus Warner: Yeah, when I say five levels of prayer it is inspired by what Dawn said, but I might not be explaining it exactly the way that she would. I think about the five levels of maturity development. Infant, child, adult, parent, elder, and how prayer looks different at each of those stages. So with an infant, an infant is nonverbal or just beginning to babble a little bit or whatever.

(13:12) Stephanie Warner: Observing others.

(13:13) Marcus Warner: What they’re doing at the infant stage is they’re observing people praying and their mirror neurons are going, look, prayer must be important. Look how often the people in my life are praying. And that was me. I can remember as a toddler that, okay, mom and dad are leading us in prayer again and it’s not just at meal time.You pick up what is important and how people pray by watching. And so the same thing, infants in the faith will often start by watching, how do people do this? What does it look like? And even the disciples were asking Jesus, so how should we pray? How do we go about this?

But they’ve been watching him and going, okay, well, this clearly is important to him. So it must be something that’s important to me. So part of what I look at in the infant stage is making sure that especially baby Christians, are around people who are praying people.That they see it modeled on a regular basis and begin to pick it up. And then also just as parents with our babies,we realize they’re watching us all of the time. Do they ever see us pray? Do they only see us pray before meals? You know, what is that like? Then you get to the child years. So in the child years I am beginning to learn to do things for myself. I’m learning to dress myself. I’m learning to go potty, learning to feed myself, and all these other things. In the same way, I’m doing that with help.

There are people who are training me how to do things for myself. So that’s like child level prayer, it is where you get things like the ACTS acrostic. Okay, here’s what you should do. You start with adoration, then go to confession, then thanksgiving, and then supplication. And that’s great and that is a helpful thing. It’s kind of a child level approach to prayer. And most of us have to go through that stage in our prayer time. And then you’ll learn other little models that help you. Well, we’re going to pray about this..

(15:10) Stephanie Warner: Or a rote prayer that you have memorized.

(15:13) Marcus Warner: Exactly. You give them a prayer to memorize. You give them a prayer to read something like that, because you’re training people how to pray. And so this is where doctrinal prayers can be helpful. And like, okay so this is how somebody who’s advanced in their faith would pray about it. Let’s go through this. It’s also why you have, like in the Church of England, you have the prayer book. And that’s designed for people who are kind of at a child level of their faith and need somebody to write it out for them, like here’s a good sample prayer. But we’re not meant to stay there. That’s not where we’re supposed to live our whole lives. We  then begin to do some themes and variations on those things. Sort of like someone playing the piano who has the song down, but now they’re kind of ad-libbing around that song and adding some variety to it.

And so when you hear people praying scripture, it’s not just reciting the Psalm over and over, but it is using it as a launching point for the things that you want to pray about. That’s starting to move into those adult level skills where I’m not dependent on somebody else to guide me through what to do here. I have an established prayer life of my own that I can talk to God about things. And so if you force an adult to go back to those earlier things it can actually stagnate their prayer life a little bit, because they’re ready for something deeper.

(16:47) Stephanie Warner: So then as you’re moving into adult, you get into that conversational style.

(16:54) Marcus Warner: You get a conversational style and you’re able to ask for things directly. You know how to make a petition. You know how to do this because you’ve practiced it with guidance for a while and now it’s a skill that you possess, and you’re able to have your own prayer life. So as people are developing it though, they almost always have to go through something like a child stage where someone is helping them learn the skill. And that’s why it’s not enough just to say, go pray, congratulations. It’s actually a skill that you need a little bit of coaching and practice with. And that’s where we need spiritual parents. Because what spiritual parents do is they’re the ones who are meeting with spiritual children and kind of giving them guidance, and modeling for the infants.

Giving guidance to the children and helping others develop their prayer life saying, let’s go and spend this time together praying, and let’s go be here. Like I will give you an example. When I first became the president of Deeper Walk I went out to see Mark Bubeck who was the founder of the ministry, and  who was famous for his prayer life. He got up early. He was a farmer. He just never got out of the habit of getting up at the crack of dawn and starting his day with at least an hour in Bible study and prayer.

I remember that he was also famous for going to bed early because he got up early. Well, I arrived at the airport about his bedtime, but he still picked me up. He drove us back and before just collapsing in bed he said, why don’t we spend a little time praying together? I remember that it was our first moment together. So I’m watching this. And he said, here I found this prayer by John Eldridge that he’s written out. Why don’t we pray this together before we go to bed? And it was like a four page hand written out prayer.

And he’s like, you do a paragraph and I’ll do a paragraph, we’ll go back and forth. And so he was kind of the parent showing the child hey, this is how we keep prayer important. No matter how tired you are, we make sure that we do this. That’s what spiritual parents do.They find ways to pass on skills to the next generation. Even though I was an adult with my own prayer life on that journey, it was still a very informative experience for me, because I hadn’t seen very many people do that sort of thing before. And it established this pattern.

(19:31) Stephanie Warner: That’s kind of what I meant, and I can’t remember now if I said it last episode or this episode. But the listening prayer guides layout may be able to help you step outside of your box. Not that the box you’re in is not a good prayer life, but it’s helpful to get your mirror neurons going to see how other people do it. And you’re like, that would actually be really helpful. That is a tool. That’s why The Listening Prayer Starter Kit is like the toolkit or whatever.

(20:03) Marcus Warner: And at the elder level too, you’re praying for different things too. It’s like you’re usually called to a deeper level of intercession. I think one of the reasons that life slows down in the elder years, is because God wants us to have more time for prayer as elders, it really is an anchor for the community to know. Throughout my ministry most of the people who were just committed prayer warriors for me were retired people. And they took seriously this idea of prayer almost as a vocation, this is my calling and what I’m going to spend a lot of my time doing. It wasn’t uncommon for them to spend three, four hours a day in prayer and linger in it.

And it’s not something that you have the luxury to do when you’re a parent trying to just get your kids up, dressed, out to school and taking care of them. Especially if you have to work and do this. And so a lot of us are comparing ourselves to elders who are retired and have time on their hands for this and realize that’s not an option for us. So understanding that there are different stages to our prayer journey as well as to our maturity journey I think can help. It helps establish the expectation of what should be going on where I’m at.

(21:39) Stephanie Warner: I think it’s a really helpful framework to work through and understand our emotional maturity levels, our spiritual maturity levels, all our stages of life. Maybe there’s a season where like, oh, hey, I’m not having to work as often for whatever reason, or I’m not having to do X, Y, Z. That would be normal in my stage of life, but I feel like God’s calling me to pray right now. That’s still okay. You don’t have to wait until you’ve had kids and they’re out of the house. You’re presenting a paradigm for how you often say, how interesting is it that God designed our elder stages of life to be like over half of our lives, because of being able to parent communities and all of this. It’s just an interesting thing too for prayer life.

(22:35) Marcus Warner: It was something I had not thought of until Dawn put it in her book. There is a correspondence to even the sorts of things God asks us to pray for depending on the stage of life we’re at. I do think elders tend to ask to pray for weightier things in general too. The way that she expressed it in her book was when it came to how you do intercession. As a child, you tell people what to pray for.

And as an adult you’re deciding what you need to pray for. And you get to be a parent and you’re guiding people in their intercession. At the adult stage you are beginning to get to the point where God is instructing you on who to pray for as well. And by the time you get into your elder years, God will occasionally guide you to pray for things you did not even know were there to be praying about. That was sort of where this whole journey started for her.

(23:34) Stephanie Warner: Sometimes you’ll say parent intercession is for loved ones and all the other stuff. Elder parent intercession is for strangers plus your loved ones and everybody else. It’s not a strict formula there, but it’s kind of just patterns we see.

(23:49) Marcus Warner: It’s fun to think about and play around with. And I think there’s insights to be had there.

(23:54) Stephanie Warner: Yep. Yep. This is so good. God is so good that he wants to talk with us and hear us and act. It’s so cool. Well, I just want to say thank you to everybody who is on the trail with us. Thank you again to our volunteers and to our Trailblazers, and everybody who shares this with friends and leaves comments. We want to hype you up. That’s why we’re here. We want to give you that 20-ish minute boost every week on your walk with God. It’s a delight. It’s an honor to be here with you. Thank you. Father, I’m enjoying this conversation very much. Any final thoughts for this episode?

(24:42) Marcus Warner: The other thing that we haven’t really talked about is community prayer. Going back to the conversation we had in the last series about allies. I just think that a lot of times, especially for people who are struggling to develop a prayer life, being in a group that’s working on it together can really make a big difference. Having people that are kind of committed to working on and even reporting to each other what’s going on in their prayer life. Again, not just from a straight accountability perspective, there’s an element of that, but also just that I’m on a journey together with people who are in this.We are supporting one another in prayer. So finding allies is a great way to keep yourself moving forward and continue to grow in this area of prayer.

(25:34) Stephanie Warner: That’s a really good point. All right, talk to you next week.