26: Prayer & Neuroscience (Jumpstart Your Prayer Life, Part 3) | S4E26

Stephanie (00:13): Welcome to Season 4, episode 26. Hello, Father.

Marcus (00:18): Hello, Daughter. Hard to believe we’re… How many seasons are we in now?

Stephanie (00:20): Season four. Seasons are so arbitrary. It’s time for a new season, but I haven’t decided that yet so we’re still in season four.

Marcus (00:24): That’s good. Haven’t run out of things to say yet. That’s good.

Stephanie (00:32): Yes, yes, you’re a good conversationalist.

Marcus (00:41): I just remember when I was dating your mother. That was one of my concerns, like, “I’m going to run out of things to talk about.” But that didn’t work. That didn’t happen. We were fine.

Stephanie (00:52): Good. Well hey, on that note, the note of people and husbands and wives and communities and all the things, I want to jump into a quick announcement, our first podcast announcement for the April conference.

We have an April online conference coming up all about healthy community and how to cultivate it. We’re going to be having Chris and Jen Coursey, Nik and Kristy Harrang, and Michel and Claudia Hendricks. And you are actually going to be giving a bonus session because you will be out for that time period.

Marcus (01:27): Yeah. I’m just extra. I’m like an appendix.

Stephanie (01:31): It’s going to be great and so we’re excited for that. That’s the name-your-own-price event coming April 25th. You can find out more details in the links. And anytime you want to check out Deeper Walk events, deeperwalk.com/events, will keep you updated.

Marcus (01:48): Well, if people want to know who these folks are, like Michel and Claudia Hendricks, Michel is the co-author of the book, The Other Half of Church, with Dr. Jim Wilder. And his wife, Claudia, also does a lot of speaking. They’re experts on community.

Then Chris and Jen Coursey run THRIVEtoday. Their whole ministry is training people how to have healthier relationships and communities. And Nik and Kristy have been working on this for years. Kristy actually works for Thrive and Nik works for Deeper Walk.

And so we’ve got a great lineup of people to talk about an important topic. I just wanted to highlight who these people were for those who might not recognize the names.

Stephanie (02:32): Yes. And also on a completely other note, for those who may be watching the podcast versus our many listeners, if you are concerned about my dear father, you don’t need to be. He has a little boo-boo on his head, but he is OK.

Marcus (02:50): I did it to myself. No one hit me. Yeah, it’s just one of those awkward things you don’t like telling people about because it was so stupid. But yeah, I did this to myself with my own thumbnail. Well, anyway.

Stephanie (02:59): Hey, and you know what? I did that in seventh grade. Yup. That’s a memory. Just saying.

Marcus (03:07): Yeah, I’m 65. Seventh grade I can see. Go ahead.

Stephanie (03:19): Okay, gonna make me laugh too much! All right, so what are we talking about today? We are talking about prayer. We are in the midst of our Jump Start Your Prayer Life series, having lots of fun talking about the theology of prayer and a big picture overview of our approach to prayer as God the King and God the Father.

Marcus (03:28): Something important.

Stephanie (03:42): And today is going to be kind of a bridge day. Next episode we’re going to start talking about some tactical approaches to prayer where we actually have, (I printed it off this time) this listening prayer starter kit that walks you through three different models of what you would actually do in prayer time.

Like, “I’m going to sit down with my notebooks and here’s what I’m going to do for my prayer time,” like some tactical approaches. So we’ll start walking through some of those next week, but you can already download that PDF for free in the links in the descriptions.
Today we’re going to start talking about neuroscience and prayer, and that will kind of bridge us into those tactical approaches. So Father, that’s an interesting topic. Neuroscience and prayer.

Marcus (04:35): Yeah, not something I ever thought I’d be teaching on 20 years ago, but it’s what happens when you become friends with Jim Wilder. All of a sudden, neuroscience finds its way into everything you do.

One of the things I find is that people are like, “Why do we need neuroscience? Why don’t we just stick with the Bible?” I find that whether it’s neuroscience or whether it’s something else, sometimes outside factors like that shine a spotlight on something that causes us to go back to the Bible and go, “Well, that kind of makes sense now when I put those together.” But without the spotlight getting shined on it, you wouldn’t necessarily pay attention to it.

So I just find it helpful to think about a couple of ideas. One is that God designed the brain for relationship, so it just sort of makes sense that if we want to have a relational connection with God in prayer, then maybe we should try to activate the relational systems in our brain.

And, come to find out, the Bible actually gives us ways to do that without explaining the brain science. It’s things like that that we’re going to be talking about today.

Stephanie (05:42): Yes, yes. So my brain is looking at what I’d planned to ask you and also new questions that I’m pulling all together. I just think maybe we should start with when you say God designed us for relationship. Can you substantiate that? What do you mean by that?

Marcus (06:06): Sure. God designed us for relationship. My starting point there is in Genesis. It says that we were created in the image and likeness of God. And there’s no real explanation for that in the text. But then a couple of chapters later, we read that Adam had a son, Seth, and he uses the exact same wording, in his image and likeness.

And so that’s a clue to us, like, there is a parallel between us being in the image and likeness of God and Seth being in the image and likeness of his father, Adam. And I look at that as he was designed for relationship because Adam didn’t have a cow, Adam didn’t have a giraffe, Adam didn’t have a donkey or a monkey or something. He had a human in the same way God created us to be children of God.

So we are capable of being in relationship with him. He gave us attachment capability. He also gave us linguistic capability so we could talk and communicate. He gave us reason so we could think together. And all of these things go into making us in the image of God.
And then you get into God’s whole purpose for creating humanity is embodying the idea of creating a family that would be God’s family. So one angle of it looks at the church as the bride of Christ. Like all of this, everything that he’s doing in the world is to create a bride for his son. That’s one way to look at it.

Also that he, Father, can have children and family. And he wants the family to love each other and he wants us to receive his love and to love him in return so that there is just love gluing all of this together and making it work.

And so this idea that God designed us for relationship shouldn’t surprise us then that when we actually look at the brain that God designed, that the brain itself is designed for relationship to be at the heart and at the foundation of all of its functions and operations. I can explain what the brain’s doing there, but that would be a four hour seminar. It just depends on how much you want.

Stephanie (08:07): It would be, and I was contemplating that too. I love that you started with that big theological overview. And with the brain, we don’t need to go through every level. We’ve done that actually before on the podcast. I’ll try to remember to link some of those other podcasts that we can go through. But could you give a two sentence pitch for how the brain is wired for relationships?

Marcus (08:28): Sure. We teach three brain facts at the foundation of Rare Leadership that are the same three brain facts that would be at the foundation of this. Number one is that the brain is wired by God to want to run on joy. It will run on fear if it has to, but it’s designed to operate best when it’s functioning on the fuel of joy.

So that’s brain fact number one. It helps us understand that we’re always going to be tempted to have a fear bond with God, but that he wants us to have a joy bond with him. That’s one of those interesting insights that neuroscience shines a spotlight on that helps us go, “That makes sense that that would be true.” And this is just bringing it into focus for us.

Number two is there are two engines in the brain. Second fact, there are two engines in the brain. In Rare Leadership, we call it the fast track and the slow track. Another way to look at it is that the fast track is essentially the relational engine of the brain. When it is functioning properly, I have relational circuitry that stays engaged and that allows me to be my relational self and to keep relationships bigger than problems and all these things. That’s all in the relational engine.

Then the slow track is about focus and it’s about focusing on problems that need to be solved and so that does a lot of the heavy lifting in life. We spend a lot of our time problem solving and creating narratives and trying to analyze things and all that. But it is the relational engine underneath it that helps us to do that well, that helps us to do that in context. So the brain connects together through these two engines.

And then the third brain fact is that the relational engine itself has four levels that we talk about like a joy elevator. Problems arise if it’s malfunctioning on the first floor, that’s going to affect floors two, three and four above it. So we want to learn to recognize what might be offline so that we can get our relational engine working as best that it can.

So you bring all of these things together, you’ve got God wanting us to have a relational connection with him. To do that, it helps to have the relational circuits in our brain turned on. It helps us to have this relational engine operating smoothly. It also helps to find some joy to fuel this whole process.

It’s not that we have to be happy and in a good mood before we pray, but it means that I might start off in lament and I may start off in grief and I may start off with anger or something else, but somewhere in there, I want to let God know I’m happy that I can bring my grief to him, happy that I can bring my anger to him, happy that all of these things can connect.

Stephanie (11:18): Yes, because “happy to be with you” is not, “I’m joyful bouncing off the ceiling because I’m with you.” We know just from our human experience, we’re happy to be with each other through those hard things too. You can be relationally engaged and not be grinning.

Marcus (11:22): Right, because this hard thing’s going on in my life and I’m bailing with all these emotions, but I’m happy that I can go through it with you and we can find joy together as we go through all of these other emotions. And that’s sort of what we’re after with God. Pouring out our hearts to him is ultimately just the idea of, “I’m glad that you’re glad to go through this with me.”

Stephanie (11:43): Mm-hmm, so we want to be relationally engaged when we enter into prayer. What does that even mean? When you’re dealing with a human, you can look in someone’s eyes or you can share that smile or whatever. How are you relationally engaged in prayer?

Marcus (12:24): You’re right. A big part of communication for humans is reading body language. Even on video, you kind of read body language. The thing is your brain is reading it faster than the video can deliver it to you. So that’s why you can get Zoom fatigue and some other things because your brain wants to go a little bit faster than the data that’s being sent its way.

I think that when it comes to this, what we’re saying is, “I want to make sure that I’m doing the things that help me keep the relational part of my brain engaged.” It just makes sense that I will have a better chance of connecting with God if the relational circuitry he designed for connection is on and operating.

And so that gets into things like, what is my motivation for being with God right now? Maybe I need to catch myself because right now it’s all about fear and shame or something like that. Like, “I better do this. I ought to do this.” I want to catch myself doing that and say, “Well, is there any joyful reason to connect with God right now and find something to be thankful for?”

Appreciation and praise are really the fastest ways to get the relational part of my brain on. What I do want to kind of emphasize, though, is that for years what that meant to me was I needed to have a thank you checklist. And so I would come to God and I would turn my gratitude and my praise into a very left-brained, non-emotional checklist.

Almost like, “I better get this right. How many blessings has he actually given me? Well, thank you for this and thank you for that. And thank you for this and thank you for that.” It is actually a fear-based exercise that I was doing, trying to get this thing right.

That wasn’t actually increasing appreciation inside of me. And so it’s better to have one thing that we can really enter into appreciating than to have a long checklist of things that we’re just doing out of duty.

Stephanie (12:24): It strikes me that – this could get us into weeds, in a can of worms, or whatever – one of the reasons that we worship with song in a church service, or a lot of times even in my personal prayer, I’ll turn on music or sometimes I’ll just sing prayers if I’m alone at home and I’m just needing to get my brain engaged. Singing brings your brain together, and if you’re singing praise and thanksgiving, or you’re interacting with who God is, that’s another way.

Marcus (15:14): Yes, absolutely. We talk about this in other books and resources that singing does bring the right and left hemispheres of the brain together and functioning. The idea of singing unto the Lord a new song and making joyful music and all of that stuff, there’s a reason for it. It’s like without explaining the brain science, he’s telling you how to activate it, right?

Stephanie (15:37): Mm-hmm. Yeah. So as we are ad-libbing here, in the next episode, we have room to talk about the Joy Switch and Mutual Mind specifically, but we’ve already kind of touched on it. Do you want to save Joy Switch/Mutual Mind for next episode and carry on to experience?

Marcus (15:58): Sure. We’ve talked about it before. I can just give a brief clue of what it is. Mutual mind in the human realm is where we’re so in sync with each other that we’re almost finishing each other’s sentences and you can communicate just with eye contact and body language. You almost don’t need words.

A lot of times when you’re having a mutual mind state with another person, you get done with the conversation, you can’t even remember whose idea something was originally because it was just so much in the flow of the connection that was going on.

It’s like, “Hey, while we were talking about this, this whole idea came up. And as I think back on it, I can’t even remember who contributed to what in that idea development.” That’s mutual mind. It means that I’m in a flow. I’m actively participating.

I am thinking, but God is also in that flow with me and he is thinking and our minds are syncing up, and as a result of that, I’m feeling very much led by God in His presence. So people will call it different things: “I’m in a flow. I feel like I’m getting a download.”

They use a lot of different terms for it, but partly what’s going on is they just feel really synced up with God. Like this is bringing me peace. It’s bringing me conviction. Some of it’s surprising. And so what happens is you evaluate it later. You stay in the flow while you’re in the flow and then you evaluate it later.

If you’re evaluating things in a regular conversation, if I sit there and I’m being critically analytical of everything that you say, we’re not going to have a very good conversation. So you can think about those things and get back to it at the appropriate time.

Stephanie (17:42): So when is the appropriate time and what are some appropriate evaluations? Because I know that some people are a little bothered by conversational prayer, listening prayer, stuff on different levels, but you already kind of mentioned it.

Some people are like, “Are you trying to be a medium or getting a download or something?” And what is happening when you are, especially if you’re journaling out your prayers or doing listening prayer in that way, where is that line between, “Oh, I’m praying with Jesus here, and yeah, anyway, you get what I say.” Where’s the line? How do you evaluate? How do you not be critical during prayer, but also not be naive?

Marcus (18:25): Well, what I’m trying to do is kind of write down the thoughts that I’m having, pay attention to those thoughts, and then afterwards, when I’m done and I’ve got something written out there, that’s when I’ll go, “OK, let me take a look at this. How does this make me feel? What does this prompt me to want to do? Is it something that’s good?” Is it Holy Spirit, the fruit of the Spirit driven?

Is it something that squares up with scripture, because a lot of times the guidance isn’t scriptural per se, but it doesn’t violate scripture. And so that’s part of what I’m looking for. Then you share it with other people, depending on what it is and how much it is. God may even prompt you who to share it.

So you’re doing all those kinds of evaluatory things after you’re basically done with the process. What we don’t do is we don’t say, “Hey, I just wrote the book of First Marcus, I’m going to add this to the Bible.” We’re not doing that. We’re just saying, “I’m feeling led by God, and I’m going to confirm this. I’m going to get confirmation. I’m going to do things to make sure that that’s actually correct.”

I’ll tell you where I actually started realizing that I did more listening prayer than I realized was. From my late twenties on, I was taking people through The Steps to Freedom in Christ that Neil Anderson developed and realized that it’s a listening prayer exercise.

Because in step one, you’re praying, “Father, would you bring to my mind… Is there any way in which I have participated in the occult?”
Here’s a checklist just to jog your thinking, but you’re counting on God bringing thoughts to your mind and a lot of times you’d have people say things like, “Yeah, I forgot all about that. But what’s coming to my mind right now is this.” Well, to me, that’s a God thought. I asked God to bring those thoughts to my mind. God brought it to my mind. Now I’m moving forward in it.

So that’s where I first began to understand it. And then it was also Neil’s book on liberating prayer where he talked about his own struggle in his prayer life and how he had the same insight basically like, “Wait a second, this is what we’re doing in the steps, what if I just do the same thing and say, ‘God, what do you want to talk about tonight?’ And start paying attention to the thoughts that come into my head.”

And you make this a bit more conversational. It’s not having a mystical experience, like an out of body experience, or a vision or something like that. You’re just trying to get in the relational part of your brain and pay attention to thoughts that could be God thoughts that you ought to kind of go with that flow.

Stephanie (21:20): Jesus says don’t worry, Holy Spirit will help you.

Marcus (21:25): Yes, and he said specifically, “Don’t throw out prophecy,” which, if you take it beyond that, he’s like, “Don’t forbid this,” he said, “Just evaluate it and test it.” And so that’s kind of the way I look at it, not that I think I’m getting prophetic words. But it would be in that category of a God message.

And so test it, don’t throw the whole baby out with the bathwater. And I think too many people throw the baby out with the bathwater because they’re afraid of being misled.

Stephanie (21:59): We are going to keep talking about that more. I was wondering if you could maybe linger on the tangential idea here of prayer and community. We’ve talked about as soon as you say anything about prophecy, that’s communal, as you know. You’re talking about, “Hey, I’ve been praying, I want to share with my community to get their opinion on it.” But then even greater than that, there’s just prayer that we do in community. Can you talk about that a little?

Marcus (22:25): Yeah, we’ve kind of focused a lot on my individual prayer life and what I sort of do in the prayer closet kind of idea. But a lot of what the Bible teaches about prayer is in a communal setting. It’s like gathering to pray so that we are collectively praying.

And we’re tempted to think that, “Well, that’s just more powerful because we’re putting more dynamite in there, because we’re adding more gunpowder to the dynamite mix, because we have more people doing it.”

That math doesn’t hold, because we’ve seen many times throughout history where millions of people were praying for the same thing and God still said no. That was not what God did. Just because you get a whole bunch of people together asking for something doesn’t give your prayer more power. God isn’t trying to do that.

He is trying to build a corporate relationship as well as an individual relationship in that he is God of the family and not just God of this son and that daughter. And so he wants the family as a family to gather. He wants the family to agree on what they should be petitioning for, to find unity on what they’re doing in their praise, unity on what they’re doing, what they’re grateful for, unity in what they’re asking for.

Paul even gives them a few things, “Pray for the peace of the larger city that you’re in, the country that you’re in, so that you can live a quiet life. Pray for your king and pray for the emperor and pray for the governors and pray for the people in authority.” And that’s whether you like them or not.

When Paul’s writing this, he’s actually writing about the emperor who is ultimately going to order his execution. He’s still saying pray for them because what we’re ultimately praying for is something that the whole community can agree on. So corporate prayer is an important element of building unity in the body of Christ.

Stephanie (24:33): Okay, thank you for that word. I think that we have lots more that we will talk about next episode and I’m excited for it. So next episode we’re starting our tactical approaches to prayer and we’re going to start with the brain science approach, if you’re looking at the PDF.

And I just wanted to say thank you to everybody who keeps us on the trail, however you partner with us, whether financially or in your prayers or in sharing with friends or volunteering. I’m so grateful for you all. And thank you. Yeah, just thank you. And don’t forget, you can download that free PDF and join us for the April conference.
Father, any final thoughts for this episode?

Marcus (25:20): You know, the brain science has helped me personally to kind of understand why I struggled with prayer for so long, because I was a very left-brained person and was very fear-bonded to God. And I say that all past tense, but it’s not all a past struggle, right?

It’s helped me to understand, there’s a fear bond that’s possible with God. I’ve got to look at my motivation. There’s a relational state that my brain can get in that makes prayer a whole lot easier. And just understanding those two things really was transformational in helping me kind of understand, first of all, why it was so hard to pray, and secondly, what I could do about it to try to make my times of prayer a little more intimate.

Stephanie (26:08): Amen. See you next week.