36: Listening Prayer

[00:06] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail Podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God.

Episode 36. We’re talking about listening prayer today. Hello, my father.

[00:27] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. We are together in person today. This is great.

[00:31] Stephanie: Yes. I love seeing the smile on your face and the twinkle in your eye. You are fabulous.

[00:38] Marcus: This is fun.

[00:39] Stephanie: I have an icebreaker for us today.

[00:40] Marcus: Oh, okay.

[00:41] Stephanie: It’s really simple. Milk or dark chocolate?

[00:44] Marcus: Dark chocolate. Ooh, yeah. That didn’t take long, did it?

Because in my mind, you were asking, would I rather have a glass of milk or some dark chocolate? Now all of a sudden I realized, no, she meant milk chocolate or dark chocolate. That is a tougher question.

[00:58] Stephanie: My immediate response would be dark chocolate, but I thought you might waffle a little bit on it.

[01:02] Marcus: I actually do waffle on that. I would say for years it was milk chocolate. As I get older, dark is growing on me.

[01:11] Stephanie: Yes. I mean, if we’re talking milk or chocolate milk, chocolate milk. But, very good.

[01:19] Marcus: That’s pretty funny.

[01:20] Stephanie: Yay.

[01:20] Marcus: No, it is funny. For years, when I was in my twenties, I used to drink milk by the gallons per week. It was my drink of choice.

[01:29] Stephanie: Wow. You know, it’s funny. I’m not a milk drinker. I’ll drink milk in things, but if I ever have a glass just of milk, it’s probably with a really decadent cookie or something because I need the balance. But, yeah, I don’t.

[01:44] Marcus: Yeah, it’s kind of funny. I think, being an athlete, looking for something relatively healthy to drink, I can’t drink pop all the time. Milk was sort of the go-to thing.

[01:56] Stephanie: Keep those bones strong.

[01:57] Marcus:  I guess so.

[01:59] Stephanie: Awesome. I learn something new all the time.

So last week we talked about connecting with God and also some of my experience at the Asbury outpouring revival. People are calling it many things.

[02:16] Marcus: Well, we were just at Asbury campus this morning. It was really cool to kind of be in the environment and get a sense of what might have been happening there. It really has died down. There were no crowds left, but you could see the aftermath just in terms of the damage done to the campus.

[02:32] Stephanie: Oh, I know!  The grass shredded up by cars. People are carrying [the revival] off into other churches. They’re really prioritizing the youth right now and doing a great job of continuing the outpouring among the youth. It’s really lovely.

This week, I wanted us to continue that conversation by talking more about prayer, and specifically the practice of listening prayer. Before we even get into those specifics, could you talk about prayer in general?

This is really large, so I’m thinking that sometimes we memorize or meditate on prayer, sometimes we’re just talking casually to God in conversation, sometimes we’re meeting with another person or in a group for prayer support, prayer journaling. There are so many different ways that prayer is integral to our walk with God and with other people. I just thought maybe especially from the angle of connecting with God.

[03:47] Marcus: I would start, maybe a little bit different than some. I find that whatever attachment issues that I have tend to be reflected in my prayer life. For example, if I have dismissive attachment, prayer is often like pulling teeth. It’s just really hard to pray.

I was this way most of my life, and I know a lot of people like me for whom studying the Bible is easy. You can study the Bible all day long. Talking to God felt weird because it wasn’t really a conversation. You would say something and you weren’t sure if anything else was happening.

[04:27] Stephanie: Are my prayers bouncing off the ceiling?

[04:28] Marcus: Yes, it feels like I’ve got to come up with a longer list so that I can have a longer prayer time, because good people and good Christians have long prayer times. That’s kind of how it felt. And so for a lot of years, I just felt a total failure when it came to prayer and I think it was partly because that dismissiveness came out.

If you have distracted attachment, you can behave in a similar way. I’ll be perfectly honest, one of the things I noticed is a lot of people who had a reputation for being prayer warriors, in my opinion, were mostly monologues. They were the people who could launch on anything and talk all by themselves for an hour, so, of course, it was easy for them to pray for an hour because that’s how they communicated. You’re probably hearing a little bite in my voice. I thought, “That can’t be what God is after. What’s going on here?”

I just think that whatever struggles that we have in our regular relationships tend to get reflected to a certain extent in our walk with God as we try to figure out what this [prayer] looks like. What is this supposed to look like? And then as soon as you ask the question, “What is it supposed to look like?” You get this performance thing that gets into the picture. I know a lot of people who really beat themselves up over their prayer lives.

Having said all of that, I think one of the things we’re going to talk about is that there are different kinds of prayer for different occasions, not like a one size fits all thing. And depending on where we are with our attachment style and our maturity development, it will affect what our prayer life might look like.

[06:13] Stephanie: That’s a great segue. I have beside me a book by Dawn Whitestone, Strategic Business Prayer. One of my favorite parts of this book is a chart that goes through five levels of prayer. If you don’t have this book, I highly encourage you to pick it up. Dawn is an excellent writer. She blew my mind with some of the parallels she was making. God led her to the five levels.

[06:43] Marcus: Through listening prayer, she got an insight. Go figure. Let me say one thing before you go further. For those of you who don’t know the name Dawn Whitestone, Dawn is the director of the Deeper Walk School of Ministry. She is a licensed mental health professional and she has been teaching with Deeper Walk for a long time. This was one of the first books you helped edit for Deeper Walk several years ago. So back to you.

[07:07] Stephanie: I’m pretty sure, if I remember her story correctly, she was in a small group, and they were having prayer time, and somebody was praying. Then Dawn just heard God say, “That’s a level five prayer.” And she was like, “Level five? What are one, two, three, and four? I gotta know.”

[07:24] Marcus: That’s how I remember the story, too.

[07:27] Stephanie: So I’m just looking at the chart here:

• Level One are rote prayers, which would be like table and bedtime prayers.
• Level Two are specific requests to God. She has listed here Psalms or The Prayer of Jabez.
• Level Three, conversation, listening to God for myself.
• Level Four, conversation, listening to God for those I know.
• Level Five, conversation, listening to God for those he knows, which would be like interceding. God calling you to intercede for people. You don’t even know who they are, but you’re praying for them.

[08:04] Marcus: Yeah, it’s a really good list. As I’ve thought about it and I think about how maturity connects to praying, I’ve tended to look at it like this:

At the infant level, I’m listening to people pray. I’m watching them pray. It’s this idea of the mirror neurons in my brain seeing people at work, and, at this nonverbal level, I’m processing what it is to pray. For a lot of baby Christians, this is where they’re starting. They’re watching what’s going on and seeing what this prayer thing is all about, how it works. It really helps to have mentors in this area so you can see what it looks like.

[08:41] Stephanie: I think that’s one of the benefits of liturgy. If you’re in a liturgical service, is that like a guide?

[08:48] Marcus: Yes. There’s a sense of beginning to watch, but even in private prayer.  Like in my family, I got to watch my family pray so I had a sense of what that looked like.

Then as I go up to child level, that’s where I get into the rote prayers. “Repeat after me…”  Here’s “The Lord’s Prayer.” Here’s, “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.” I don’t know if that’s a good one. Let’s not traumatize the kid just before they go to sleep. But I think what we’re talking about is this sense of guiding somebody and saying, “Here’s what the next thing is, the prayer.”

Then maybe the older child level is now where you start making lists, here’s my list of things to pray for.

And then you start moving into the adult level where I’m having a conversational connection with God.

At the parent level, you’re passing that skill on.

The level five that Dawn originally had popped into her head was really the intercessory level, where God is telling you what to pray about. I’ve read about intercessors like this who don’t create prayer lists. They go to God in prayer and God basically tells them what to pray about.

Sometimes they’re praying about things they don’t even know what’s happening. It’s happening on the other side of the world, and God is saying, “I need somebody praying about this thing right here.” Then years later, they find out that exactly at that moment something happened on the other side of the world.

[10:16] Stephanie: I was going to say sometimes they’ll find out what they were praying for, sometimes they don’t, and sometimes it’s years down the line.

[10:22] Marcus: Exactly. I think it’s helpful to understand that there are different levels and some of it has to do with how far down the road we are in our own maturity development and our own attachment style. Also some of the holes that are in our other areas of our walk can pop up in our prayer life.

[10:44] Stephanie: Very good. So listening prayer specifically, what is it and what is it not?

[10:47] Marcus: I’ll be honest, I discovered listening prayer kind of in the deep end of the pool. We discovered it in the context of the healing of memories, which we’ll talk about in our next session.

I think, because of that, I knew that it happened, I knew that it worked, but I had no experience with it. I did not grow up with an expectation. Listening prayer and conversational prayer were never held up to me in my early Christian years as something to strive for or as an expectation.

Every now and then you’d hear somebody come in and say, “The Lord impressed upon me to do this,” or said, “The Lord told me that.” And I thought, “Who is this strange person and should I trust them? They sound strange.”

The first person that really made sense, really connected with me was actually Neil Anderson. I was taking people through The Steps to Freedom and realized that The Steps to Freedom was essentially an exercise in listening prayer.

I may be jumping too far ahead here, but in The Steps to Freedom, somebody will say a rote prayer and they’ll ask a question like, “Father, would you please bring to my mind anybody I need to forgive?” Then the exercise was, “Tell me the first thing that comes into your mind and let’s go from there.” Well I began to realize, that’s listening prayer. It’s where I ask God a question and then I pay attention to those thoughts that come into my mind. I realized I’ve been doing this with people for years and didn’t realize that was what conversational prayer is.

Then I heard a talk by Neil on a cassette tape where he talked about having the same revelation: that The Steps to Freedom was actually a listening prayer exercise. So he said, “What if I took the same approach to my regular prayer life?” So he would read a psalm and would start in a regular prayer time. Then he would take two spiral notebooks and say, “Lord, what do you want me to pray about first?” giving God this opportunity. Whatever thought comes to mind first, that’s what to pray about first and he would write it down in a notebook. Every now and then he would get random thoughts like, ”Don’t forget to take out the trash.” That’s what the second notebook was for. He’d write down those things.

[13:15] Stephanie: The second notebook was also for warfare stuff too, wasn’t it?

[13:19] Marcus: It was. He said it wasn’t uncommon for him to finish his prayer time and have his to do list done. But the other thing that was unexpected for him was what you were pointing out – the warfare things.

He began noticing the pattern of how Satan attacked his prayer life and the kind of statements that would pop into his head trying to sabotage, saying, “This is a waste of time. God’s never going to speak to you. Who do you think you are?” He started writing those down. He started seeing a pattern and realized, “Those thoughts are coming from the devil to sabotage this because he does not want me developing the kind of intimacy that can come out of this prayer time.”

Neil Anderson, according to his story, was the sort of person who found studying the Bible easy. Prayer was the hardest thing ever. All of a sudden he had this breakthrough that night as he started saying, “What if I ask God questions and pay attention to the thoughts in my head and interact with them?” And, especially then, putting that down in writing was very helpful. The very first time he did this, he had a 45 minutes prayer session when his longest ever was eight to ten minutes.

He realized, “This is what these people are doing. They’re engaging with God and there’s a two way street to this that I hadn’t seen before.” So that was really the story that tipped the scales for me and I went, “Okay, I think I get how this works now.” And that was the start of me beginning to practice listening prayer.

[14:55] Stephanie: That’s a really good transferable example. Could you speak into some of the pitfalls you’ve seen people fall into? What is listening prayer not? What are the “nots”?

[15:07] Marcus: First of all, when you’re doing listening prayer, one of the “nots” is, I don’t want to then go to somebody and say, “I have a word from the Lord for you.” That is something that comes way down the line as something that is unmissable.

I would never go with just a thought popped into my head, therefore, God has spoken.  You have to develop an awful lot of discernment before you get to be able to trust that. I’m not sure I’ve gotten to that level where I feel like this thing in my head is, “I know it’s God. I know it’s for you. You need to do something about that.” That’s a little bit on the edge.

I would share that sometimes I have been in counseling sessions where a thought popped in or an idea popped in and when I pursued that, it turned out to be exactly what they needed for the breakthrough they were looking for.

[16:03] Stephanie: But there’s a difference between being guided by God and pronouncing, “Thus saith the Lord.”

[16:09] Marcus: Exactly. We do have to be careful of that. I had a friend years ago who was told to divorce his wife by somebody in their church who had heard from God, and the wife was told to divorce him, and she did, on the basis of this word from somebody. You’ve got to be careful.

That’s why sometimes in prayer ministries and churches, what can happen at times is that those of us who are just starting into the conversational prayer world, as we’re just beginning to lean into this, if somebody comes in who looks like they’ve got this all figured out, every time they talk to God and pray, God speaks to them. You have to be careful, because sometimes those people can begin controlling the whole group, because everybody just defers to them out of the assumption that they’ve got the closest walk with God. But that can become very manipulative and controlling, too. So you have to be careful.

There are a lot of pitfalls you can fall into when it comes to this, so we talk about testing. How do you test if you’re going to practice listening prayer? There are three basic tests.

The first one is fruit of the Spirit. And of those, you start with love. And the idea is to ask what is coming into my mind and if I were to follow through on that, would it lead me in a more loving direction or a more selfish direction? I think by putting it in opposites like that, it helps. If I follow that, it would not be selfish, it would be a loving thing to do. It might be hard, but it would be loving.

The second thing I ask is, does it bring me greater joy or peace? Not in the sense of, is this a happy thought? But does it just settle down in my spirit as the right thing. A lot of times these thoughts, honestly, were corrections of my behavior. Like, you need to change what you’re doing here. Well, that’s not a happy thought per se, but there’s a sense of peace, like that’s absolutely right.

And then the third test is looking for scripture. Not everything can be backed up by scripture, but you’re looking to make sure it’s not contradictory to scripture. If I get a prompting that I should go talk to that person who’s pumping gas right now, you can’t find a Bible verse for that, but it’s not contrary to scripture.

So you’re looking at scripture, you’re looking for peace, you’re looking for, is that a more loving thing or a more selfish thing? Those are the basic tests that I use to get started.

[18:34] Stephanie: And then a fourth, once you’ve gone through those three, would be to share with somebody who would help you with your discernment.

[18:41] Marcus: And one of the reasons the Journey Group process that Amy Brown developed has people practicing listening prayer in a group setting is so they can bounce what they’re sensing off of other people and get some guidance so they’re not in this all alone. That can be very helpful.

[19:02] Stephanie: That’s good. Well, I had a thought and I kind of lost it, but it might come back. For listening prayer, what would be some best practices? We’ve covered testing, so on the actual practice.

[19:18] Marcus: So there are two different patterns that I use most frequently. One of them is the Immanuel journaling process that you find in the book, Joyful Journey (I always want to call it Joyful Journaling) Joyful Journey that Jim Wilder did with Anna Kang and the Loppnows.

That process has been really simple to remember for me, and it starts with interactive gratitude. What am I thankful for right now? And then ask Jesus, “How does that make you feel? What’s your response to that gratitude?” And then I journal as if God is speaking to me. So I’m not saying God is saying this, but it’s like when I’m trying to put myself on his side of the conversation.

And then I’ll write, “I see you…” [from God’s perspective]. “I see you sitting in your car or I see you sitting on the couch.” It doesn’t have to be this super intuitive “I see that struggle that’s going on inside your heart about this and that.” It’s like when God found Hagar, he said, “I see you sitting there next to the well out in the desert.”

Then the next is, “I hear you…” because there’s a psalm that talks about trust in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. What’s interesting is the Hebrew word there for desires is actually “requests.” It says, “He will give you the requests of your heart.” And what that meant to me was a desire is sort of like something I want deep down inside and I don’t know how to put it into words. I may be even afraid to tell anybody that’s what I really want, but God knows. He knows my deep desires are those deep requests, so sometimes saying “I hear you” helps me get when God looks at what I’m struggling with, what does he see that I’m after?

And then “I know how big this is…” is just sort of God’s validation statement. “I know how big that emotion is. I know how big this is for you.”

And then,  “I am happy to go through this with you. I’m happy you’re bringing it to me,” which is just a good reminder. God’s not saying, “ Really? Again?” He says, “You’re doing the right thing bringing this to me. This is good.”

And then you finish up with, “I am strong enough to do something about it.” And this is often where if you’re going to get some kind of guidance or insight, it tends to come about there.

[21:46] Stephanie: It struck me, as you were saying “happy to be with you”, I’m reminded of you also talking about the peace and joy in the test. Do I feel peace about this? And you can feel that even when you are being corrected.

I know I have felt this before. I can tell if Satan is accusing me by how I feel versus if God is convicting me of something, he’s happy to be with me in it. So I can feel that relational connection with him as, “That wasn’t so great,” or, “You should do this differently.” But I know that he’s with me in it.

[22:21] Marcus: Right. One of the very first times I remember being aware of this was when I was upset with your mom, one of the first times. We’re down in Texas and I’m on my way to the store and I’m just rehearsing in my mind all the reasons why I’m justified in being upset with her. All of a sudden this random thought, it’s kind of a surprising thought, (I have heard Karl Lehman say this about listening prayer: that as well as bringing love and peace and it being biblical, it’s often surprising.) This surprising thought just caught me up short and said, “Marcus, you’re just having a pity party.” And the way it was said, I almost laughed. It wasn’t a condemning thing, but it got my attention, called me up short, and within a couple of minutes had reframed the whole conversation in my head.

That’s what I mean. It was corrective, but it got my attention and it got me in a direction that I had a lot of peace about. This is a path that leads to the fruit of the Spirit. I think I said before, that’s Immanuel journaling.

The other type of listening prayer is the Neil Anderson approach. It is more of a “God, as I come to you today and I’m connected, what’s the first thing that we should talk about?”  It could be the earthquake that just happened in Syria and Turkey, I want you to pray for those people. Or sometimes it’s like there’s this tension going on between these two people at church, pray into that. Rather than me sitting down and, before I connect to God, making my list, I’m sort of making my list conversationally as we go through it together.

So those are the two main things I would lay out as patterns.

[24:14] Stephanie: I’m reminded of an exercise that we did in Dr. Seamand’s class in my day term class. We got with another person in the class and we were supposed to just to ourselves on our own piece of paper at first, ask Jesus, what does he want to tell you about yourself right now and then ask Jesus what he wants to tell me about my group partner? And then we would share with each other what Jesus wanted us to tell each other.

We did kind of a voting around the room and everybody felt like they did hear something and it felt truly from Jesus. Over half, I want to say, of the class raised their hands to say that it felt like the things that people were asked to pray for about themselves and the thing that the other person was asked to pray for about them matched up. It was just crazy. Mine was all capital’s REST. So my partner was like, “I’m sorry. I asked Jesus, and he was just… all caps, rest, rest, rest.”

[25:30] Marcus: Yes, I know. It’s kind of funny how that happens. Well, along that line, I was at Thrive doing an exercise like this. I’ve spent years telling people, “I’m a teacher, not a leader, and I’m just a teacher. I’m just a teacher.”

It was interesting because when I did the exercise for the first time ever, I felt like God was saying, “No, actually, you’re a leader who teaches.” And I’m like, wait, that is completely backwards.Are you sure? It was really the beginning of something for me, of having to actually deal with some healing related to the idea of leading.

So all those things factor together, and it also brings in this group dynamic again. One of the things we’re trying to do at Deeper Walk a little more often is to be intentional about gathering people in groups to pray about important decisions and pray about strategies and things like that.

[Listening prayer] can be very helpful in group settings, too. What you’re checking for in a group setting is to what extent. Not just are we getting the same thing, but to what extent are we getting complimentary things? Somebody might get one word and somebody else has something totally unrelated, but it puts a boundary on it, or it takes it a step further, or it clarifies something. And so, sometimes by the time you put them all together, you begin landing on a decision here we can all get on board with.

[26:57] Stephanie: Yes, good word!

We’re about out of time. Next week, we’re going to be going deeper into listening prayer and its role in healing. But for now, any final thoughts for this episode?

[27:09] Marcus: Well, again, I go back where I started, and that is if you find that you really struggle with prayer, there is a good chance that there are some attachment patterns you might want to be looking at for and ask, “Do I have this problem in any other relationships?”

And then also begin to pay attention to what are the thoughts that sabotage your prayer life every time you start to get serious about it, “Every time I start to sit down here, what are the thoughts? Is it just a barrage of distracting thoughts, or are they actually accusational thoughts?” I think if you begin to pay attention to those, write them down, get them out there, it can help to get past that initial hurdle that takes so many of us out quickly, so that we never get past the initial distracting and accusational thoughts.

[27:58] Stephanie: Good word. Thank you, Daddy, and thank you all for joining us on the trail today.

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