Have any of you read the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer? I hadn't until this past week. He was a German pastor who spent nearly two years in a concentration camp during WWII before being executed in 1946.I'm not sure what initially possessed me to purchase Bonhoeffer's little book entitled Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible," but I have found it to be a wonderful collection of his thoughts on the Psalms. And in God's mysterious timing, the first couple of chapters have as their subject material the overlapping of the Lord's Prayer, (which the women of EPC are studying on Tuesdays - see two posts ago), with the prayers in the book of Psalms.
His first point is that the disciples were right in asking for instruction from Jesus on how to pray:
"In making this request, they confessed that they were not able to pray on their own, that they had to learn to pray. The phrase 'learning to pray' sounds strange to us. If the heart does not overflow and begin to pray by itself, we say it will never 'learn' to pray. But it is a dangerous error, surely very widespread among Christians, to think that the heart can pray by itself. For then we confuse wishes, hopes, sighs, laments, rejoicings - all of which the heart can do by itself - with prayer. And we confuse earth and heaven, man and God. Prayer does not mean simply to pour out one's heart. It means rather to find the way to God and to speak with him, whether the heart is full or empty. No man can do that by himself. For that he needs Jesus Christ."
And how shall we 'find the way to God?' As always, God Himself has provided the way:
"The child learns to speak because his father speaks to him. He learns the speech of his father. So we learn to speak to God because God has spoken to us and speaks to us. By means of the speech of the Father in heaven his children learn to speak with him. Repeating God's own words after him, we begin to pray to him. We ought to speak to God and he wants to hear us, not in the false and confused speech of our heart, but in the clear and pure speech which God has spoken to us in Jesus Christ. God's speech in Jesus Christ meets us in the Holy Scriptures. If we wish to pray with confidence and gladness, then the words of Holy Scripture will have to be the solid basis of our prayer. For here we know that Jesus Christ, the Word of God, teaches us to pray. The words which come from God become, then, the steps on which we find our way to God."
Oh let us take the posture of children in listening carefully to our Father's words, that we might have 'clear and pure speech' in our communion time with Him.
Thanks for this post Candy what perfect timing as I decided to re-open my prayer journal and sit with Jesus in our secret place once again. It's been so long and dry, the last entry I made was early December 2009.
ReplyDeleteEven with the clearing of my plate, no bible studies for the summer, I have not had any quiet time to sit with my Beloved Jesus and soak in His presence, gain from His wisdom or soften my heart from His touch. I don't know why I have been avoiding this time but this morning I made a promise to Him to come back, even if it is just to sit at His feet and gaze longingly into His lovely face. I long to be back on the road that leads to His calling at the beginning of each new day. I hope you don't mind, I copied this blog and posted it in my prayer journal as a reminder of God's perfect timing and His tender touch through a sister in Christ. Blessings DS