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Why Pray? and What is God Like?
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Month 1 classes
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Class 1: Why Pray? AND What is God Like?
Class 2: Application of Why Pray
Class 3: John 10 or 14 Meditation
Class 4: Listening Prayer
Class 5: Journaling
Class 6: Listening Prayer
Class 7: Worship Painting
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Teaching - Why Pray? and What is God LIke?
Q: What is God like? How does he interact with us?
Our response to this question will shape our entire Christian lives. How you see God dictates how you see yourself. I’m not saying that we make God into whoever we want him to be. I’m saying that your understanding of God’s character, including any misconceptions you have about him, will profoundly affect every aspect of your life—not just your prayer life. It affects what you believe about yourself. It affects how you interact with authority figures. It affects how you go about treating your friends and your enemies. It affects your dating relationships. It affects how you do homework. What you think is how you live. What you think about God, is the most important thought your ever going to have.
So, what is God like?
Q: This God we described in the first question, what does this God think about you?
Are you a sinner or a saint? Is he angry with you or delighted in you? Is he disappointed in your continual failings? Is he disillusioned with your progress in the Christian life? Is he frustrated by your lack of prayer, or Bible reading? Does he like you more when you do have your devotions or read your Bible? Are your prayers more effective when you’ve lived a holy life over the past week or month? How does God think of and interact with you?
Our answer to this question shifts our prayer life in one direction or the other. Either we run towards God when we sin or we run from him. Either prayer is an opportunity or it is a duty.
Q: If God is in control then why do we need to pray? If he already wants something to happen, then there is nothing we can do about it right? Are we trying to change God’s mind when we pray?
In these questions, we hear a naïve concept of not only prayer, but also our relationship with God. God does have a plan and he is active in our lives—which the question suggests; yet we are not passive participants in the story of salvation. God includes us in the unfolding of his plans. We are the agents through which God accomplishes his purposes. God, in his sovereignty, has chosen to limit himself to working through the prayers of his people. More than that, we are the redeemed people of God, the Bride of the Lamb. We are redeemed not simply as pawns in a cosmic chess match between Good and Evil; we are redeemed to be lovers of God. Prayer is our opportunity for relationship with the Divine.
First and foremost, prayer is about building relationship with our heavenly Father. It works as any relationship does… except that God is invisible (think of it like talking on a telephone). We pour out our hearts to him and then we wait for him to respond. We ask questions, he answers. He asks questions, we answer. Though his questions often have a different purpose than ours. When God asks us a question, it isn’t because he wants to know the answer. He wants us to know the answer. For example, when God asked Adam where he was in Genesis 3, it was so that Adam came to the realization he was hiding from God. Prayer, then, includes not only talking but also listening.
Let’s go back to the idea of God accomplishing his purposes through his people. Can you think of some events, aside from creation, in which God acted without being asked? I can think of God’s initiation of the relationship with Abraham… that’s about it. One could even lay a case from the Bible that the 1st coming of Christ was in response to the prayers of God’s people (see Luke 2). Every time we see God act on the people’s behalf in the Bible, it is in response to their asking. Why then do they need to ask? Because God wants relationship.
So, if God already has an idea in mind of what he wants for any given situation, how do we pray his will? We ask him. Our job is to pray what he tells us to pray. It’s almost like we are 6 years old again and shopping for our parent’s birthday—we have to ask him for money to buy him a gift. Absolutely everything in the Christian life originates with God. He is both the author and the finisher of our faith. So, we come into a situation, and the first thing we do is listen. We ask God what he’s doing and what he wants us to do. Then we pray back his words.
Once we know God’s will for a situation, it is our job to P.U.S.H.: pray until something happens. We don’t need to pray anything differently. We already know what he wants from us in this particular situation. We declare what the Lord has already said, reminding God of his promises to us, and we wait for him to do the rest.
“The Christian life is a cooperation with God’s grace. God will not do our part and we cannot do His part. If we do not do our part then God withholds some of the help and blessing He would have given us. …Some “trust” the sovereignty of God in a non-biblical way by “trusting” God to do the role that He has assigned to us. This is not trusting God, but is negligence and presumption. God has chosen to give us a dynamic role in determining some of the measure of the “quality of life” that we experience in the natural and in the Spirit. There are blessings that God has chosen to give, but only if His people rise up to ask for them (Isa 30:18-19; Ezek. 22:30; Mt. 17:21; Jas 4:2).”- (Bickle, Pursuing Spiritual Gifts: Faith that Works by Love)
Different types of prayer which use listening.
-Praying through Scripture
-Using the Bible as a basis for our prayers to God
-Lectio Divina
-Journaling
-Intercession
-Declaration of God's intentions over a situation
-Praying on behalf of someone else
-God’s answer to injustice is prayer.
-Healing Prayer
-Enforcing the victory of the cross over disease.
-Sometimes we need to do something in order to be healed (i.e. forgive), sometimes we simply need to be prayer for.
-Not all healing is immediate (in my experience, it usually takes 1 or 2 days)
Our response to this question will shape our entire Christian lives. How you see God dictates how you see yourself. I’m not saying that we make God into whoever we want him to be. I’m saying that your understanding of God’s character, including any misconceptions you have about him, will profoundly affect every aspect of your life—not just your prayer life. It affects what you believe about yourself. It affects how you interact with authority figures. It affects how you go about treating your friends and your enemies. It affects your dating relationships. It affects how you do homework. What you think is how you live. What you think about God, is the most important thought your ever going to have.
So, what is God like?
Q: This God we described in the first question, what does this God think about you?
Are you a sinner or a saint? Is he angry with you or delighted in you? Is he disappointed in your continual failings? Is he disillusioned with your progress in the Christian life? Is he frustrated by your lack of prayer, or Bible reading? Does he like you more when you do have your devotions or read your Bible? Are your prayers more effective when you’ve lived a holy life over the past week or month? How does God think of and interact with you?
Our answer to this question shifts our prayer life in one direction or the other. Either we run towards God when we sin or we run from him. Either prayer is an opportunity or it is a duty.
Q: If God is in control then why do we need to pray? If he already wants something to happen, then there is nothing we can do about it right? Are we trying to change God’s mind when we pray?
In these questions, we hear a naïve concept of not only prayer, but also our relationship with God. God does have a plan and he is active in our lives—which the question suggests; yet we are not passive participants in the story of salvation. God includes us in the unfolding of his plans. We are the agents through which God accomplishes his purposes. God, in his sovereignty, has chosen to limit himself to working through the prayers of his people. More than that, we are the redeemed people of God, the Bride of the Lamb. We are redeemed not simply as pawns in a cosmic chess match between Good and Evil; we are redeemed to be lovers of God. Prayer is our opportunity for relationship with the Divine.
First and foremost, prayer is about building relationship with our heavenly Father. It works as any relationship does… except that God is invisible (think of it like talking on a telephone). We pour out our hearts to him and then we wait for him to respond. We ask questions, he answers. He asks questions, we answer. Though his questions often have a different purpose than ours. When God asks us a question, it isn’t because he wants to know the answer. He wants us to know the answer. For example, when God asked Adam where he was in Genesis 3, it was so that Adam came to the realization he was hiding from God. Prayer, then, includes not only talking but also listening.
Let’s go back to the idea of God accomplishing his purposes through his people. Can you think of some events, aside from creation, in which God acted without being asked? I can think of God’s initiation of the relationship with Abraham… that’s about it. One could even lay a case from the Bible that the 1st coming of Christ was in response to the prayers of God’s people (see Luke 2). Every time we see God act on the people’s behalf in the Bible, it is in response to their asking. Why then do they need to ask? Because God wants relationship.
So, if God already has an idea in mind of what he wants for any given situation, how do we pray his will? We ask him. Our job is to pray what he tells us to pray. It’s almost like we are 6 years old again and shopping for our parent’s birthday—we have to ask him for money to buy him a gift. Absolutely everything in the Christian life originates with God. He is both the author and the finisher of our faith. So, we come into a situation, and the first thing we do is listen. We ask God what he’s doing and what he wants us to do. Then we pray back his words.
Once we know God’s will for a situation, it is our job to P.U.S.H.: pray until something happens. We don’t need to pray anything differently. We already know what he wants from us in this particular situation. We declare what the Lord has already said, reminding God of his promises to us, and we wait for him to do the rest.
“The Christian life is a cooperation with God’s grace. God will not do our part and we cannot do His part. If we do not do our part then God withholds some of the help and blessing He would have given us. …Some “trust” the sovereignty of God in a non-biblical way by “trusting” God to do the role that He has assigned to us. This is not trusting God, but is negligence and presumption. God has chosen to give us a dynamic role in determining some of the measure of the “quality of life” that we experience in the natural and in the Spirit. There are blessings that God has chosen to give, but only if His people rise up to ask for them (Isa 30:18-19; Ezek. 22:30; Mt. 17:21; Jas 4:2).”- (Bickle, Pursuing Spiritual Gifts: Faith that Works by Love)
Different types of prayer which use listening.
-Praying through Scripture
-Using the Bible as a basis for our prayers to God
-Lectio Divina
-Journaling
-Intercession
-Declaration of God's intentions over a situation
-Praying on behalf of someone else
-God’s answer to injustice is prayer.
-Healing Prayer
-Enforcing the victory of the cross over disease.
-Sometimes we need to do something in order to be healed (i.e. forgive), sometimes we simply need to be prayer for.
-Not all healing is immediate (in my experience, it usually takes 1 or 2 days)
Application - Why Pray? and What is God Like?
This class centers around the idea that you can hear God. Every Christian can hear the Lord speak in their life. This is not just for the super-spiritual or the prophets of the Bible; if you are a Christian, the Holy Spirit lives inside of you and is in constant communication with you… regardless of your attentiveness.
This concept is so foundational that we’re going spend the entire class talking about it. I need you to be convinced without a shadow of a doubt that this is what the Bible says. That doesn’t mean it must ‘feel’ true. The emotions will come later. I need you to believe the Bible actually says this. Otherwise, you will have a constant distrust of and frustation with what we’re doing for the entire year.
Q: How do you hear God?
This concept is so foundational that we’re going spend the entire class talking about it. I need you to be convinced without a shadow of a doubt that this is what the Bible says. That doesn’t mean it must ‘feel’ true. The emotions will come later. I need you to believe the Bible actually says this. Otherwise, you will have a constant distrust of and frustation with what we’re doing for the entire year.
Q: How do you hear God?
- People already hear God’s voice. Whether they recognize it or not is a different question.
- Gen 1: all creation responds to the voice of the Lord.
- Gen 2:19 Adam and Eve heard it in the midst of sin.
- Gen 7: All the animals responded to the Lord’s call
- 1 Chronicles 7:12-14 (the Lord commands insects)
- John 6:44 44"No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.
- John 10 (his sheep hear his voice 4 different times)
- they will not follow another.
- John 16:12-15 12"I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. 13But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. 14He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. 15All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you.
- 1 Sam 3. Young Samuel heard the voice but needed to learn how to recognize it.
- Heb 4:7 7Therefore God again set a certain day, calling it Today, when a long time later he spoke through David, as was said before:
"Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts."[a] - Direction--Isaiah 30:21 21 Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, "This is the way; walk in it."
- God desires a relationship with us.
- When God created Adam and Eve, he walked in the garden with them.
- The LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend. (Ex 33:11)
- God said to Israel “you will be my people and I will be your God” (Lev 26:12)
- Over and over we are called to seak God’s face, but God does not have a face (or any other part of a body). This langauge is to help us understand our relationship with him. When God hides his face from Israel, it is in anger. In the Priestly blessing (Numbers 6:22-27) we pray that God’s face would shine upon us. It’s about knowing the other person. It’s about intimacy.
- The great commandment is to love God with all our heart. This is God’s first priority in our life. You cannot love without relationship.
37 Jesus said to him, "You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” 38 This is the first and great commandment. (Mt. 22:37-38) - We love because God first loved us (1 John 4:19)
- We are children of God (1 John 3:1-3)
- Abraham was called God’s friend (James 2:23)
- God loves us in the same way that God loves God. The measure of the Father’s love (affection) for Jesus is the measure of His love for us. This is the ultimate statement of our worth. It gives every believer the right to view themselves as “God's favorite.” It is not difficult to believe that God loves perfected believers in heaven. The difficulty comes with believing that He has affection for weak people in this age. God loves us like God loves God.
9 As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide (live) in My love. (Jn. 15:9)
23 That the world may know that You...have loved them as You have loved Me. (Jn 17:23) - John 14-17 is all about relationship: our relationship with Jesus, our relationship with the Father, our relationship with the Holy Spirit.
- Rom 8:15. We have the Holy Spirit, through whom we cry “Daddy God”.
- Luke 15: you are God’s treasure.
- Ways we hear God speak to us.
- Scripture, scripture, scripture
- we must be aware that the Bible reveals God to us…
- The Holy Scriptures we believe are the primary way the Holy Spirit communicates with his people.
- …AND that the Bible does not contain God.
- 39You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, 40yet you refuse to come to me to have life. (John 5:39-40)
- If we are not meeting God in the Scriptures and being transformed by his voice into his likeness then something is wrong.
- We believe in both special and general revelation: Scripture and Creation
- Recognizing the voice of the Lord as we live out of our relationship with Him.
- Absolutely everything we believe God says to us during prayer is submitted to the revealed word of God found in the Scripture. Unlike Islam or Hinduism, we believe God will never contradict himself.
- Because of the subjective nature of personal revelation, ALL directive ‘words’ from either others or ourselves should be submitted to those in authority over us (family, pastors, elders) for discernment.
- We ‘hear’ through i) reading the Bible, ii) recognizing God’s voice in others, iii) personal prayer, iv) circumstances
- Community
- Primarily, community should confirm God’s working in your life, not point it out. We do not want to reject our own responsibility to hear the Lord for ourselves. God gave the gift of the Holy Spirit to every believer. Unlike the Old Testament, we do not need others to mediate between Lord and ourselves (other than the continued mediation of Christ).
- Doctrine: is like a fence that keeps us within agreed upon boundaries in Scripture.
- different denominations agree on different placements of the fence. (though some fences cannot be moved: e.g. the divinity of Christ, etc)
- Note: sometimes, from our perspective, it seems like God does not answer when we call to him.
- think of the laments throughout scripture.
- such an experience is the exception not the norm of the Christian life
Meditation - Why Pray? and What is God Like?
Biblical Meditation (John 10 and 14)
The last two classes have been about trying to give you an overview of this class and theologically convince you of God’s voice in your life.
Meditation is simply the art of thinking deeply. So, when we meditate on Scripture, we are going to reflect on, contemplate and think deeply about what the particular passage of the Bible is saying and what God is saying through it to us.
If you are struggling with God as being emotionally distant or angry or as anything other that what Jesus was like spend time in John 14. The Father should be just as attractive to our hearts as Jesus.
Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but is not a complete revelation of the nature of God. Absolutely it is true that God is transcendent and all-powerful. But he also has the affections of a Father. We loves us and desires relationship with us. He cares about you as an individual. You’re not a number, you’re his kid. We tremble before his power but we have confidence in his love for us.
If you want to cement into your emotions the fact of God’s voice in your life: John 10
You’re ability to hear God is not based on you but on you being one of God’s creations. He made you to hear his voice. You must now learn to recognize it.
The last two classes have been about trying to give you an overview of this class and theologically convince you of God’s voice in your life.
Meditation is simply the art of thinking deeply. So, when we meditate on Scripture, we are going to reflect on, contemplate and think deeply about what the particular passage of the Bible is saying and what God is saying through it to us.
If you are struggling with God as being emotionally distant or angry or as anything other that what Jesus was like spend time in John 14. The Father should be just as attractive to our hearts as Jesus.
Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but is not a complete revelation of the nature of God. Absolutely it is true that God is transcendent and all-powerful. But he also has the affections of a Father. We loves us and desires relationship with us. He cares about you as an individual. You’re not a number, you’re his kid. We tremble before his power but we have confidence in his love for us.
If you want to cement into your emotions the fact of God’s voice in your life: John 10
You’re ability to hear God is not based on you but on you being one of God’s creations. He made you to hear his voice. You must now learn to recognize it.
