Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools

Inner Orientations. Sin, at its deepest and most hidden, is about disordered trust structures. Ask yourself this question: Who am I really trusting? Behavior effortlessly (and often destructively) flows from there.

One of my most frequent prayers is to simply try to get in touch with his prayers for me. I usually phrase it as a question: “Jesus if you were to walk in the room right now, what would you want to say to me?” Ask him. Be still and wait. In my experience, he’s eager to share his heart.

That’s where it started, but that wasn’t where it ended. For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.

Frederick Buechner summarizes: “For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind that keeps the whole show going, but that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives . . . It is not objective proof of God’s existe

The Hebrew yada is even used in the Old Testament as a euphemism for sex. “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived.”17 That sort of thing. That’s because knowledge, in the Hebrew understanding, was intimate. It was not memorized in a classroom but experienced in a relationship. Spiritual knowledge has to be inhabited, experienced, lived.

Jesus is applying the finished work of the cross to you. He’s lavishing you in the Father’s love, assuring you of your forgiveness, binding up your wounds, and breathing courage into your lungs. Intercession means all that.

Intercession takes biblical rumors and makes them real within us. Scripture teaches that God is a loving Father who is interested in the mundane, day-to-day of my existence, but Christ’s intercession makes that real to me.

Intercession, stated as simply as possible, brings forth the image of Jesus praying for us, individually by name. And as he does, he wedges us tightly between forgiveness and glory, enabling a deep inner rest sheltered by security, hope, and delight.

Our praying lives are incomplete without an understanding of the present praying life of Christ because prayer doesn’t begin with us; it begins with Jesus. His prayers always precede our prayers.