– Nathan Nettleton

Last Tuesday Margie, my wife, asked me to drop a quiche of at the
home of her friend Sue who had just had a baby. She gave me a quick
explanation of how to get there: “Down Malvern Road and just across
Burke Road you go over the bridge and it’s in there somewhere near the
old College.” That made sense to me, Margie and I first met one
another at that College.

Well I am very thankful that she also gave me the address and that I
had the map book in the car, because the place I had to deliver the
quiche to was actually off High Street about a kilometre and a half
away from the old College and on the opposite side of the main road.
Fortunately I learned along time ago that when it come to geography
and sense of direction, some people have it and some people don’t.
And Margie’s one of those who don’t. If you’re trying to understand
adolescent psychology, Margie’s a good person to ask. But if you’re
trying to work out how to get to Sue’s place, get the address and a
map book.

Prayer, real prayer, is something that takes us into unfamiliar
territory. And the deeper we journey into the experience of prayer,
into the experience of intimate communion with God the more
unfamiliar the territory becomes and the fewer and fewer people you
will find who’ve actually been there. And so the question arises: how
will we find our way? How do we negotiate this unfamiliar terrain
when we haven’t been there before?

Sure we could just hang around in our safety zones, going no further
than we’ve been before and making sure we never go over the crest of
the first rise so that we can still see where to run back to at the
first sign of anything scary. But I suspect that most of us aren’t
long satisfied with just doing that. I know I’m not. I often feel
inadequate about my prayer. I often feel a hunger to go further, to
connect with God more deeply, to journey into the mysteries of God
that lie beyond the end of my safety rope.

A quick show of hands. Who’s with me in that feeling? Who else
sometimes feels inadequate in their prayer and yearns to go a bit
deeper???

And who feels entirely satisfied with their prayer as it is and
doesn’t see any need for anything more???

I thought so. So how do we proceed? Well, what is the number one
means by which we learn things? How did you learn to talk? How did
you learn to cook?How did you learn to drive???

That’s right. You found someone who already knew a got them to teach
you. I wouldn’t have needed the address and the map book to get to
Sue’s place if Sue had been with me. She would have just shown me how
to get there.

Do you remember how our gospel reading started before. Jesus was
praying in a certain place and after he had finished, one of his
disciples said to him,”Lord, teach us to pray. John the Baptiser
taught his disciples. You teach us.” Sounds to me like we’ve got some
fellow travellers here. We are not the first ones to want to grow in
our prayer and not know how to proceed. And what did the disciples do
about it. They saw Jesus praying and said, “Teach us how to do that.”

There are countless books around on prayer and how to pray, and many
of them are very good. There are plenty of courses around on prayer
and how to pray, and many of them are very good too. But there are
some serious limitations to how much they can help you. Can you
imagine learning to drive a car from a book? Or by attending lectures
on driving? I’ve no doubt that it’s possible,but I don’t think
anyone who’s ever driven would recommend it as the preferred learning
method. Can someone have a go at identifying for us what it is
that makes learning from another driver so much better than trying to
learn from a book or a class???

That’s right, it is having someone watching exactly what you’re
doing and providing direct feedback. I’ll give you another example of
this. Margie and I both enjoy telemark skiing, but Margie had about
twelve season’s head start on me. But Margie was self taught, and I
went out and got lots of lessons from qualified instructors. I caught
up to her standard in about three seasons.

The difference was that I had someone who knew what to look for
watching me and telling me what I needed to do differently. And then
telling me again when I still didn’t quite get it right. And then
giving me a pat on the back when I got it right. I could read in a
book that I needed to angle my hip towards the slope, but the book
can’t watch me and tell me whether I’m angling it right.Margie’s
since gone and got lessons and overtaken me again.

Learning to pray is not that much different. You see, your
particular set of strengths and weaknesses is unique to you. You have
all sorts of idiosyncrasies that make up the unique human being that
you are. And so the ways you relate, the ways that you express
yourself to God, or anyone else for that matter, will be unique to
you. And the things that will cause you difficulties will not be
exactly the same as what causes anyone else difficulties.

When Margie and I wanted help to further develop some areas of
our relationship last year, we went to a specialist relationship
counsellor. Now we didn’t do that because we needed to seek out
expert advise on relationship theory. Margie’s a counselling
psychologist and I’m a pastor. Between us we have heaps of knowledge
and a library full of books on relationship skills.The problem for
us was not lack of knowledge. We had far more knowledge than we will
ever be able to put into practice. What we needed was someone
who would spend some time looking at the unique contours of our
relationship and make wise suggestions as to what bits of knowledge
we needed to put into practice right now. We might have eventually
stumbled across the right suggestions in a book, but we might not
have even recognised them when we did.But after a few sessions Tom
was usually able to put his finger on what was going on and then help
us to see for ourselves how we might address it.

If you want to learn how to pray, how to make real advances in the
depth and intimacy of your relationship with God, then I can’t
recommend highly enough that you do something similar. That you find
someone who has gone further on the journey than you, and who is a
person of wisdom and maturity, and most of all who will listen
carefully to you, taking the time to pick up the unique contours of
your spirituality and the subtle whisperings of the Spirit in
your soul.

If you can find such a person and entrust yourself to them, you need
to make an agreement to meet with them on a regular basis, once a
fortnight or once a month at least, so that they can do that
listening and help you to see what the ways forward are for you.
There are books full of generations worth of accumulated wisdom on
prayer, but you don’t need someone who has just read some books and
is full of pat answers and pious cliches. You need someone who will
be a probing listener and a wise guide.

There are some people around who are especially gifted in this, and
some who have done special training and do it professionally. In some
traditions they are called spiritual directors, in others soul
friends, in others spiritual mentors. I don’t much care what you call
them or whether they are professionals or not, if you want to journey
more deeply into prayer there is nothing I can recommend more highly.
John the Baptiser did it for his disciples. Jesus did it for his
disciples. You need someone who will do it for you. If you want to
know how to find one for you, come and ask me and I’ll help you find
someone.

Although there is nothing I can recommend more highly than that,
there are a couple of other things that this gospel reading points to
which I can also recommend. What is the first example we heard of
Jesus’ prayer guidance???

That’s right. The prayer we know as the Lord’s Prayer. “Pray like
this,” Jesus said. Now there are two ways we can take that, and I
think they are both right. The first is we can take it as a model
prayer, as an example of the sorts of things we should pray about and
ways to express them. I think that’s right. And although at one level
I agree with that piece on the front of the notice sheets about how
you can’t pray it until you live it, at another level I think it’s
bad advice. You need to pray it because you can’t live it yet. If you
don’t even notice the discrepancy, that’s hypocrisy, but if you do
you keep praying it in your desire that it will become true in you.
You keep praying your life until eventually you are living your
prayer.

The second way we can take Jesus’ guidance here, and I think this is
also right is as an endorsement of the use of well constructed set
prayers. The Lord’s Prayer is only one of many prepared prayers in
the Bible. The book of Psalms has another 150 of them and there are
various others scattered throughout the scriptures. Outside the
scriptures there are many other books available with collections of
really well written prayers. Those of you who lead worship here know
that I’ve got dozens of them and we often pray such prayers from them
here on Sundays.

Now the objection that is often raised to the use of set prayers is
that they can become just routine things that we say without
thinking, and that is undoubtedly true. They can. But that’s not the
whole story. You see, if you were to ask Luciano Pavarotti or Dame
Kiri Te Kawana whether singing scales can become just routine things
they do without thinking, they would certainly tell you “Yes”. But
they still sing scales. Regularly. Singing scales was where they
started to learn and now as the best singers in the world they
know that they still have to sing scales to stay at their peak.

Praying set prayers is a bit like singing scales. Even when they’re
not really expressing the fullness of your prayer, they are an
exercise that help keep you in shape for praying things that are more
specific and heartfelt. Now I’m not sure exactly how this works.
Maybe if we got a neurologist in here, they’d be able to explain it
for us. But it does.

You can see this if you get together with a group of elderly people
who are all in the advanced stages of senile dementia or Alzheimer’s
disease. You might have half a dozen people who can’t even remember
the names of their own children, but you start singing Amazing Grace
or praying the Lord’s Prayer and just like that the lights comeback
on and for a few moments they’re right with you and they know it as
well as you do.

If you want to learn to sing you start with scales. If you want to
learn to pray you can do worse than start by regularly praying the
Lord’s Prayer and the Psalms till they start to wear tracks into your
brain, because it is along those tracks that your deepest yearnings
will be able to find expression in spontaneous prayer. Without the
well worn tracks there probably won’t be much spontaneous prayer
either.

One final thing that I can recommend, and although it gets the most
space in our reading I’m going to give it the least here. The
recommendation is hang in there. Persevere. You don’t build your
relationship with God in one enthusiastic burst any more than you can
build a marriage by having an intense honeymoon and then just resting
on your laurels for the next ten years.

God is good and will neither ignore you nor give you what’s bad for
you anymore than you’d give a tiger snake to your kids when they
asked for a puppy.But just as you know that if you give children
exactly what they want exactly when they want it you just end up with
spoilt rotten kids, so too God will not spoil you. You are told
“search and you will find” because it is not always going to be
handed to you on a plate.

As in many other areas of life you will sometimes benefit more from
the actual searching than you will from the eventual finding.
Although as Abraham showed us, there is no reason why you shouldn’t
argue with God or seek to change God’s mind, more often than not it
is us who are changed in the course of praying and short cuts would
often mean being short changed.

These three recommendations are not unique to prayer as you have
probably noticed. They would hold good in just about anything that
you were feeling a bit inadequate in and wanting to get better at. As
most of you know, I’m a passable but fairly pedestrian guitar player.
I can strum along OK but I’m certainly no Tommy Emmanuel. I would
love to be able to finger pick instead of just strumming along, but I
can’t.

It’s not that I don’t know how to. I do know how to. I own several
books on it and I’ve read them. I know how it’s done but I can’t do
it unless I concentrate really hard and go really slowly. I can’t do
it because I have never got myself a teacher who would watch me and
guide me and hold me accountable. I can’t do it because I have never
worked away at the basic exercises and scales until they came
naturally. And I can’t do it because even when I have decided to
start with the exercises and scales I never persevered for more than
a few weeks.

Two years ago my praying was even more pedestrian than my guitar
playing, but I could no longer hide from the hunger. Today my praying
is a little better than my guitar playing and it is certainly
developing faster. The reasons are all indicated in this gospel
story. I’ll probably go to my grave a pedestrian guitar player, but I
hope that by the time my body gives the game away I’ll have journeyed
so much further into the life of communion with God that I’ll hardly
notice the transition.

If the hunger for God, the hunger for prayer, the hunger to lose
yourself in the mysteries of the cosmos is growling away inside of
you and you can’t fight it off much longer then come and talk with
me, because I too am looking for fellow travellers on the journey.

Nathan Nettleton
Pastor, South Yarra Community Baptist Church
Melbourne, Australia