12 Aug 2010
Shut up and Listen
Prayer means shutting up
I continue to be challenged and inspired by Ecclesiastes.
I am also really interested to be seeing the parallels between the Apostle Paul’s writing and this book. I have a sense that Paul read Ecclesiastes regularly as a source of inspiration for dealing with all the foibles of the early church.
Bruce Dutton shared at the Poatina morning tea this morning about Prayer. He is going through the book ‘Celebration of Discipline’ by Richard Foster. It’s a great book, but his central point about prayer was actually discovered by Solomon many hundreds of years ago.
Foster says:
In prayer, real prayer, we begin to think God’s thoughts after him: to desire the things he desires, to love the things he loves, to will the things he wills. Progressively, we are taught to see things from his point of view.
Solomon says (Eccl 5:1-2):
Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong.
Do not be quick with your mouth,
do not be hasty in your heart
to utter anything before God.
God is in heaven
and you are on earth,
so let your words be few.
Foster and Solomon both invite us to a different kind of prayer than perhaps we are used to: the Prayer of a listener rather than a talker.
How do you go at putting yourself aside to listen to God? I know I’ve got a lot to learn.
Foster also says:
To pray is to change. Prayer is the central avenue God uses to transform us. If we are unwilling to change, we will abandon prayer as a noticeable characteristic of our lives.
Challenging hey?
Soren Kierkegaard (as quoted by Foster) said:
A man prayed, and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realised that prayer is listening.
Perhaps its time for all of us to shut up a bit and listen?