RSS<\/a><\/p>\nTopics Addressed in This Interview:<\/h2>\n
Matt Tully<\/em>
Paul, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast<\/em>.<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Thank you, Matt. It\u2019s great to be here.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
I think it\u2019s fair to say that prayer is one of those topics that most of us maybe feel a little bit conflicted about. On the one hand, we know that it\u2019s really important, foundationally important, for our lives as Christians. And maybe we\u2019ve even experienced seasons or moments of real vibrancy in our prayer life. We felt the Lord coming near to us in prayer, and we\u2019ve loved that, and yet I also think we can feel a sense of guilt or inadequacy or frustration when it comes to our prayer lives. So I guess I wonder first, to start us off, can you resonate with that kind of seemingly oxymoronic sense that we can have sometimes when it comes to prayer?<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Yeah. Even though I\u2019ve written a book on prayer and I\u2019ve done\u2014I don\u2019t know how many\u2014a hundred seminars on prayer\u2014<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
You\u2019re kind of the prayer guy.<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Yeah, yeah, I\u2019m kind of the prayer guy. I pray for my praying because it\u2019s really a function of my faith life, of my confidence that the unseen world has more weight than the seen world. And there\u2019s been no culture in the history of humanity more than ours that has flipped that. That sentence was too complicated. In other words, our world is just alien to faith.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
The unseen world is out of our mind in our society today.<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Yeah. Actually, there was some speculation, and I think even John Owen mentions this, but in the early church the word \u201cHoly Spirit\u201d\u2014there are a couple of references in Isaiah to the Holy Spirit, but it\u2019s really Jesus who begins to use the phrase \u201cHoly Spirit.\u201d But it\u2019s in the context of a world that\u2019s saturated with overt demons. And John Owen even makes a reference to this, that \u201choly\u201d is to differentiate. Because if someone were to say, There\u2019s a spirit in my closet<\/em>, most of us would think, and assuming he\u2019s not kooky, that would make us afraid.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
And we see in the New Testament that \u201cunclean spirits\u201d are everywhere. <\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
That\u2019s right. And so in this pre-modern world, which saw things better than our modern world, you had to differentiate. So Jesus is saying this is a Spirit that\u2019s good. But our world is so spirit-less. tf their world was filled with The dangers of evil, with ours it\u2019s just like God has disappeared.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
This materialism that surrounds us and that sort of pervades our secular culture, you think that\u2019s part of the reason that prayer can feel difficult for us at times. <\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Oh, yeah. If you just look at the history of civilizations, prayer is omnipresent in some form. It\u2019s done badly. It\u2019s always an attempt to control the gods (small \u201cg\u201d gods), but at least people are aware that the unseen world has weight. And there\u2019s nothing in our world, and in fact, there\u2019s this active suppression of that. It\u2019s a very active suppression. So there\u2019s the legal act of suppression, but that really gets into people\u2019s bones. For example, I tell the story in A Praying Life<\/em> about when I was doing a science experiment with my daughter Emily. She was in seventh grade. I took it over from my wife, who had accidentally thrown out the science experiment of my son the year before. It looked like a bag of trash. Anyway, so we were doing this stream project. We were analyzing bacterial levels of streams, and I said to Emily, Let\u2019s pray<\/em>. And so we prayed, and God helped us. So Emily said, Okay, dad, we have to log everything we did. What was the first thing we did?<\/em> And I said we prayed. And she said, Dad, I can\u2019t write that<\/em>. And of course now I\u2019m in dad fighting mode.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
I\u2019m going to teach her something here.<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Yeah. I\u2019m not going to give the ground on this. I said, Well, why not?<\/em> She said, They don\u2019t want that<\/em>. All her friends were Christian. We went to church every Sunday. She was in a Christian school. She was in this Christian bubble, and yet she had inhaled the spirit of the age at seventh<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
Yeah. What an awesome little microcosm of the world that we live in\u2014that mindset. As you said, you are the author of, and probably what people know you best for, your book A Praying Life<\/em>. It\u2019s this massive bestselling book that I think touches and responds to the sense of frustration that we can feel when it comes to our prayer lives. And you offer a real breath of fresh air. Take us back briefly to before you wrote that book. What was it in your own experience, your own heart, that made you think, I need to study this for myself more, and perhaps I need to even write something on this<\/em>?<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
The things that fed my prayer life are really, as I try to capture in the book on the J curve, where the idea that the \u201cJ\u201d is dying and rising with Christ, and it was that sense in Paul. I had immersed myself in the 1980s in justification by faith and had written a course on that that was really influential in the church, but I couldn\u2019t escape this pattern in Paul that he actually just didn\u2019t preach the gospel, but his life looked like the shape of it. And I begin to ask God to draw me into that. And he just drew me into a lot of suffering. And in that suffering, I learned to pray. I did not set out to study this. There\u2019s almost nothing in my life I set out to study. God kept drawing me into, what Paul calls in Philippians 2:10, a fellowship of sharing in his suffering. And that was my school of prayer. <\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
So prayer was less of this topic that you set out to think about because it was the right thing to do as a Christian, and it sounds like it was more of a necessity, given what God was putting you through. <\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Yeah. I developed the prayer cards, which a lot of people use and have been helpful, in one of the hardest years of my life when the suffering was so great that I was just frozen spiritually. I was filled with faith, but absolutely frozen. The only thing I could do is sit on the couch in the morning for twenty minutes and read Psalm 23. I call them these prompts from the Spirit. They\u2019re not at the level of the word of God, but I do think the Spirit, and I don\u2019t like using the phrase \u201cspeak\u201d because it can elevate our intuition. It could just be human intuition. You don\u2019t know. But this little thought, Put the word to work<\/em>, came to my mind and I thought, Well, how do I do that?<\/em> And I wrote out these prayer cards. I took a piece of paper (I didn\u2019t have any three by five cards) and cut it up and made my first three by five cards, and I still use them. I would write out a Scripture verse and a situation, and then just begin to pray them. <\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
In your experience talking to Christians about prayer and about their prayer lives, do you find that many Christians come to prayer to rediscover the importance of prayer in the midst of suffering like you did?<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Oh yeah. In A Praying Church<\/em> I talk about the praying Annas in the temple, and I have yet to meet Anna in the temple, or a Simeon in the temple that has not learned how to pray through suffering. I mean, it does help to have teaching and mentoring on that. It really, really does. But it\u2019s hard to learn how to pray if you think you\u2019re in control of your life. It helps to have kids.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
That\u2019ll teach you that quick.<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
That\u2019ll teach you that.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
I recently did a search on Amazon for books on prayer, and I saw that there were over 70,000 results. I\u2019m sure that\u2019s not a complete list in many ways. And it just got me thinking that many people have said many, many things about prayer\u2014both Christians, as we said, but as you were emphasizing earlier, non-Christians as well often value some kind of prayer. So if you had to boil down your core message\u2014the core message behind A Praying Life<\/em>; behind your ministry; when you help people with prayer; and even this new book, A Praying Church<\/em>; the core idea about prayer that you would want people to get\u2014what would you say that is?<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
I\u2019ll say it simply, and then I\u2019ll say it complicated. Here\u2019s the simple one: it\u2019s just what Jesus tells his disciples\u2014become like a little child. Don\u2019t overthink this. Tell God what\u2019s on your heart. Bring your heart as it is, messy, to God. Grace is for sinners. You qualify. Don\u2019t go fixed up. Just bring the real you to the real God.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
That\u2019s seemingly so simple and so obvious, and yet I\u2019m sure we all can feel that temptation to kind of fix ourselves up before we go to God. Why do we do that?<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
This is the more complicated answer. Partly, it\u2019s the human heart, but in the church, and it\u2019s particularly in the world of prayer, there is a Gnosticism that functions at the DNA level of the church. And I do mention this in a praying life, that spirituality is kind of on a hierarchy. You have to say it the right way, or your heart has to feel right. There\u2019s a lot of legalism that people bring to prayer, even in the feelings world. Like, My prayer life should feel good<\/em>. That\u2019s like saying my marriage should feel good. Well, I mean, that\u2019s all over the map. You know what I mean? <\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
Sometimes it does. <\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
A lot of times it does, but sometimes it doesn\u2019t. So our world is dominated by kind of a secularized pietism now. Pietism was very focused on how I\u2019m feeling in relationship to God. And so it searches in prayer for a kind of feeling. So that\u2019s what I mean. So it\u2019s a kind of a feeling legalism. And that\u2019s actually very Gnostic, where you\u2019re hunting for a particular emotion. Gnosticism tries to float above this world. <\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
There\u2019s a secret knowledge or experience that we want to attain somehow. <\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
That\u2019s right. And you\u2019re trying to escape your embodiment. And that\u2019s why becoming a little child is so important. Just go as you are to God. Don\u2019t try to be something you\u2019re not. And Gnosticism and one of its modern stepchildren, pietism, tries to create a new you to improve your praying, or hunt for a new you. It\u2019s a kind of hypocrisy.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
One of the most interesting, penetrating things that you say in A Praying Church<\/em>, your new book on corporate prayer, is you highlight how we often tend to relegate prayer to the world of feelings. And we even approach it almost with the mindset of it\u2019s a kind of personal therapy, rather than it is a real conversation with God. Can you unpack how that approach to prayer could impact even our motivation for praying with other people?<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Well, if it doesn\u2019t feel good, then we\u2019re not going to want to do it. And one of the most striking differences between praying with other people and just your own individual prayer life is that with other people, you have to love them in the act of prayer. Now, it really does help to have someone to be schooled in how to pray so they don\u2019t get stuck with what I call Aunt Edna\u2019s hip.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
We all know exactly what you\u2019re saying. <\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Yeah. Body parts. Although, as I\u2019m getting older I want to know from Aunt Edna, What doctor are you going to?<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
Do you have any recommendations?<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Any recommendations? So people measure their prayer meeting by the feeling of it. And there are some times that prayer meetings are amazing, just like your personal time, but a lot of time it\u2019s just work, like a lot of things like. How do I feel about my work? But if someone were to say, You know, I don\u2019t really feel good about my work today<\/em>. Actually, a lot of people are talking that way now. But in general in the normal world, if someone doesn\u2019t feel good about their work, they still have to work.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
It\u2019s almost kind of expected at times. You just know that work sometimes often feels like work. But you\u2019ve still got to do it. It\u2019s still good for you. <\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em> .
And the great thing is it\u2019s connected with getting a paycheck and things like that. So we bring this feeling, what Alasdair MacIntyre calls the \u201cemotivism.\u201d That\u2019s his word for it. I don\u2019t know what I call it in The J Curve<\/em> book. It\u2019s very strong in the world of prayer, that I should have a sense of God. Well, sometimes you do and sometimes you don\u2019t. Why are you looking inward when this is actually a moving outward. <\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
And even if you don\u2019t have this intimate, special, heightened sense of God, it doesn\u2019t mean the prayer was pointless or ineffective or not worth it.<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Emotions are the tail. And this is not a new idea; a lot of people have said this. Emotions follow the heart. So it\u2019s the bringing the heart to God, and then doing that in community together. <\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
As we\u2019ve said already, your newest book with Crossway is called A Praying Church<\/em>, and you\u2019re trying to help Christians not just pray individually and see the value of that but actually see the special importance, the special power, of praying together with other believers in many different contexts. But your assessment of the church\u2019s prayer life, the prayer that we do together in many different contexts, is not very good. You write, \u201cThe American church is functionally prayerless when it comes to corporate prayer.\u201d<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
And Barna backs me up on that. In a recent poll just maybe five years ago in a very extensive study, Barna found that 70 percent of Americans pray at least once in the previous three months. So that includes everybody. And so it is the most common experience. And the majority of those 70 percent are Christians. But of the people that have prayed at least once in the last three months, only 4 percent of them did it with another person. So I\u2019ve got Barna to back me up.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
It\u2019s not a big feature of our spiritual lives, generally. <\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Nor of church leadership. Barna. It was maybe twelve years ago that Barna did another research study where they took twelve areas of the church and asked pastors and Christian leaders to rank them in terms of importance. Prayer was at the very bottom. I think there was like 4 percent of pastors, or 5 percent, that put prayer as the first priority. So at every level of the church corporate prayer is a low priority. And what\u2019s striking is that corporate prayer had been one of the dominant features of the church in the 19th century.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
What would you say to somebody listening right now who says, Okay, I get where you\u2019re going with this. You really just want me to go to my church\u2019s prayer meeting. I\u2019ve been there before. It\u2019s so boring. It\u2019s so dry. Is this really what it\u2019s all about? Is this really what we\u2019re called to do is go to church prayer meetings?<\/em> How would you respond to that?<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Well, first of all, I know a lot of people will say, I don\u2019t even know where I would go to go to a prayer meeting<\/em>. One of the things I talk about is just from my years of being a participant and then a leader and a teacher within two different praying churches is that there are six things\u2014and I think this is even since I wrote the book\u2014that characterize a praying church. One of them is that there\u2019s a spirit of prayer within a church that gets community. People are quick to pray. It\u2019s happens in the hallways, praying with your wife in the morning (if you\u2019re married), or praying with a good friend. And what it does is it, and you don\u2019t do it for this reason, but there\u2019s this symbiotic loop going on between prayer and faith and love. It really creates a divine community. There\u2019s this awareness of the presence of Jesus in our community.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
When it comes to prayer with other Christians, and even prayer in the context of the local church, sometimes our mind can go right to formal times of prayer, whether it\u2019s a prayer meeting or prayer during the worship service. But there\u2019s also the spontaneous culture of prayer where prayer becomes almost the default reaction that we have to situations that come up. How do you think about the balance of emphasis between the two? How important are more formal, planned times of prayer with other Christians versus cultivating this sense of prayer, a prayerfulness, in our interactions with other believers?<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
You get a lovely symbiotic relationship between the two. I was at New Life Church from the beginning of 1973 and there for twenty-three years. Dad started this prayer meeting on Thursday morning after he\u2019d really been through some real suffering. This is my dad, Jack Miller. So he had a Thursday morning prayer meeting that went from seven in the morning until twelve, and he just opened up his house to pray and just invited people in the congregation to come in. And it was a lovely invitation. It wasn\u2019t like, You need to be here<\/em>. There\u2019s a macho streak that sometimes praying people have.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
Like, We\u2019re going to pray for ten hours straight all night long<\/em>. <\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Yeah, and I am not a fan of prayer walls, prayer lists. Let\u2019s pray in community. You\u2019re not creating a prayer machine. I see a lot of pastors trying to solve the problem of prayer by mobilizing the Annas in the temple. You don\u2019t need to mobilize the Annas in the temple. They\u2019re already praying. Every church has a couple, and they\u2019re really lovely and beautiful. And yeah, you grow them and you should honor them. They\u2019re your wealthy donors who are really making this church work. So he had this lovely prayer meeting that wasn\u2019t macho. He would invite people, Hey, come in on your way to work and we\u2019ll pray for you<\/em>. So there was a kind of a cadence. I don\u2019t think any staff members of our church stayed the whole time. They would come in, Dad would make them tea. <\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
It was like an open house almost. <\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
It was like an open house for prayer. It was just lovely. And that then encourages people to pray. And then Dad would model that when someone would say, Would you pray for me for that?<\/em> Dad would pray for them right then. It was partly because he wasn\u2019t organized like I was. <\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
You might as well do it right away. <\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Yeah, because dad would forget about it. So the one enhances the other. <\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
It\u2019s so funny how often\u2014and I think we\u2019ve all experienced this. Maybe you haven\u2019t, but most of us have experienced talking to somebody and the conversation is coming to an end and you say, Well, I\u2019ll definitely be sure to pray for that<\/em>. And it\u2019s like, Why don\u2019t I do that right now?<\/em> But it\u2019s almost that there’s this pressure. It feels too awkward or it feels like something easier just to do it later, even by yourself.<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
And what happens is usually you forget. So just to pray right then, and not to set this sort of high, weird, Gnostic spiritual bar. I mean small as spiritual, and just to pray then and keep it simple. I love to get husbands and wives praying together, and friends praying together. I love to mock with other guys, but a mocking culture becomes the sinew of how guys relate, and it kills the ability to just pray together because you feel weird. No one wants to be sort of seen as super spiritual. <\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
Right. True prayer requires a kind of sincerity and a transparency into how we\u2019re feeling and how we\u2019re doing that is hard when we\u2019re constantly ribbing each other. At one point in the book you describe the various contexts in which you pray with others. And you say something really incredible. You say, \u201cThe feel of prayer time with other Christians is resurrection.\u201d What do you mean by that?<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Well, that\u2019s really at the heart of prayer. And there has been this quiet revolution of rediscovering the Holy Spirit among Reformed scholars that began with Bavinck, who influenced Geerhardus Vos, who influenced Ridderbos and John Murray and Richard Gaffin, who just retired from Westminster. He\u2019s really the one who has articulated it with great clarity that particularly within Paul\u2019s corpus, but it\u2019s all through the New Testament, is that the work of the entire Christian life is resurrection. And why is that? It\u2019s because the entire Christian life is shaped by the Spirit of Jesus. Gaffin\u2019s recent book In the Fullness of Time<\/em> pulls together a lot of his thinking on that, and it\u2019s just breathtaking. Gaffin wrote his stuff later, but my dad discovered that the Spirit of Jesus is at the center of the church. And what it did for dad is it moved all the institutional pieces of the church\u2014the structures like budgets and worship and preaching and a lead pastor\u2014those are all good things, but what I saw is it moved them to the periphery, and it really moved the Spirit of Jesus to the center. And I was in a praying community for twenty years because of my father\u2019s rediscovery. It\u2019s how people in my heritage get filled with the Spirit\u2014we read books about the Spirit. But it really is true. I saw my dad change. His faith grew. The way Gaffin would put it, and my dad would not put it this way, but the way Gaffin would put it is that the gospel is not just Jesus for me. That\u2019s the core of the gospel\u2014the atonement, justification by faith\u2014but it\u2019s Jesus in me. What happened at the resurrection is continually happening in his body. And what is so critical, and this was my dad\u2019s gift to me, is when you look at Luke and Acts and the book of Ephesians, prayer is the conduit into the ministry of the Spirit. And my dad got that, and I saw its effect on him. So I don\u2019t think you can sustain a praying church unless you understand something of that.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
So I think compared to most of us, Paul, it would be fair to say that you have a robust prayer life. So you\u2019re consistently praying for an extended time with your wife each morning, with your daughter, with your coworkers as you get to work. And I think our reaction to seeing someone like you in that can be, Wow! He\u2019s really disciplined. That must have required a lot of work, a lot of intentional habit formation<\/em>. And yet you claim in this book that the most important thing that we need is not discipline but \u201ca learned desperation.\u201d That\u2019s the phrase that you use. I wonder if you can share a little bit more about that.<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
It\u2019s just like how life works. I\u2019ve done things without prayer, and they don\u2019t work real well. They don\u2019t last. And the things that I pray for last. I was a history major in college, and I like to study the past and see what happens. I\u2019m a manager. I like to manage things. I like things to go well. And I\u2019ve learned that if you make management central, you end up running over people. My gifts are in management and organization.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
So it\u2019s probably a temptation to then try to manage everything.<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Yeah. I think all of us want to lead with our gift, but it is a gift of the Spirit. They are Spiritual, capital S, Spiritual gifts from the Spirit. They\u2019re only alive in a life of prayer and love.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
Unpack a little bit more the \u201clearned desperation\u201d part, though. What do you mean by desperation? And then what\u2019s the learned component of that?<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
I find it best to tell people\u2019s stories. One of the stories that I continue in A Praying Church<\/em> that I started in A Praying Life<\/em> was our daughter, Kim, would pace upstairs in the early morning. And I\u2019ll try to make this story brief, but Jill and I would take turns yelling. I do like to tell people I was the assistant yeller.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
Is that because she was up so early?<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
She would get up and start pacing, and we didn\u2019t really know why. One morning I decided to go up and just pray with her. When I went upstairs and prayed with her, it was a typical, simple, Lord Jesus, would you quiet Kim\u2019s heart?<\/em> It was like a fifteen-second prayer. And at the end of that prayer, the only way I can say it is I knew something that I hadn\u2019t known at the beginning of the prayer, and that was that I\u2019d underestimated Kim\u2019s ability to grow and mature as a person, and to grow spiritually. I had put Kim in a box. She\u2019s got a lot of disabilities, and I hadn\u2019t really even thought about it at this time, but almost the entire church has done that with people with intellectual disabilities. So that was December of 2007. In March we moved, and I would go up once a week and pray with her. In March we moved, and her pacing stopped because we moved to a quieter street. The diesel trucks in the factory across the street from our old house had been waking her up and we hadn\u2019t put two and two together. And then I started having devotions with her. I\u2019m kind of following this what I call \u201cprompt,\u201d and I started having devotions with her that spring of 2008. And then I eventually started praying with her and sitting down with her and letting her pray. And her prayer life blossomed, and all this stuff came out of that. And that summer I also went to our pastor and said, I\u2019m going to stop teaching Sunday school because I have to teach Kim<\/em>. That\u2019s how I start all my books. Either in a small group or Sunday school I would teach a series. And so I stopped my writing. I went down in the basement of the church and with a couple other kids and friends of kids who had disabilities and taught them. And it ended up my wife joined me a year later, Jill, and she said, You know, I could write curriculum for this<\/em>. And she started writing curriculum. There are a lot of parts to this story, but it ended up launching a Bethesda ministry, we call it Bethesda, of writing curriculum for kids with intellectual disabilities. And hundreds of churches have now used that. That wasn\u2019t part of my plan. There was no plan in there. It was just obedience. There was a whole series of what I call the killing function of the Spirit that I entered into that Paul talks about in Colossians 3 and Romans 8. I was participating in the killing function of the Spirit. I was putting to death a narrow idea I had of Kim, putting to death efficiency in the morning, putting to death my writing. And as I went into the killing function of the Spirit, he brought life out of that. <\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
It\u2019s so clarifying, too, especially in our day and age when I think we often feel overwhelmed. We feel uncertain about the future and what we should be doing. We feel anxious about what we should be doing in our lives. You\u2019re testifying to a certain clarity power, a simplifying power, as we bathe our lives in prayer. <\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
I\u2019m a planner. I love to plan. I\u2019ve done far better in management by not spending as much time planning and more time praying. So in that story with Kim and with all those pieces together, it was really important for me to be repenting. When Jesus baptizes with fire, that\u2019s what I see. A praying community that\u2019s not obedient to Jesus will not endure in that prayer, or it\u2019ll just be boring. That\u2019s why at New Life we had elders getting up and repenting. It was a spiritual community, and capital S spiritual. The Spirit of Jesus wants to conform the body of Christ to the beauty of Jesus. <\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
I think sometimes one of the big hindrances for our prayer lives can be a sense that, ultimately, it doesn\u2019t make a big enough difference or it\u2019s not as quick of a fix for a situation we\u2019re in. And so we can kind of be thinking in our minds, I could either spend more time this morning trying to get that email written and think carefully about how I should word things to my boss or that person<\/em>. And the thought of then actually putting that aside for a bit and spending more time in prayer about the situation, it can just feel less productive. It can feel like it\u2019s a little bit more of a, I should do it, but I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s really going to actually help me with that<\/em>. How do you fight against the temptation to view prayer as a less effective, nice thing to do, but when it comes down to it, I\u2019ve got to fix this myself?<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
There is a tendency within pietism to sort of make prayer everything. You know what I mean? So you\u2019ve got to work your prayer.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
Prayer is not going to write that email for you. <\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Right. It\u2019s not going to write that email for me, and you need to be attentive to your boss, but no matter what I\u2019m doing\u2014I have a tax business on the side, and I have a couple of prayer cards on that\u2014I just pray for it. It needs help. I need help. So I guess it really gets back to unbelief, and I would just say, try it. But try it long enough. I was mentoring some of the staff in our church with prayer, and it was new to them. They were used to management and marketing. I mean, those dominate in the\u2014<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
In the pastoral world.<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
And it depends on the kind of world you\u2019re in, but in the big church world, they\u2019re very dominant. And one of the guys, maybe during the fourth or fifth week of our cohort, said, This really works<\/em>. And he\u2019d been hostile in the beginning. And I said to him, What the \u201cit\u201d is is God. He really is a thing<\/em>.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
And that\u2019s what prayer is ultimately about; it\u2019s about talking to God. <\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
I actually get nervous about people talking about the power of prayer or prayer works. Prayer is the conduit. It\u2019s God. It\u2019s that my God hears me when I call. I love in the Old Testament the rich language in the Psalms for prayer\u2014 Hear me when I cry; I lift up my voice to you; Where are you God? Are you deaf?<\/em> My wife talks to me that way. Why haven\u2019t you taken out the trash? This is the second week in a row<\/em>. It\u2019s real communication with a real person. <\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
It\u2019s so important to remember that. We can so easily slip into, again, viewing prayer as its own isolated thing, even detached from God himself.<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
And that\u2019s very strong in the prayer movement. <\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
You mentioned pastors a minute ago and the training that you\u2019ve done with pastors over the years in churches. I wonder if you could speak to the pastor listening right now who maybe, if he\u2019s being honest, knows he hasn\u2019t done a great job leading his church in prayer\u2014cultivating a community of prayer, giving opportunities for the church to pray together. What are two or three specific things that he could do\u2014next steps for him\u2014to start to change that in his church?<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
He should start praying. I would tell him to write out a little prayer card that says you want your church to become a praying church. I wouldn\u2019t do anything for a couple months. I would just slow down new things and just begin to pray every day, God, show me how to do this. I don\u2019t know how to do it<\/em>. So be like a little child. I tell pastors, Don\u2019t preach on prayer. I just want you to begin to pray. Stop all the planning. Slow your planning life down and to begin to ask God<\/em>. When I\u2019m working with pastors in small groups, I\u2019ll ask them how powerful is sexual temptation in your life. It\u2019s called confidential groups. And it\u2019s strong. How are you praying about that? And usually it\u2019s just zip. So there\u2019s something really powerful in their life that is a struggle for many of them, and yet they are functionally prayerless with it. Then, I\u2019ll switch to another topic. Do you have any difficult men and women in your church?<\/em> Often, there is a temptation for wealthy businessmen or women to be dominant because they\u2019re used to leading. Especially if they own their own business, they know how to do it, they\u2019re self-made people, and they often clash with pastors who don\u2019t have much managerial experience. They actually need the help of these guys, but a lot of these guys are just sort of quick and judgmental. And so how are you praying for these people? And there\u2019s very little response. And often these guys will drive pastors out of churches. So how are you beginning to pray for them?<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
So you would say that if a pastor would focus on his own prayer life, that eventually that\u2019s going to inevitably have a ripple effect on the church as a whole?<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Yeah. And then I would encourage them probably to just begin, depending on who you have in your staff, to get a prayer meeting started. In Luke 16 with Jesus teaching, start small, and let it grow. Just be careful of turning things into prayer shows and prayer machines. Just let this thing grow steadily. Develop your own confidence in God. Begin to pray with your staff. I generally suggest a separate meeting on prayer. If your primary way of praying is praying before or after a meeting, in a staff meeting, then the meeting eats up prayer. The value of having an hour or a half hour prayer meeting\u2014keep the size of the prayer meeting to your faith size. If you can pray for fifteen minutes well, then take a half hour for a staff prayer meeting, and then take maybe ten minutes to hear, What are you concerned about in your lives?<\/em> And then we then pray for ten minutes or fifteen minutes together. I even tell them to set a clock. It\u2019s okay with silence. Keep your prayers short. Don\u2019t overstretch your faith. Build your faith slowly. <\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
Yeah, that\u2019s so good. One final question for you, Paul. In your book you mention your dog.<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Tully.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
Tully. \u201cA very bad golden retriever\u201d I think is the phrase. And I just have to ask, as someone who shares the last name with your dog, Tully, where did you get that name?<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
My wife came up with it. I have no idea where she got it. And we had been using Hebrew names for like twenty years for our dogs. And I think we left the blessing of using Hebrew names.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
And everything went downhill from there.<\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
And everything went downhill.<\/p>\nMatt Tully<\/em>
Paul, thank you so much for helping all of us to think a little bit more clearly about this thing, prayer, that we’ve all experienced. It can sometimes feel so mundane to us, but as you said, we\u2019re really tapping into the power of the resurrection when we approach God in prayer, and all the more so when we do it with other Christians. Thank you so much. <\/p>\nPaul Miller<\/em>
Thank you.<\/p>\n
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