"Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. . . . And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to Him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him" (Heb. 11:1, 6).*

N SPIRITUAL TERMS, THERE ARE ONLY TWO kinds of people: those to whom God is an intense reality and those to whom He is not. The difference is expressed in prayer.

We are told many things about prayer: "Prayer changes things." "Prayer doesn't change things; it changes us." "Handle with prayer." "When the going gets tough, the tough get praying." There are prayer bumper stickers, "praying hands" salt and pepper shakers, prayer cloths, prayer incense, 1-800 prayer lines. Our society seeks to fulfill its nutritional needs through junk food and its spiritual needs through "junk prayer" and psychobabble.

"I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6), Jesus said. What does the kind of prayer just described have to do with that kind of Person? Absolutely nothing!

Here's what Jesus said about prayer: "And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him" (Matt. 6:5-8).

Everything we need to know about prayer is in these words of Jesus.

• Jesus says, "When you pray." He doesn't say, "If you pray." Prayer is not elective in the Christian life.
• Jesus says, "Close the door." Prayer is private. It's between you and God, and nobody else. Hypocrites pray for show. Honest people seek out God in secret.
• Jesus says, "Pray to your Father." Prayer isn't talking to the wall or to some mysterious "other being." Jesus came to show us that His Father is our Father. You may have such rotten relationships with your own parents that you can't identify with what I am saying. I am sorry for that. But God is the parent none of us ever had. Even if you can't speak to your own parents, prayer opens up a real relationship with God.
• Jesus says, "Don't babble; ask." Slogans, clichés, repetition, poems-prayer is not a campaign speech to win God's election. When a child wants a cookie, he or she says, "I want a cookie." "Ask your Father," Jesus says. "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened" (Matt. 7:7, 8). This is prayer-a direct, simple, honest conversation with the one who can do something about the problem.

Prayer involves trust. Risk. Putting aside ourselves and going for it. What kills this trust in us? Probably a lot of things. One childhood day, we ask for love. And it's denied us for no reason. Parents may abuse us. Teachers may be strict and unfeeling. The pain that confronts us may be too intense, and we retreat into an emotional fortress. The standards may be too high for us to reach, and nobody gives us help or hope. Someone we love may betray us or be lost to us.

Just as big a blockage to prayer as the losses of loved ones and failures of our authority figures are the myths that we are told in the religious culture about our ability to talk to God. Here are a few:

Myth 1: Prayer connects only when we ask God for the right thing.
The truth is that God initiates prayer-we don't. This is evident in Scripture. God spoke directly to an idol-worshiping, nomadic sheik named Abraham, led him to a new land and established a relationship with him through faith (Gen. 12, 13). The Bible records that God spoke to Moses as a man speaks with his friend (Ex. 33:11). Jesus told His disciples, "No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you. You did not choose Me, but I chose you" (John 15:15, 16, NKJV). Jesus says, "Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me" (Rev. 3:20, NRSV).

Our prayer is not the first step to Jesus. It is Jesus who stirs us to pray. Our prayer lets Him into our needs and permits Him to share the bread of life with us.

Psychiatrist and author John White describes the importance of God-initiated prayer.

"Two facts necessarily follow. If you are His friend, He will share His thoughts and plans with you. If you are His partner, He will be concerned about your views on His plans and projects. Whatever else prayer may be, it is intended to be a sharing and a taking counsel with God on matters of importance to Him. God has called you to a celestial board meeting to deliberate with Him on matters of destiny."¹

Myth 2: God communicates only with good people.
If God talks only to well-scrubbed, clear-thinking individuals who keep the Ten Commandments, then we all are in real trouble. A lot of us got this perfectionist idea from the gold stars we were given as children when we said our Bible memory verses correctly or sang, "Oh, be careful, little eyes, what you see . . . Oh, be careful, little hands, what you do."

Consider this radical statement of Jesus to religious bootlickers: "You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of men, but God knows your hearts. What is highly valued among men is detestable in God's sight" (Luke 16:15). When the religious establishment criticized Jesus for eating with tax collectors and sinners, He replied, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners" (Matt. 9:12, 13).

What does this mean for prayer? It says that God loves desperate souls and that people in trouble have ready access to Him. It means that Jesus Christ identifies with our screwups and mistakes. The Bible tells us that Jesus sympathizes with our weaknesses and was "tempted in every way, just as we are-yet was without sin" (Heb. 4:15). That text concludes, "Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need" (verse 16).

When is your time of greatest need? When you're lonely, angry, hungry, tired, guilty, despairing, drunk, damaged . . . The Word of God says unequivocally that you can be confident in those moments to approach God through Jesus and receive His mercy and His grace to help you.

Myth 3: We have to know the right words to pray.
This hogwash is promoted by perfectionists who want to sell how-to books and keep you scared enough to listen to their "carrot and stick"
sermons.

A little more than a year ago I was called by a friend, an administrator who had been devastatingly and treacherously betrayed, threatening his good reputation and career. He was upset beyond words. I told him to read Psalm 109 before he went to sleep that night. This prayer of David reads, in part, as follows:

"O God, whom I praise, do not remain silent, for wicked and deceitful men have opened their mouths against me; they have spoken against me with lying tongues. . . .

They repay me evil for good, and hatred for my friendship.

Appoint an evil man to oppose him; let an accuser stand at his right hand. . . .

May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership.

May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.

May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes.

May a creditor seize all he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor. . . .

But you, O Sovereign Lord, deal well with me for your name's sake; out of the goodness of your love, deliver me.

For I am poor and needy, and my heart is wounded within me"
(Ps. 109:1-22).

You may ask why a prayer such as this is even in the Bible. It's there for two reasons. It shows us that we can pray about anything, even when we are angry. Second, David did the best thing he could do with his anger-he put the problem squarely in God's hands. My friend told me the next day that this prayer helped save his spiritual life by allowing him to bring his feelings to God.

It doesn't matter that the words weren't nice. Jesus taught that greeting-card formulas for prayer are worthless. He said, "When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him" (Matt. 6:7, 8, NRSV). The apostle Paul told the Romans this principle of prayer: "The Spirit," he said, "helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will" (Rom. 8:26, 27). God is so ready, willing, and able to hear and answer our prayers that He accepts the groans and sighs of an honest but desperate heart as prayer, and He has a plan for exactly the help that we need.

Myth 4: Be careful about what you ask God, because He may give it to you and you won't be able to handle it.

We sometimes succumb to this warning by what I call religious terrorists. It's a hellish lie about God. Our Father in heaven is not some Halloween witch playing trick or treat with us.

Jesus described God as a father who was wounded by an ungrateful son who took his inheritance early and squandered it all on sleazy sex and illicit substances. But when the son came home for a job, the father ran to him, welcomed him, forgave him, and, most incredible of all, threw a welcome-home party (Luke 15:11-32). Jesus said: "Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!" (Matt. 7:9-11, NRSV).

This is the God that Jesus Christ came to reveal. A Father who can't be compared to earthly parents, because in good times and bad, stress and failure, shame and rebellion, He just keeps on loving you, knowing that the only relationship that will mean anything in time and eternity is one based on loving response.

God's heart is great for us. It longs for us. He invites us to relationship-real, honest communion through prayer. No performance, no teaching, no tradition, no doctrine, no other commitment can substitute for a relationship with Christ.

The Empty Chair
I see the idea of relationship in a story told by Brennan Manning. There was an old man dying of cancer. The old man's daughter had asked Manning to come and pray with her father. When Manning arrived, he found the man lying in bed with his head propped up on two pillows, and there was an empty chair beside his bed. Manning assumed that the old fellow had been informed of his visit. "I guess you were expecting me," he said.

"No; who are you?"

"I'm the new associate at your church," Manning replied. "When I saw the empty chair, I figured you knew I was going to show up."

"Oh yeah, the chair," said the bedridden man. "Would you mind closing the door?"

Puzzled, Manning shut the door.

"I've never told anyone this, not even my daughter," said the man, "but all my life I have never known how to pray. I used to hear the pastor talk about prayer, but it always went right over my head. Finally I said to him one day in sheer frustration, 'I get nothing out of your sermons on prayer.'

"'Here,' says my pastor, reaching into the bottom drawer of his desk. 'Read this book by Hans Urs von Balthasar. He's a Swiss theologian. It's the best book on contemplative prayer in the twentieth century.'

"Well," said the man, "I took the book home and tried to read it. But in the first three pages I had to look up 12 words in the dictionary. I gave the book back to my pastor, thanked him, and under my breath whispered, 'for nothin'.'

"I abandoned any attempt at prayer," he continued, "until one day about four years ago, my best friend said to me, 'Joe, prayer is just a simple matter of having a conversation with Jesus. Here's what I suggest. Sit down on a chair, place an empty chair in front of you, and in faith see Jesus on the chair. It's not spooky, because He promised, "I'll be with you always" (Matt. 28:20). Then just speak to Him, and listen in the same way you're doing with me right now.'

"So I tried it, and I've liked it so much that I do it a couple of hours every day. I'm careful, though. If my daughter saw me talking to an empty chair, she'd either have a nervous breakdown or send me off to the funny farm."

Manning was deeply moved by the story and encouraged the old guy to continue on his prayer journey. Then he prayed with him and returned to the church.

Two nights later, the daughter called to tell Manning that her daddy had died that afternoon.

"Did he seem to die in peace?" he asked.

"Yes, when I left the house around 2:00, he called me over to his bedside, told me one of his corny jokes, and kissed me on the cheek. When I got back from the store an hour later, I found him dead. But there was something strange-in fact, beyond strange, kinda weird. Apparently just before Daddy died, he leaned over and rested his head on a chair beside his bed."²

Talking to Jesus as a friend. Putting your head in His lap. That's the stuff of relationship! That's prayer! That's knowing God!

* Unless otherwise indicated, all scriptures quoted in this article are taken from the New International Version.

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¹ John White, Daring to Draw Near (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1977), p. 17.
² Brennan Manning, Abba's Child (Colorado Springs, Colo.: NavPress, 1994), pp. 126-128.

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Kent A. Hansen is an attorney who lives in Corona, California.