Grazing on God (Part 3)

Mother Teresa told Henri Nouwen to “spend one hour a day in adoration of the Lord and you’ll be all right.” Mother Teresa might say something different to you and me. So much depends on our temperament, our family and job demands, the state of our health, our age and level of maturity. At first ten or fifteen minutes may be all we can manage. Then perhaps we will be ready for an hour every day. It’s not important how much time we spend at first. The important thing is to make a beginning. God’s Spirit will let us know where to go from there.

Our reading should be toward relishing God, delighting in Him, gazing at His beauty, as David said  (Psalm 27:4). When we approach God in that way, it inclines us to want more of Him. “I have tasted Thee,” Augustine said, “and now I hunger for Thee.”

There’s no  need to worry about texts that we don’t understand. Some meanings will escape us. Everything difficult indicates something more than our hearts can yet embrace. As Jesus said to His disciples, “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear” (John 16:12). There’s much that we will never know, but some of the hard questions will be answered when we’re ready for them.

God can never be understood through the intellect. Insight arises from purity of heart—from love, humility, and a desire to obey. It’s the pure in heart who see God, Jesus said (Matthew 5:8). The more of God’s truth we know and want to obey, the more we know. As George MacDonald said, “The words of the Lord are seeds sown in our hearts by the sower. They have to fall into our hearts to grow. Meditation and prayer must water them and obedience keep them in the light. Thus they will bear fruit for the Lord’s gathering.”

Nor should we worry about our doubts. How could God possibly reveal Himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt?

Madeleine L’Engle said, “Those who believe they believe in God . . . without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.”

Uncertainty is the name of the game. The best thing is to take our questionings and doubts directly to God, as David often did. His psalms are filled with discomfort and disagreement with God’s ways. He fills page after page with confusion and disbelief. It’s good to do so. God can handle our hesitancy.

Sometimes we’re mentally dull or emotionally flat, weary, and tired. On such occasions it’s worthless to try to make ourselves think more deeply or respond more intensely. If the value of our times alone with God depends on our emotional state, we will always be troubled. We should never worry about how we feel. Even when our minds are confused or our hearts are cold, we can learn from our solitude. Don’t try to make your heart love God. Just give it to Him.

If we’re having a hard time with God, if we don’t yet trust His heart, we should read the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There we hear what Jesus said and did and what was said about Him. There we see Him making visible the invisible God. When Philip, Jesus’ disciple, asked to see God, Jesus replied, “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” (John 14:9).

The main use of the Gospels is to help us see the character of God made real, personal, and understandable in Jesus. What we see Jesus doing—caring, suffering, weeping, calling, seeking—is what God is doing and has been doing all along. If you can’t love God, try to see Him in Jesus. There He’s revealed as One who has no limits to His love; One to whom we can come with all our doubts, disappointments, and misjudgments; One “whom we can approach without fear and to whom we can submit ourselves without despair,” as Blaise Pascal said. In the Gospels we see that God is the only God worth having.

As we listen to God, we should answer. This is prayer—our response to the revelation and unfolding of God’s heart. “My God, Thy creature answers Thee,” said the French poet Mussett. Prayer, understood in that way, is an extension of our visits with God rather than something tacked on.

Our meetings with God are like a polite conversation with a friend. They’re not monologues in which one person does all the talking but dialogues in which we listen thoughtfully to one another’s self-disclosure and then respond.

One of my colleagues describes the process this way: If we’re reading a note from a loved one in which we’re praised, loved, appreciated, counseled, corrected, and helped in various ways and that individual is present in the room while we read, it’s only right that we should express thanks, reciprocate love, ask questions, and in other ways react to the message. It would be rude to do otherwise. This is prayer.

Around 1370 a book was published with the title The Cloud of Unknowing. It’s thought that the author was a spiritual director in a monastery, but we don’t know his name. Much of what he wrote is hard to understand, but when it comes to prayer he was profoundly simple. God, he said, can be known even through “the cloud of unknowing” by responding to Him with “just a little word . . . the shorter it is the better.”

If you don’t know where to start, pray David’s psalms. David’s life was characterized by prayer—“I am a man of prayer,” he said (Psalm 109:4). The translators supply “a man of,” but the text reads simply, “I am prayer.” Prayer was the essence of David’s life and his genius, as it is ours. We have this access to God; this intimacy with Him; this opportunity to receive all that the heart of God has stored up for us. It is the means by which we receive God’s gifts; the means by which everything is done. David teaches us to pray.

Prayer is worship. Our praying should be full of adoration, affection, and fondness for God—that He is who He is; that He created us in order to have someone on whom He could shower His love; that He stretched out His arms on the cross; that He intends, in the fullest sense, to make whole men and women out of us. In worship, as the old word worth-ship implies, we declare what we value the most. It is one of the best ways in the world to love God.

Prayer is the highest expression of our dependence on God. It is asking for what we want. We can ask for anything—even the most difficult things. “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God” (Philippians 4:6). Anything large enough to occupy our minds is large enough to hang a prayer on.

Prayer, however, by its nature is requesting. It is not insisting or clamoring. We can make no demands of God or deals with Him. Furthermore, we’re coming to a friend. Friends don’t make demands. They ask and then wait. We wait with patience and submission until God gives us what we request—or something more.

Prayer is asking for understanding. It is the means by which we comprehend what God is saying to us in His Word. The process by which we gain awareness of His mind is not natural, but supernatural: spiritual things are discerned spiritually (1 Corinthians 2:6–16). There is truth that can never be grasped by the human intellect. It cannot be discovered; it must be disclosed. Certainly we can understand the facts in the Bible apart from God’s help, but we can never plumb its depths, never fully appreciate “what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). We must pray and wait for truth to come honestly into our minds.

Prayer moves what we know from our heads to our hearts; it’s our hedge against hypocrisy, the way by which we begin to ring true. Our perceptions of truth are always ahead of our condition. Prayer brings us more into conformity; it bridges the gap between what we know and what we are.

Prayer focuses and unites our fragmented hearts. We have a thousand necessities. It’s impossible for us to purify them and simplify them and integrate them into one. David prayed: “Give me an undivided heart” (Psalm 86:11). He wanted to love God with his whole soul, but he couldn’t sustain the effort. Other interests and affections pulled him and divided him, so he asked God to guard his heart and unite its affections into one.

Psalm 90:14 says,

Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love,
that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.

Centering on God has to be done each morning as though it had never been done before. In that quiet place He comforts us, He instructs us, He listens to us, He prepares our hearts and strengthens us for the day. There we learn to love Him and worship Him again; we esteem His words and defer to Him once more; we get His fresh perspective on the problems and possibilities of our day.

Then we should take His presence with us all through the day—journeying, pausing, waiting, listening, recalling what He said to us in the morning. He is our teacher, our philosopher, our friend; our gentlest, kindest, most interesting companion.

In God’s presence there is satisfaction: His lush meadows are boundless; His still water runs deep. “There,” I say to myself “[I] will lie down in good grazing land, and there [I] will feed in a rich pasture” (Ezekiel 34:14).

Taken from Seeing God, ©2006 by David Roper. Used by permission of Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566 Grand Rapids, MI 49501. All rights reserved.