DAY 29 40 DAY PRAYER CHALLENGE—A NEW PRAYER Sing GOD a brand-new song! Earth and everyone in it, sing! Sing to GOD—worship GOD!–PSALM 96:1-2 The Message Batteson says that Spiritual growth is a puzzle. The key to spiritual growth is developing healthy and holy routines called spiritual disciplines. But once the routine becomes routine, we need to change the routine. Why? Because sacred routines become empty rituals if we do them out of left-brain memory instead of right-brain imagination. Routines are a necessary and important part of life. Most of us practice a morning ritual that includes showering, brushing teeth, and putting on deodorant. On behalf of family and friends, please continue practicing those routines. But here’s the catch-22: good routines become bad routines if we don’t change the routine. One of the great dangers we face spiritually is learning how and forgetting why. Call it famliarization. Call it habituation. Call it routinization. Call it whatever you want, but when we learn how and forget why, we start going through the motions spiritually. A few years ago, I came across a fascination study indication that we stop thinking about the lyrics of songs after singing them thirty times. I’m sure the numbers vary a bit from person to person, but the tendency is universal. And it has profound implications when it comes to worship. If we aren’t careful, we aren’t really worshiping God; we’re just lip-synching. In fact, the lyrics can get in the way of genuinely expressing to God our own thoughts, our own feelings. Can you imagine a marriage in which the only expression of love is through Hallmark cards? You never put your love into your own words; you just use someone else’s words. That’s how many of us worship God. We never go beyond the lyrics that someone else has written. Without lyrics on a screen, we’d have nothing to say, nothing to sing. Six times the psalmist tells us to sing a new song. Evidently God gets tired of old songs. He doesn’t wany you to worship Him with just your memory; He wants you to worship Him with your imagination as well. Love isn’t repetitive; love is creative. As love grows, you need new lyrics and new melodies. You need a new song to express new dimensions of love. If you express your love to your wife in the same way over and over again, she may stop believing you at some point. Why? Because it’s a mindless expression of an old feeling. RIGHT-BRAIN PRAYER Left-brain worship doesn’t cut it. Neither does left-brain prayer. Jesus warns us, “When you pray, don’t babble on and on as people of other religions do. They think their prayers are answered merely by repeating their words again and again. Don’t be like them, for your Father knows exactly what you need even before you ask him!” It’s easy to fall into a prayer rut. We repeat all the prayer clichés we know, followed by an amen! In the same way that we need to sing a new song, we need to pray a new prayer. We need a new vocabulary, a new methodology. We tend to think and act in patterned ways. Our tendency to do things the way we’ve always done them is called a heuristic bias. It is an amazingly complex cognitive process, but the result is mindlessness. We do things without thinking about them. If we aren’t careful, we pray without thinking—and that is just as destructive as thinking without praying. A few years ago, I preached about overcoming our heuristic bias, and someone in our congregation was compelled to respond with a prayer experiment. After your sermon, I decided to approach your challenge to thank God for the daily miracles we generally take for granted. Knowing the list of thanks could be infinitely long, I decided to focus only on the miracles I was receiving at the moment of my prayer. So I started praying. “Thank You, God,for aerobic respiration. Thank You for mitochondria, which right now are creating ATP. Thank You for ATP. Thank You for glycolysis. Thank You for pyruvate.” With a biology degree, I ended up having a lot of things on the list. By the time I got back to my place in Arlington, I was thanking God for each of the amino acids. “Thank You, God, for glycine. Thank You, for leucine and isoleucine and tryptophan.” I started thanking God for the fact that all organisms that form amino acids have the same chirality so that my body can reuse the nutrients and cellular building blocks of the food I break down. I found myself in absolute awe of His creation. I prayed while I took a walk outside, thanking Him for bones and ligaments and tendons. I also thanked Him that I somehow never took an anatomy course in college, because otherwise I would have felt compelled to thank Him for each bone by name, which would have definitely set me back even more in my quest to get through most of the miracles I was receiving at that moment. I spent the day praying without ceasing! I literally didn’t stop and just consciously kept listing things I was thankful for. I listened to music and thanked Him for my ear’s cochlea. While I made dinner, I thanked Him for xylem in the plants I was preparing. I spent a lot of time thanking Him for the molecular properties of water. I thanked Him for the bacteria in my colon that helps me digest food. I thanked Him for the genetic recombination that made developing and cultivating cotton plants possible for the jeans I was wearng. At around nine o’clock that night, I think God got amused with the futility of me trying to thank Him for everything. The Spirit finally hushed me, saying, “You can stop now.” Now that’s a right-brain prayer! God doesn’t want all of us to pray the same way. We pray in keeping with our personality. So one dimension of my own prayer life is humor. We burst out laughing in the middle of prayer all the time because I’ll bust out a joke. I know that sounds sacrilegious, but I love telling jokes. Why would I exclude God? And I can’t imagine a relationship with someone where humor wasn’t part of our conversational relationship. It would be downright boring. I’m not sure God laughs at all my jokes, but He’s the one who created us with a sense of humor. The next time you pray, try a new posture or a new time slot. If your typically verbalize your prayers, try writing them out. If you kneel while praying, try a prayer walk. Do something different. Get out of your regular routine, and pray a new prayer to the Lord. IF YOU WANT GOD TO DO SOMETHING NEW, YOU CANNOT KEEP DOING THE SAME OLD THING. All Things New - Elevation Worship w/ Lyrics https://youtube/watch?v=cysTVzoajM4
Posted on: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 09:47:40 +0000
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