Studying Romans 8, especially vv. 15 and 27, this passage from C.S. Lewis comes to mind.
From Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer:
I’ve just found in an old notebook a poem, with no author’s name attached…[it addresses] the haunting fear that there is no one listening, and that what we call prayer is soliloquy: someone talking to himself. This writer takes the bull by the horns and says in effect: ‘Very well, suppose it is,’ and gets a surprising result. here is the poem:
They tell me, Lord that when I seem
To be in speech with you,
since but one voice is heard, it’s all a dream,
One talker aping two.Sometimes it is, yet not as they Conceive it. Rather, I
Seek in myself the things I hoped to say,
But lo!, my wells are dry.Then, seeing me empty, you forsake
the listener’s role and through
My dumb lips breathe and into utterance wake
The thoughts I never knew…
Lewis comments,
But is he not right in thinking that prayer in its most perfect state is a soliloquy? If the Holy Spirit speaks in the man, then in prayer God speaks to God.
Lewis knows that he might be charged with something like Pantheism for such a statement. But this is not Pantheism:
In Pantheism God is all. But the whole point of creation surely is that He was not content to be all. He intends to be ‘all in all.’
(from Letter 13)
- Romans 8:15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”
- Romans 8:26 ¶ Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. 27 And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
It is ‘by the Spirit’ that ‘we cry “Abba, Father!”‘ It is the Spirit working in us to inspire our ‘groans.’ In this prayer God is speaking to God (the Spirit to the Father) through the agency of man and man is speaking to God (the Father) through the agency of the Spirit.
In Tony Sargent’s book, The Sacred Anointing, he severally refers to the practice of ‘reading the mind of the Spirit‘ in prayer. This is what the Father does (according to Rom. 8:27). And in some sense it is what we are to be doing in prayer as well. Anyone who has often led corporate prayer has a sense of this – you struggle with the Holy Spirit concerning what needs to be said in prayer for a given congregation at a given time. You do not simply want to be praying your own fleshly desires. You want to pray the will of God and the promises of God that are applicable to a given situation. You are striving that the Spirit would speak to the Father through you and that you would speak to the Father through the Spirit. That is what Sargent calls ‘unction’ in prayer, and we should all strive for it.
- 1 John 5:14 And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. 15 And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.
You get an inkling of this type of prayer in the book of Revelation. Eugene Peterson describes it:
At the end of the book he is still praying: ‘Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!’ (22:20). St. John listens to God, is silent before God, sings to God, asks questions of God. The listening and silence, the songs and questions are wonderfully in touch with reality, mixing the sights and sounds of Roman affairs with the sights and sounds of salvation – angels and markets and Caesars and Jesus…St. John lives on the boundary of the invisible world of the Holy Spirit and the visible world of Roman times. On that boundary he prays. The praying is a joining of realities, making a live connection between the place we find ourselves and the God who is finding us (The Contemplative Pastor, pp. 42-43).
Prayer, then, is making applications of the Scriptures to a given situation. It is reading the mind of the Spirit, revealed in Scripture, and applying it in a current context. It is the timeless Spirit speaking to the timeless Father concerning time. It is right now man, in his right now world, speaking the timeless Spirit’s timely word to the Father.
