After
sending out my "thought" last week from John
Powell's book, "He Touched Me - My Pilgrimage of Prayer," and
receiving the positive response I got back as a result, I thought I would send
out one more from the same book. This selection has to do with honest
"self-disclosure" with God in our times of prayer. I have found
what he says to be true to my own experience and have recommended it to others.
Therefore, I also commend it to you. Enjoy. "I hear Jesus say, "Without me you can do nothing. You can bear no fruit. I am the Vine and you are the branches. Cut off from me you are dead." I hear St. John say that only he who knows God can know the meaning of love. I hear St. Paul describe love as the highest and greatest gift of the Spirit. Wherever I have found love I have felt the presence of God; God at work in the minds and hearts and muscles of people.
My
experience of God has been working this transformation in me, too. Oh, I am
still a very selfish person. God is not finished with me yet. Others may not
think of me as a very effective lover, but they do not know the before and
after; they cannot read the motives of the heart. The process of divinization,
in which God makes us more and more into his image and likeness, is a slow and
gradual process. I am still a pilgrim. But I have been touched and
I am partially transformed. This is the basis of my hope. The God who has
touched me in the past will act again and again in my life. Over and over again
I will feel his finger and find him.
Where
has all this led me? Where has God, through all this, been leading me? I now
understand and approach prayer as communication in a relationship of love, a
speaking and listening in truth and in trust. Speaking to God honestly is the
beginning of prayer. It locates a person before God. I believe that
the primary "giving" of love is the giving of one's self through self-disclosure.
Without such self-disclosure there is not real giving, for it is only in that
moment when we are willing to put our true selves on the line, to be taken for
better or for worse, to be accepted or rejected, that true interpersonal
encounter begins. We do not begin to offer ourselves to others until we
offer ourselves in this way, for love demands presence, not presents. All my
"gifts" (presents) are a mere motion until I have given my true self
(presence) in honest self-revelation.
As
in all interpersonal relationships, so in the relationship with God. I do not
put myself into his hands or confront his freedom of choice to accept or reject
me, to love or loathe me, until I have told him who I really am. Only then can
I ask him: Will you have me? Will you let me be yours? Will you be mine?
Martin Luther's first law of success in prayer was: "Don't lie to
God!" In speaking to God in the dialogue of prayer, we must reveal
our true and naked selves. We must tell him the truth of our thoughts, desires,
and feelings, whatever they may be. They may not be what I would like
them to be, but they are not right or wrong, true or false. They are me.
I
am sure that this has benefited me in many other ways, but certainly it has
enabled to speak more honestly to my God. It has freed me from the lie of those
prefabricated pious cliches that are death to true conversational prayer.
I have told him where I really live -- in belief and unbelief. I have told him
of my weariness in answering his call. Of the emotional resentment I feel
at being a public utility, a servant to be used and taken for granted. I have
ventilated all my neurotic, throbbing emotions... I have been like Job of
the Old Testament, cursing the day he made me, and like the prophet Jeremiah,
accusing God of making not a prophet, but a fool of me. I have been a King
David singing of his mercy and forgiveness, which I have always needed along
the way of my pilgrimage.
There
is something so healing about "letting it all out" with God. The
psychiatrist Karl Jung defined neurosis in terms of an inner cleavage, a war
within, the existence of fraction-hood or inward division. With Paul we all
know that there is, "another law warring in my members." The
real problem is confronted when we come to the question of our willingness to
accept ourselves in this human condition of weakness. Will we be comfortable as
a fraction, a creature of ambiguity whose evil is always mixed somehow with
good and whose good is always somehow tainted with evil?
I
am sure that my comfort in this human condition depends for me on whether God
will accept me this way or not. I am worth only what I am worth in his
eyes. All the rest is charade. So, I have to put myself on the line the
way I am. Charades with God is wasted time. I have to place myself in the
posture of trusting his greatness and understanding. This is the essential
beginning of prayer."
Self-disclosure with God requires two things:
1st) It requires the assurance we will not be rejected for what we share. That is, we need to be assured of the Gospel doctrine of justification; that our acceptance is secured through another on our behalf. That God accepts us fully for Jesus sake, through faith in Him. Or to put it in theological terms, we must believe the message of the Gospel -- that our justification is not dependent upon our sanctification or performance, but just the opposite! If we do not believe this, then complete honesty with God and others is nearly impossible.
2nd) To be searingly
honest with God I must believe the biblical declaration that the God who
loves and accepts me in Jesus is all-knowing (Psalm 139:1-4). We must believe
that there is nothing hidden from Him, not even the secret things we alone know
about ourselves (Ecclesiastes 12:14). If we think we can hide something
from God, we will. It's not until we know He knows all that we are, that
we are freed to share what we truly feel and struggle with - that
mishmash of conflicting desires and compulsions Paul speaks of in Romans
7. In fact, believing that God knows all, even the secret things, makes
anything but complete openness and honesty and transparency and truthfulness
with God seem so utterly childish and foolish -- like the child who
naively thinks he's not fully exposed to the sight of others simply
because he covers his own eyes with his hands!
God's
omniscience actually beckons me to be completely truthful with him, because it
assures me he already knows everything I'm thinking, feeling, and even
repressing. It helps me realize that in prayer he simply wants to hear me
tell him what he already knows about me! It's part of healing that
neurotic cleavage and fraction-hood and bringing me (and you) to wholeness. And
Powell is right, it does open the door to become the true beginning of real prayer.
Then honest communication replaces the pious cliches we often use to mask the
truth of who we are and experience God loving even the darkest parts of us.
In
the Bonds of the Transforming Truth of the Gospel, Pastor Jeff
