A Dangerous Approach to Prayer
In the Vineyard, we deeply value hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit for ourselves — it’s even one of our core values.
We’re not about blindly following the “anointed man of God”, we’re committed to empowering everyone to hear for themselves and to testing what we hear. We trust what other people share when they prove credible, but we still always test what they say. We do not blindly accept prophecy, prediction, and critique without seeking the wisdom of Jesus for ourselves. To properly discern what God is saying to us, it’s of critical importance that we learn to engage with disciplines like meditation on the word, prayer, silence, solitude, and a plethora of other ways people have been hearing from God for centuries. We could sum these practices up under the umbrella of “listening prayer”.
Real listening prayer is the most revolutionary and countercultural thing a modern Christian could ever do. It’s dangerous because it challenges the status quo in every way just like Jesus did. In order to enter into this kind of listening, we need to do become aware of some obstacles to right spiritual hearing.
Beware the false belief that the world is bifurcated into sacred and secular!
One third of the New Testament was written to refute this wrong teaching. Unfortunately, the church doesn’t often discuss some of these obstacles for that very reason. Sometimes we mistakenly believe these concepts come out of a “secular” context when the truth is, we’re making a mistake by not considering them, especially because they can have a drastic effect on how accurately we hear the Holy Spirit.
Confirmation Bias
The people around Jesus were always given space to think openly about theological and ecclesiological concepts. He was always asking them things like “who do you say that I am?” (the beginning of all theological thought). Jesus listened for their answers, was patient with the ones that were a little off base, and cheered the ones that were accurate (Matthew 16).
That said, confirmation bias is a real thing. We can define confirmation bias this way; it is the psychological and sociological idea that we tend to accept information unquestionably when it reinforces some predisposition we already hold to. In other words, if some idea seems to agree with what I think is right, I’ll probably think it’s true without much question. My personal opinion is that the Church is rife with this kind of thinking right now. Many Christians tend to have strong opinions and convictions. And I get it — we want to stick to those convictions! However, we must recognize that some of those convictions are cultural, not biblical, and should not be defended as such.
Dignity, integrity, and honesty need to be at the center of our discernment process. We must be on our guard against confirmation bias in all of our circles. We can’t afford to sacrifice love on the altar of “being right”. To combat this, we make it a practice to test (question) the things that sound good and right to you. Not in order to become a skeptical person, but to always be thinking critically about bible teaching and prophecy (or what claims to be), even when it’s coming from someone we like to listen to. ALL teaching must fall in line with Christ. This is exactly what Paul means in 1 Thessalonians 5:21 when he says, “but test everything; hold fast what is good.” Don’t forget to test the things that tickle your ears along with the things you want to resist!
Echo Chambers
Have you ever noticed that the more interested you are in something you see on Facebook or YouTube, the more of it you see? The more of something you click on, the more of that thing they show you. That’s because those platforms are specially engineered to serve as your own personal echo chamber. When you shout one of your ideas or opinions into the proverbial chamber, what comes back to your ears (and eyes, in this case) is more of the same.
Whether you’re right or left, liberal or conservative, woke or waging your own personal war on political correctness, you’re not being supplied with a diversity of opinions or outlooks when you take to social media. When we take part in these echo chamber-playgrounds, we only get back more of what we already believe.
Your facebook feed becomes what you want to see, otherwise they know you wouldn’t come back. Remember, Jesus doesn’t endorse the right or the left. He maintains the politics and the culture of the kingdom that can’t ever be found completely in tact in manmade ideologies. If we’re not careful, we end up on the hamster wheel of only seeing things one way with no hope of getting off.
It takes hard work to hear clearly!
This month we’ve had some excellent talks on Sunday mornings from John Richter and Josh Jones on this subject of hearing the voice of God. God is relational. Everything you need to know about him is on display in the person of Jesus. Getting God’s perspective is like getting someone’s perspective that you know personally. It’s dialogue, but even more importantly, it’s listening. That’s why this conversation about listening as an element of discernment “listening” prayer.
Listening to teachers and prophets can be great. I’ve learned so much from taking in the diverse perspectives of other people. However, I’ve learned that taking time to hear Jesus for myself, to pursue friendship with him, must take precedence over any voice I’m listening to — even a trusted one. We often claim to believe that God wants to speak to us. I would posit that if we truly believed this, you and I would spend way more time waiting to hear his voice than we do flitting from screen to screen searching for the next “great revelation” from someone halfway across the globe we’ve never met.
Doing this kind of discernment is countercultural because it doesn’t sell. Modern American Evangelicalism is, in many cases, built on a sturdy foundation of what you could think of as a cost-benefit analysis of what is “safe” to believe. It’s a self-preservation mindset. It allows us to produce and sell what could easily be classified as “Christian self-help”. I don’t know about you, but I gravitate toward believing what is safe unless I’m keeping careful watch. But Jesus isn’t safe. The religious elite put up pretentious boundaries to keep their lives “pure and holy”, but Jesus challenges the status quo. His actions provoke religious people and he hangs out with prostitutes and tax collectors instead (Matthew 21, Mark 11, etc).
Getting wisdom by highly valuing the voice of God is “dangerous” in the sense that it might decentralize what you think about God. I found out that when I truly started engaging in contemplative prayer, it did not confirm all the things I already liked to think about God and life in general.
The more I pursue the wisdom of God in my personal spiritual discipline, the more he surprises me by how he challenges my perceptions of things instead of reinforcing them. I’m surprised every time I hear something from God in my times of listening prayer that offends my sensibilities and then find evidence of that thing in the scriptures.
I believe that we are headed for a season of dynamic kingdom impact in our communities, but not the way many Christians think of revival. Jesus wants committed disciples, not superficial “converts”. For converts, the work is done once they’ve “prayed the prayer”. Disciples participate in spiritual discipline that leads to formation and deep relationship that lasts a lifetime. The work is only beginning when they commit to Jesus. We can only make disciples by being formed ourselves! We’re called to make disciples, not converts.
Consider this an invitation to take up the journey of slowing down, “testing all things”, and hearing God for ourselves as we discern the true, unvarnished Jesus in a time when so many seek to apply their own topcoat to an otherwise pure and perfect way of being. We’ll never arrive, but we can always draw nearer.
The Church is Flying Upside Down
“The whole world is watching!”
The chant rose up as a tampered-with jury and a geriatric judge born just thirty years after the Civil War presided over the trial of the “Chicago 7” — a band of organizers and protestors who were in the dock for their involvement in the violence outside the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 1968.
The crowd’s chant strikes a chord with me. The decisions you and I make about what we listen to, what we read, and how we respond to those things have inescapable consequences that can change the course of history one one-hundredth of a degree at a time. After a while that becomes a significant shift. I often buy the lie that my everyday life is insignificant in the larger scheme of things. However, the truth I’ve come to experience in Christ is that my actions bear much more weight than I realized before. The whole world is watching you and I as we call ourselves “Jesus people” and act on his behalf. As the globe spins faster, Christianity as you and I know it is on trial in front of the whole world whether we like it or not.
The function of discernment as a biblical value is to keep one following the footsteps of Christ. It is my strong conviction that our community can pioneer an ancient-but-new, healthy approach to discernment as an example to the corners of the body of Christ we influence. It does not serve to keep us in bounds of any particular sect of the church. I don’t write to you in order to be sure our behavior remains in line with the philosophy of ministry of the Vineyard. Discernment serves a greater purpose — to ensure that we remain followers of The Way, adherents to the beauty of Christ and the will of his Father. As we seek wisdom by the Holy Spirit, the by-product is a closer followership of that Way. A lifestyle and an ethic emerge that truly sanctifies our whole person; heart, mind, soul, and strength, to love God and to love neighbor (enemy) as self. Consider Proverbs 22:5;
“Thorns and snares are in the way of the crooked; whoever guards his soul will keep far from them.”
Proverbs 22:5 ESV
The word “crooked” in this case means one living under the false pretense of piety. Let’s be clear — the one who thinks themselves to be the standard bearer of rightness is the crooked one. Thorns and snares are in their way. Guarding your soul is akin to “getting wisdom” and “insight” according to Proverbs 4. Quite a few Christians are caught in the act of going the way of the crooked. Folks are taking advice from prophets and teachers who are misguided in their own judgement. At the Vineyard, we’re not in the practice of listing them by name, but what I will say is this; as I have adopted the practice of carefully seeking wisdom before engaging with teaching, writing, prophecy, sermons, podcasts, books, etcetera — I have found a great many teachings which used to tickle my ears now cause me to cringe.
In American Christianity, consumerism has met Christendom in a dangerous concoction of devil may care, overzealous ‘content creation’ and a desire to enforce the kingdom of Heaven rather than embody it — charismatic evangelicals certainly not exempt. I mean to say, it is impossible to engage in the true kind of discernment while clicking and scrolling from one 30 second clip to another on Facebook and YouTube, slave to the algorithm proven to push people deeper and deeper into sensationalism. You may never have thought of it this way, but all that clicking and scrolling is a spiritual practice — although, not a healthy one, and not one becoming of Jesus people. Is it a daily practice of yours? Are you being formed more by Facebook, or St. Francis? The Psalms and Proverbs, or Parler?
Discernment requires an open mind. A mind that is not so wide open that nothing ever sticks or that everything passes right through, but a mind that is just so open, God can surprise you with what, who, and how he wants you to hear. That takes vigilance. It is not a destination we arrive at, but a journey that will last our entire lives.
The opening chapter of one of my favorite books, “The Divine Conspiracy” by Dallas Willard, begins with a parable of a jet pilot. The pilot, while practicing high speed maneuvers in the dark, turned the controls for what she believed to be a steep ascent and flew the plane straight into the ground, destroying the plane and killing her. She was unaware that she’d been flying upside down. Willard writes,
“This is a parable of human existence in our own times [...] most of us as individuals and world society as a whole, live at high-speed and often with no clue to whether we are flying upside down or right side up.”
Over the next several weeks I want to write about something I believe is evidently most lacking in the American church today: discernment. Simply put, the church is flying upside down and dangerously close to flying the jet straight into the ground. It would be arrogant for you and I to assume we’re exempt from this phenomenon, so we must be on our guard. For that reason, I’ll be writing about discernment as a value, a guiding philosophy, and a spiritual gift. It’s up to people like you and I — normal people — to commit ourselves to the Proverbs 4 way. Discernment is what it means to get wisdom and insight. They are our “crown” and our “graceful garland”.
Throughout this series of essays I will address wisdom, understanding, and discernment interchangeably, as a great many of the passages from scripture I’ve examined seem to view them as essentially one in the same. Getting God’s wisdom is a quest we’ll never complete. At the same time it’s critical we relentlessly pursue it.
I’m challenging myself to slow down in light of what’s going on around me. I’m striving to slow down my news intake, my categorical trust of whatever preacher might grace my social media feed, my urge to react, my yearning to complain. I want to challenge you to consider the same over the course of the coming weeks. Lent is around the corner — a great opportunity to look inward. Going after insight has been one of the most defining and revealing experiences for me and I pray it always will be. I hope you find it beginning to enrich your life even more than it already has so far as we take time together for careful consideration and slowing down.