Prayer is Response
A number of years ago I found myself gripped by the Holy Spirit in strange prayer for a friend. We’d had a chance meeting after years of silence, at a funeral of all places, where he’d told me he and his wife had been trying for kids for three years without luck. I was gutted for them, even more than felt natural, and I told them I’d pray for them.
And boy did I pray for them.
It’s hard to describe what happened to me exactly, but I was overrun. For three days I hardly needed to consciously form any thoughts because my entire being was filled with grief for the couple. Not in a personal, sorrowful way, but in a deep-groaning kind. In a poetic twist, I felt pregnant with prayer for them and night and day it stayed with me, praying from me, out of me, and best I could do was consent.
It lasted three days, then it left.
Half a year later I happened to bump into them again. Their countenance was radically different. They had news to share. They’d fallen pregnant a week after I’d seen them.
I learned something important in those few days of being gripped by God; truest prayer isn’t really ours. It’s not something we drum up nor is it our starting something.
Truest prayer is a response.
In the beginning of John’s gospel the apostle makes the profound statement that Jesus Christ is the Logos. Many translators translated the Greek word logos into the english word “Word”, but it’s so much more than that. The first translators actually translated the Greek logos into Latin where it became the the word sermo which, you guessed it, is where we get our word sermon from. It implies a back and forth dialogue. Going deeper still, sermo is derived from sero which means more of a joining together or a weaving.
So what’s inherent then in Logos isn’t so much a static word as we materialist, enlightenment folk would consider it. But a conversation. The Conversation we trinitarians might say.
What does that have to do with prayer, or with the story about my friends getting pregnant? Everything. Because in Christ, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, you and I have been pulled in to that Conversation. We are not the instigators of prayer, but the recipients of it. We are caught up in this trinitarian life.
How do we know? Because Hebrews tells us that Christ “lives to intercede” for us (Hebrews 7:25) and Romans that “the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans” (Romans 8:26) when we don’t know what to pray. So, we’re in Christ who is interceding, and the Spirit is in us interceding. We are conduits of unceasing, powerful, godly prayer. We continually receive it.
And that has two significant implications for us. The first is that a Christian by nature is called to be an intercessor. Notice there are no intercessors in the five fold ministries. Prayer is not a gift of the Spirit. There are no “prayer ministries” in the New Testament church. All were considered called to deep, crucial prayer because all are in Christ. In the trinity Himself. How could we not pray? A Christian, by pure existence, is an intercessor if they’re faithful in leaning in.
But secondly, it means that even intercession begins with abiding. It begins with a faithful attentiveness to the light or heavy groans of the Spirit within us. It means we need to lower the volume of our lives and selves enough to let the Quiet Fire burn within us at all times. There is an undeniable charismatic-contemplative nature to this kind of prayer. It begins in the quiet and makes it’s way out from there. My friend David Thomas who was there at the heart of the Asbury Outpouring told me in a conversation recently, “trevail is simply the overflow of love.” A love, we could say, that comes to us through our growing union with God.
Yes, we are co-labourers with Him, but we are working with the raw materials of His heart.
Which leads me to the second great implication of the Conversation - it claims back intercession as an act of intimacy and restores it to a place of rest. It means we can confidently say that when we pray for others we’re drinking deeply for ourselves too. In our intercession we’re filled to the brim with the powerful, loving, conscious presence of the Spirit. We water the garden of our own souls as we seek the beautification of others. That may take the form of words, or tears, or groans, but it is always an act of listening, abiding love.
Prayer doesn’t begin in the mind, it begins in the deeper place. It begins with the Holy Spirit. When we pray like that, we’re refreshed, we’re transformed, we’re effective as a church. We don’t grow weary, our prayer only makes us more loving, more brimming for the world.
So, take a deep breath. Listen to the Spirit within and let Him pray His way to the surface of you.
Sister, brother, may you become prayer.
Written by guest contributor: Strahan Coleman - author, musician, spiritual director.
You can hear more from Strahan at Commoners Communion or buy his new book Thirsting.
