Prayer the Way Jesus Did

[HKHaugan]

Prayer the Way Jesus Did

 If there was ever a prayer lifted up for you and me, one I knew was for real, one that came from the heart of the one praying, I would want it to be how Jesus prayed so openly, so caringly, so lovingly in the last seven verses of John 17.  These are not just words out there in some printed pages.  These were words from the heart of God prayed for you and me personally!  And they will be prayed for all the generations after us.  How many times haven’t we read and heard them?  Let’s read them right now. 

 “My prayer is not for them alone [His disciples]. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

“Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.

“Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me.  I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them (Jn.17:20-26 NIV).”

Stop for a moment and let these words sink in.  They are as real now as they were when He prayed them.  He is risen, He is present, and He is moving in and through us.  His Holy Spirit brings Him into our consciousness.  Just the memory of Him and His words stir us with expectation, a sense of movement within, hope, reaching into spiritual reality, seeing ourselves as His images.  Think about that!  We are images of Him!  He is praying for us! 

 And it is not only that He is praying for us it is what He is praying that excites and enervates our spirit within.  He is praying for what He knows is our deepest longing, “O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is (Ps.63:1 KJV).”  This is what makes His prayer for each of us so real. So, let’s take a moment and walk through the door He has opened with His words.  By the way if you want to walk into the spiritual realm, really walk, all you have to do is open His Word and open your heart.

 First, this is His prayer (vs.20 “My prayer…”).  Since it’s His prayer it expresses His desire, His hope and His purpose for us.  It originates in Him.  He has a vision for us, what we are to be like, live like and be a part of.  Its foundation is spiritually rooted because God is Spirit, and we are His spiritual beings whose destination is His presence.  He is taking us into His mind and heart which is where prayer always leads and where we find ourselves in the ‘right place’ at the ‘right time’ in the ‘right company.’

 Second, these are His words.  They are spiritual words expressing His heart.  He is praying in the Spirit from His heart.  He is praying words that are His thoughts, His hopes and His vision.  They are words that ring within like notes that resonate when a similar sound is made.  Jesus knows what words resonate with our hearts and awaken the needs within that He brings before His Father.   The Spirit interprets them and the Father sorts and answers them through His will.  You can take Him at His Word.

 Third, this is His event.  An event in prayer transcending time and carrying us into spiritual reality.  For Jesus it was the event of His Father and He being One.  It was for this event that He came to set the spiritual atmosphere for His sacrifice on the Cross.  This was a cross prayer, THE Cross prayer, the prayer that carried Him to death and His homecoming.  He believed from the Word with His mind what He would have to face.  He trusted His Father in His heart to make the choice to accept death and He had faith that the Holy Spirit would bring Him through to His promised Resurrection. He prayed to be obedient to His Father‘s will.

 “I am the good shepherd,” He says, and we can see ourselves being led into His embrace.  “I am the light of the world,” He says and through His eyes we see a whole different environment within and without.  “I am the bread of life,” He says, and we find our mind and heart being fed with new insights, new experiences and growing life, spiritual life.  We see with the eyes of our heart.  We trust more intensely and feel beyond into a vast clarity of being.  We are taken into a different dimension. 

 Going within is no longer a frightened avoidance of reality, or the need to blame others to justify ourselves, nor the reason to traverse the desert of self-deceit. Our sense of self expands beyond the limits of our fear and pride and the particulars of our uniqueness become apparent and functional.  We can be honest, admitting our faults, weaknesses and failures crossing the bridge between stubborn self-denial to true self-realization.  It is Jesus who is our personal point of comparison.  As we relate to Him, we see not only what we are but what we are called to become.  If we find ourselves digging up the bones of the past or the broken bones of our present internal struggles with the shovels of remorse, regret and guilt, it’s OK to admit them to Him because “…there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus…(Rom.8:1 NIV) 

 We may be alone in the world but in the Spirit, we are never alone.  The tour within and without has three supporters, the Father who reveals His will through His Word, the Son whose personal presence is the Father at work and the Holy Spirit who penetrates the mind and heart to both boost and caution us as we walk the path of faith following the Son.  The Lord also provides the Body, His Body, the Body of Christ to be a family of brothers and sisters who grow together to be like Jesus.  We are a family of sinners in the process of being perfected in Christ, so our imperfections are cancelled through shared repentance and forgiveness, the process through which we travel together. 

 But remember Jesus’ words that in this ‘fallen-away-from-God-world’ we will have tribulation and being in the Body, being in His family, we go through one another’s tribulation together.  Then He closes that truth with His calling for us to make a personal heart choice, a faith decision, to be of good cheer because He has overcome the world (John 16:33).  And what is this world He is talking about?  It is secular society; the way people structure their lives apart from God.  It is thinking, choosing and acting apart from God, which is the nature of the fallen world.

 His prayer for us is the pattern for how we personally go to the Father with every choice and decision.  We lay our heart open knowing and admitting our own imperfections and the given fallenness of the world around us.   This is where the Lord does His greatest work as we yield to His Spirit to move us through the tribulation they cause.  Jesus personally praying, praying for Himself to glorify the Father, praying for His disciples to be unified in Him and praying for us to be with Him and to be in Him.  This is how we go to the Father and continue in this pasture of prayer, our spirit greening in God’s love, maturing and ripening with spiritual fruit, the harvest of our witness and testimony to Him.

 Now about witness and testimony.  Witness is our vertical identity and testimony is our horizontal expression.  The first is our personal belief and trust in the Lord.  The second is sharing our faith relationally.  Both come from the heart.  “They will be known by the fruit they bear (Mt.7:16).”

 One more observation.  Paul, in his first letter to the believers in Corinth, ended his description of God’s love by saying, “Faith, hope and love, the greatest of them is love (13:13).”  It is like a sandwich where between two slices of bread the filling is what makes the sandwich.  We buy the sandwich in faith that it would taste good and loved the sandwich after we ate it.  But in between we hoped it would taste good.  Hope is the looking forward part because our faith needed a push to take the first bite.  That push was hope.  Hope was proven by taking the bite.  Hope led us to take a second bite and so on.  Hope is the neglected spiritual quality, the vision of possibility that what we were told about the sandwich was true.  The same is true for the hope of the resurrection that lies at the bottom of our daily walk with the Lord Jesus.  We hope that every next moment, event, relational encounter will be a blessed one and build the image of God in us as we hope for our resurrection.