A Prayer Shaped Life - Prayer as “Being with Jesus”

Hello Family, Tyler here. I wanted to take a moment to invite you to Bridgetown's eighth annual Holy Spirit Conference, January 23rd and 24th at Portland's Keller Auditorium. The theme of this year's conference is going to be the healing after the healing. We'll be exploring how the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit is often just the first step to the deeper, slower, soul-level healing. Like the Man Born Blind and John 9, each part of us God heals only exposes a deeper part of us awaiting healing from the same God, and the deepest healing is often the slowest kind. We're so excited to be joined by contributors like Ruth Haley Barton, Kurt Thompson, Ken Shigamatsu, and Brooke Ligertwood. Tickets are available now at Bridgetown.Church/Holy Spirit. I hope you can join us. Mark chapter 1, verses 9 through 13. At that time, Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open, and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, whom I love. With you I am well pleased." At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness for 40 days being tempted by Satan. This is the word of the Lord. A number of years ago, I was one among about a hundred in a cohort of Christian pastors doing quarterly retreats in this Midwestern monastery type setting. And one such retreat was entirely themed around prayer, but the practice of prayer that we were prescribed was a type of prayer involving no words, just sitting in God's loving presence. And in my experience to date, words were kind of like the key ingredient to prayer, like prayer without words, similar to ordering the fried chicken at a vegan restaurant. Sure Son, you've entirely lost the plot. But I was committed to growing beyond my comfort zone and my current experience, and so I took the advice of the wise older woman who got all giddy talking about the joy of sitting in God's presence, doing nothing but receiving his love in silence. But then when I got back home to Brooklyn where I lived at the time, and I sat out on the stoops of the apartment building that I called home, just as the sun was dawning the following morning, I didn't feel all warm and fuzzy. I didn't have a heart-rending, lightning bolt of divine revelation. I didn't really get it. I just felt restless and unproductive. I felt distracted and uncentered. I wondered in the back of my head how this could possibly be formative for me or pleasing to God. And mostly I just wondered if I was practicing the ancient way of Jesus, or if I might just be beginning to completely lose it altogether. That we're continuing a teaching series we began a week ago, A Prayer Shaped Life, where we as a community are taking the long range view of prayer, less prayer's immediate power in the world around me, and more prayer's slow formative power of the world within me. Now next month we're going to get to the rhythm of prayer that orders and guides our days, but first in part one of the series, we're going to talk about the way that prayer shapes us as apprentices of Jesus, how prayer is a means to be with Jesus, become like Jesus, and do what Jesus did. And up for tonight is prayer as being with Jesus through the practice of silent prayer. And that takes us back to Jesus's baptism. Look back down with me at your Bible's Mark chapter one. Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open, and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, whom I love. With you I am well pleased." The whole of Jesus's life and ministry flows from this divinely given identity. Before his baptism, when the Father said, "This is who you are, Son, heir, beloved, wanted, welcomed, delighted in." Before all of that, Jesus lived for three decades without working a single miracle, calling a disciple, or uttering a word of teaching. After that divinely given identity, Jesus goes around distributing the same divine love everywhere he goes. The whole life and ministry of the Incarnate God begins and ends with hearing the Father's voice. And the whole life of an apprentice to Jesus begins and ends with hearing the Father's voice. "You are my daughter, my son, whom I love. With you I am well pleased." Three years after his baptism on the eve of his crucifixion, Jesus prays not only for the twelve, but for all the generations of disciples who would come after them following him behind them, that's you and I tonight. And he prayed these words, "Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them, even as you have loved me. You, follower of Jesus, are clothed in the life and identity of Jesus. You are beloved, delighted in, heir to the riches of heaven itself. Wanted, welcome, worthy, known, named, trusted, cherished. You are all of that graciously, a new identity that is given but never earned, irrevocably given and never returned, ungainable and therefore untakable, unloosable, unrejectable. That good, that real, that free, that permanent, that is where the life of a disciple begins and ends. All of which begs this obvious question, why is this freely given beloved identity so slippery to hold on to? Why is it so easy to receive in a moment of comfort like this one so hard to hold on to tomorrow morning when I go to work or by midweek next week? Why is this freely given beloved identity so slippery to hold on to? Let me give you a sociological, a psychological and a theological reason why. First, sociologically speaking, because you and I live in a noisy world. According to a research from the University of Catalonia in 2007, if you added up all the information taken in by human being each day, think television, podcasts, books, notifications on your device, all of it, it would be the equivalent to reading 174 85-page newspapers every day. We are firehosing our brains with content and information, far more information than anyone can actually process. We touch our phones on average 2,617 times a day for an average of three hours and 15 minutes. We watch shows in the evenings, often over dinner. We listen to podcasts while we exercise and commute, or listen to music or audiobooks while we do the laundry or wash the dishes. You and I have developed a set of habits that makes quiet, stillness and self-reflection so against our muscle memory it is next to impossible. We itch for distraction, for busyness, for productivity. So, of course, a man sitting on a Brooklyn stoop at dawn with nothing to do, nothing to read, nothing to listen to, nothing to say, itches with the restlessness of an addict and needable fix. We live in a noisy world with noisy minds. The psychologist and best-selling author, Ethan Cross, published a recent book titled Chatter, which is all about the cacophony of voices inside everyone's head. Negative rumination, that's the psychological term for the unfortunate fact that the unoccupied human mind always drifts toward fear. And you can save yourself reading his entire book, here's the Cliffs Notes version. Negative rumination, that chatter in your unoccupied mind, it has the effect on you of either leading you to paralysis because you get stuck in a state of anger or frustration because you keep retelling yourself the same story about that person, that situation, or even about yourself. Or transference, your anxiety about one thing comes out elsewhere like frustration at a coworker being expressed as shortness toward your child or spouse or roommate back at home. Or insecurity or self-loathing at very worst, you define yourself by that inner critic that rehearses the day's experiences, replaying the moments you wish you had shown up to differently or the moments you wish you had been received differently by those you showed up to. There's more noise in your head, in your inner world, even than in our outer world. And no matter what song you're listening to, the melody is fear, not love. We live in a noisy world with noisy minds and an ambitious culture. A 2024 study showed that Americans logged more working hours, exerting 42% more energy output than their European counterparts. And despite that, we were less efficient and productive than the vast majority of Western European nations, meaning you and I work ourselves to exhaustion. We are driven to succeed, and we do so even to the detriment of our own capacity, exceeding our limits, winning us diminishing returns. And that's just ambition when it gets channeled into work. Similar studies showed that Americans lead the world in investment in cosmetic products, cosmetic procedures, dieting, and gym memberships, while also carrying some of the highest obesity rates in the world. We live in a culture that is ambitious for the most expiring parts of our lives, our resumes, our waist sizes, and our physical appearances, but no one has ever said at a funeral, "Her abs were tight to the very end." We live in a noisy world with noisy minds in an-- I'm going somewhere with all of this. A noisy world with noisy minds in an ambitious culture with distracted lives. Simply by living in Western culture, you and I are actively and intentionally being shaped to run from silence into the waiting and welcoming arms of distraction, entertainment, and busyness. We live in an attention economy, your imagination commodified by the little screen in your pocket. And we live in a social society, filling all of our quiet and alone moments with a barrage of noise through messages, notifications, and posts. Our minds are overworked, exhausted, and fragmented the result of which is that we are reactionary and anxious at a psychologically alarming level. We live in a noisy world, the noisy minds in an ambitious culture with distracted lives, and we have a quiet spirituality. Mark chapter 6, "Then because so many people were coming and going that did not even have a chance to eat, Jesus said to them, 'Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.'" Jesus lived a quiet spirituality. He retreated often and invited his apprentices to do the same. Look, I don't want to overstate this. Jesus was active, relational, and interruptible, but you cannot miss the theme. If you give an honest reading of the Gospels that Jesus prioritized, the slow, quiet way of being alone with the Father who spoke over him first at his baptism. He retreated quietly, he left the crowds just as often as he sought them, and he taught us to do the same. A quiet inner life, it seems to me, is the canvas on which God paints his masterpieces. As a father of three young boys, I am often called on to provide homework help, and while look, I will freely admit that I have Googled many a math equation under the table while they weren't looking. I'm pretty good with grammar and logic, and one of the logic worksheets that I typically interact with involves the question which one of these does not belong, like one circle among a group of squares or one cat among a group of dogs, that kind of thing. So let's play a little game of which one of these does not belong. We live in a noisy culture with noisy minds in an ambitious world with distracted lives and a quiet spirituality. Do you see the issue here? One of these things is not like the others. Why is this freely given beloved identity so slippery to hold on to? Well there you have a sociological reason. How about a psychological one? Psychologically speaking, attachment relationships between children and caregivers form our sense of self more than any other factor in human development. Attachment theory is among the world of psychology is most universally recognized and adopted ways of understanding the inner world of the individual, and attachment theory claims that the way that you show up relationally in the world as an adult is based mostly on the way that you experience security, insecurity, harm, neglect, abandonment, or trauma in your first relationship in this world with your caregiver. You see the human brain is always developing shortcuts, and that's a really good thing. It's why you can drive a car and change lanes while having a conversation with someone in the passenger seat and eating a sandwich all at the same time. Without those sort of shortcuts in your brain you would be concentrating hard on just clicking the turn signal and drifting into the left lane the way that you did at 15 the first time you ever drove on the highway. Your brain creates relational shortcuts too for your healing or for your harm. The experiences between child and guardian get chunked together into shortcuts the brain has made by piecing together patterns of felt experience that's called attachment. The patterns we experience as children from our caregivers created shortcuts in our brains that inform how we experience all relationships today. Relationships with other people, the way that we view ourselves, even the way that we know and relate to God. We all have unique attachment patterns because we are all unique people with unique experiences, but over time in this field four primary attachment styles have emerged. And without going into a full explanation of attachment theory for our purposes this evening I simply want to point out that psychologically speaking healthy human attachment is called secure attachment. Dr. Todd Hall who is both a clinical psychiatrist and a follower of Jesus writes, "To be securely attached means you are spoken for by your attachment figures. Secure attachment means someone in this world has signed up to look out for you, to always be for you." Amos my three-year-old is a pretty social kid, really friendly outgoing guy, very trusting, but if he bumps his head not just anyone will do, he will run past all sorts of familiar faces. Friends he sees in this church community or often in my home, other family members, aunts, uncles, grandparents, he will run past everyone else looking for one of two faces, either me or Kirsten. Why is that? Well I hope it's because he's growing securely attached. I hope it's because he feels spoken for by someone in this world that there's someone that is always looking out for him, someone who is safe to run to when he's hurting. A. W. Tozer in the knowledge of the holy argues that we all know God in two different ways, we know God explicitly and implicitly. Your explicit knowledge of God is everything you cognitively believe about God and it's the way that you would describe your faith. It's the scripture that you memorize, the doctrine that you recite, the lyrics to the songs that you sing. Implicit knowledge on the other hand is everything you relationally believe about God and it is rooted primarily in your attachment style. Those with a mother or father wound like abandonment tend to have a hard time knowing God without fearing the same sort of abandonment from their heavenly father. Those with overbearing parents tend to relate to God like an overbearing parent, either tiptoeing around the rules or rebelling against whatever they perceive the rules to be. Those with performance driven parents tend to relate to God like love is a reward for good performance. The psychoanalyst Anna Maria Rizzuto argues from a robust amount of research on the psychology of prayer. The way you and I pray is actually less reflective of what we say we believe about God and more reflective of the home that you grew up in and the caregivers who shaped you first and what made you feel safe or threatened in that environment. Consider your family of origin for a minute. I'm just trying your imagination to go back to the environment of your earliest years and the way that you related to the people who raised you. And with that home environment in mind, as honestly as you can, finish these two statements. The most important thing in life is, and I'm only safe when. Whatever your answers to those two questions are, there you have the great descriptors of the spiritual battle that you will fight longest and hardest to overcome. The lies the deceiver planted in you before you even had a chance to defend yourself. And a voice came from heaven saying you are my son, whom I love. With you I am well pleased. Why is that freely given identity so slippery to actually hold on to? Well, there you have a sociological reason, a psychological reason. Now how about a theological reason? Look back at your Bibles when they want to pick up right after this moment when Jesus is spoken for by the father of his baptism, verse 12. At once the spirit sent him into the wilderness and he was in the wilderness 40 days being tempted by Satan. So as soon as the divine identity of love was given and received by Jesus, he suddenly poses a threat to the darkness of this world. And the serpent in the garden who stole that very identity from the first man and woman as soon as it is given to Jesus comes to try to take it from him too. You see Mark chapter one is just a reenactment of Genesis chapters one, two, and three. Creation happened when a human being was spoken by God, spoken for by the God who is personified love. Deception happens when an enemy weaves a lie, a lie aimed at earning the love that I've already been freely given. You see the forbidden fruit was never the point. The serpent never once asks Eve to eat the fruit. The focus of the temptation was never the fruit. You never hear the serpent saying anything like, look at that apple. Oh man, that looks good. I think it's a Fuji. Oh, nope, it's a Gala. You don't think. A cosmic crisp. You never hear anything like that. There's no direct toward temptation toward behavior or compromise in morality. Instead, the serpent just chips away at Eve's trust in God until this moral action is the natural product of a relational deception. The lie is aimed at love, where to find love, how to find love, who or what will love me and even how I'm supposed to love another. This is why second Timothy three goes on to describe people corrupted by that ancient lie as lovers of themselves, lovers of money and lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. Sin then is not the absence of love, but the search for love in a place I will never find it. Every human being is on a search for love and sin is the attempt to acquire love by some means that is under my own control rather than receive it as the free gift of God who made me in his divine image. It is to try to drum up my own loveliness somehow, to try to become in my own eyes or in the eyes of everybody else, what I already am in the eyes of God. To try to use my resume or my body or my accomplishments, my status, my calendar, my possessions, my social standing, my sense of security to become lovable to my preferred audience. The same serpent who lied to Eve lies to Jesus in three particular ways. Turn these stones into bread, jump off the temple and be rescued by angelic intervention and worship me and I'll give you your creation back. It is the same liar weaving the same deception, aim not at behavior but at love, chipping away at the identity of love that's just been spoken over Jesus at his baptism. You are the one who can turn stones into bread, belovedness by provision. You are the one who can jump from the temple to spectacular rescue, belovedness by performance. You are the one who can rule the world, belovedness by power. Each temptation, some version of earn what God just gave you. Drum up your own loveliness. Become in your eyes or in everybody else's eyes what you already are in the eyes of the Father. And again and again and again what does Jesus say? No, no, no. I am the beloved of God. That is who I've already been named and I will not let you redefine me. Prayer then is first listening to that voice, to the Father's voice. The one who spoke me first and who speaks for me each and every time I stop and slow myself to listen and hearing that voice. The one who speaks love over me in a whisper. That requires intention and practice for people like us. People who live in a noisy world with noisy minds in an ambitious culture with distracted lives and a quiet spirituality. People whose image of God is as distorted as the warped version of love that was offered us in the homes we grew up in. Richard Foster writes, "In contemporary society our adversary," that's a biblical title for Satan. "In contemporary society our adversary majors in three things, noise, hurry, and crowds. If he can keep us engaged in muchness and manyness he will rest satisfied." Why is this freely given beloved identity so slippery to hold on to? Because we think muchness and manyness is where love is found. We are searching for love, scrambling for love, but Jesus returned to that love alone and in the quiet. And that's where you and I will find it too. Octavia Bright wrote this beautiful memoir documenting her first five years of sobriety and her journey out of alcoholism. A sobriety journey that for her coincided with the loss of her father in the subsequent grieving process. And in one scene in her story she's sitting beside the bed of her dying father under these bright hospital lights considering her own journey toward wholeness. And she writes, "There I could see the flaw in my desire for a sense of continuous progress, which can't help but suggest a perpetual movement towards something better or a destination at which you can arrive. Sometimes recovery is not about moving forward, but about being able to stay still." And that's it. In this jungle of muchness and manyness lies we do not find our way out by movement and active steps of progress. We learn to be still, to wait, to grow quiet, still patient and quiet enough to stop searching for love, but to let love find me. To let love find me again today so that when I do move it is from the spoken for identity that threatens every square inch of darkness in this world around me. And that is how being with Jesus, receiving the very love he received that is mine in Christ and living from that foundation he returned to again and again and again. That is how being with Jesus is practiced through silent prayer. Silent prayer is the active practice of remaining in the love of God. It is the active choice to retreat from the muchness and manyness into the quiet where I hear again today the love that spoke me into being at first and speaks over me afresh each day. So there I was, pastor of a community of Jesus as a princess, is trying my best to live a quiet spirituality and keep up in a muchness and manyness culture both at the same time. Feeling foolish on a Brooklyn stupid dawn with nothing to do but wait. Wondering why nothing was happening and how long I'm supposed to wait on something to happen, itching for some kind of noise to sate my restless attention. There I was years ago and there I hope you will have been by this time tomorrow. So we better get practical about all of this. In the world of recovery in which Octavia found the strength to stay still and surrender, they've got this mantra and it goes something like this. It works if you work it. So that'll do for us for a little turn from theory and into practice. Okay, silent prayer. How does it work and how do I work it? First, how does it work? Silent prayer is the, sorry, silent prayer in the presence of God is the practice of receiving the love of the father and then sharing that same divine love with others. So first let's talk about receiving the love of the father. Tanya Lourman whose anthropological research I referenced a week ago wrote this fascinating book on the psychology of all spiritual practices from different spiritualities and religions titled How God Becomes Real. And in her finding she discovered that across the board in modern religious communities and among different spiritual practitioners, quote, "It is more difficult to sustain belief in a loving God than a demonic spirit. Across these faiths runs a common thread, that which we fear is more believable than that for which we yearn." You see, we live in a culture where fear is the air that we breathe that requires no intention. We live in a culture where silence is endangered at best and outright extinct more likely. And so it requires priority in practice. Silent prayer is the intentional practice of belief in a loving God. Muchness and manyness is the passive practice of belief in a cunning deceiver. Personally, I come from a long family line of doers. We are active and reliable at our very best and hurried busy bodies at our worst. Also, I have a personality structure that happens to be bent in the direction of activity, productivity, and achievement. And I've chosen a vocation that is made up heavily of preaching and writing, where I'm identified by, where what most people want from me to state it most crassly is what I do. It is the words that I produce. So there you have the personality through which I process and participate in our noisy world, the psychology of my family history, my attachment patterns in a nutshell, and the vocation that can so effortlessly for me, just be an outlet to more muchness and manyness. So the overlap of that Venn diagram for me personally is a spirituality that is highly susceptible of being bent in the direction of overdoing it. That's me. It might not necessarily be you. In silent prayer then, I am still quiet and alone. There's no doing. There's no activity. There's nothing to achieve. I'm bringing nothing to God, save a set of open hands and an attempt at an attentive imagination. I've come with no words, that commodity that I trade in vocationally. That thing that I'm so used to, everyone else wanting from me, some string of words that might inspire or instruct or comfort, I'm coming to God with nothing that makes me feel useful in this world. Silent prayer is the place where I come to God naked and unashamed of everything that makes me feel useful, and it is where I discover Him there seeing me, knowing me, loving me, choosing me entirely apart from all of my usefulness. And that is how for me, being still and quiet in the presence of God is the furnace that burns away the false places that I go looking for love and refines the only love that I possess that is real enough to keep the perfect kind of love that casts all the fear out of my life, spoken over me afresh today. That's how silent prayer works within me. There's even more to it than that though. You know, every Sunday I have the great privilege of getting to pray and preach in pastor, but do you know what the most spiritually formative moment of my Sunday is? Every week. It's not the ministering or the teaching. It is not the listening or the pastoring. It's none of the doing. It's the moment that I get home from all of that. And I walk into the door and I'm welcomed by Kirsten, Hank, Simon, and little Amos by my family because they are so glad to see me, but they don't want from me what everyone else has been wanting from me all day long. Words, my version of doing and producing and achieving. No, they could care less about any of my usefulness. They just want me to be with me, to welcome me, to accept me, to see me, to love me, and to be loved by me. And the neighbors, friends, and coworkers that I've gone closest to over the years, it's the same with all of them. The very same love that I quietly and intentionally practice receiving from God in silent prayer, I go on unintentionally receiving in all the relational spaces of my active life when I get up from that moment of silent prayer. And as I experience the naked and unashamed love of God in silent prayer and that same love of God coming to me through others, something like scales are slowly, but surely beginning to fall from my eyes and I'm beginning to see others the same way. To grow little by little more capable of welcoming others into my loving presence in the very way that I'm welcomed into the loving presence of God. To see and accept others for their being and not their usefulness. To welcome them in the very welcome of the God who knows them best and loves them most. You see, what I'm trying to show you very personally is that when you show up to silent prayer, you might at first discover that it charades as a private practice, but the truth is that it is profoundly communal. It is prayer that begins privately, but then pours out of us compassionately. It is the practice of being alone with God for a moment so that I can be truly richly and deeply with others for a lifetime. That's how silent prayer works through me, sharing the same divine love with others. One of the enemy's most subtle but debilitating blows to our generation is to take this very good growing re-engagement with ancient forgotten spiritual practices and then warp them into self-serving lifestyle hacks that we engage to feel better or achieve balance, like it's the spiritual version of drinking powdered greens and sitting in red light therapy saw on us. When the truth is that every spiritual practice, including silent prayer, is a means to an end. That end is being poured out like a drink offering in the language of the apostle Paul, an offering of sacrificial love for the sake of the world. Thomas Merton says, "We do not go into the desert to escape people, but to learn how to find them. We do not leave them in order to have nothing more to do with them, but to find out the way to do them the most good." Silent prayer is a way of being crucified with Christ for the sake of the world. Henry Nowan defines this quietest way of prayer as listening to God and listening to the pains of the world simultaneously. To return to his definition of prayer from a week ago, prayer always leads us to the heart of God and the heart of the human struggle at the same time. You see, when our lives are cluttered with so much coming and going, so much talking and doing, so much task management and achievement and getting from here to there and so little quiet in the presence of God, we are slowly but surely bent in the direction of using people rather than seeing, knowing, welcoming and loving them. We want to fix someone to get from someone to check another item off our list to commodify someone, but we cannot love that someone because we are out of step with the one who is love. If we do not learn to retreat from the crowd to listen to the Father like Jesus, then neither can we learn to see, welcome and companion those within the crowd like Jesus. Dr. Jerry Sitzer says, "Silent prayer, then, is both a means and an end. It is a discipline we practice, it is a gift we receive. Such prayer, wordless, silent, patient, confident, secure, will empty us and fill us, will break us and restore us, will plunge us into the darkness and draw us into the light. Separate us from God as we know him through creation so that we can be united with God as we know him in Christ, and thus we experience the union with him for which our souls truly long." This definition, it upends the most common misconception about silent prayer carried by sincere apprentices of Jesus, and that is we get quiet so we can hear God speak. And sometimes God does speak, but the practice of silent prayer is a whole lot more about identity than it is about instruction. Listening prayer, tuning my ear to God, that's for the sake of new revelation, often on behalf of someone else. Silent prayer, though, is the practice of being in God's presence naked and unashamed, that I might be found by the love that I am ever tempted to go searching somewhere else for. Silent prayer, explained as simply as possible, is just the spiritual practice of being still and quiet in the presence of God, the God who is love. That's how it works. All right, so how do I work it? Well, here's the practice of silent prayer in four essential steps. First, you're going to need to choose a time and a place, because any new habit requires you to cultivate a set time and place. Every new ritual is absolutely doomed without both of those. So when are you going to get quiet and still in the presence of God each day? Is it going to be first thing in the morning, or maybe the last thing before you go to bed? Is it going to be during your daughter's nap time, or in that 15-minute window you have between classes mid-morning? There's no magic hour, just choose a time when you tend to be alert rather than tired, and a time that you can keep consistently when you won't be interrupted. And then where are you going to get quiet and still in the presence of God? Is there a sacred chair in your living room that you love to sit in, or a quiet bench outside of your office that you can stop by before you commute home in the evenings? There's no location, there's more holy than any other in God's creation, so just choose somewhere that you can consistently hide away, where you can be uninterrupted by distraction and uncluttered by anything else mentally. And then create a ritual of transition that will guide you from noise to quiet. Now as strange as this sounds, quiet and still actually takes a lot of practice. So you're going to need to create some kind of ritual to transition from the external and internal noise that you're very used to into quiet. And that can be as simple as just lighting a candle or playing a sacred chime or sound or a short chorus of a song. It can be just taking three deep breaths to slow and study yourself. Whatever works, just pick a ritual and then use it every time. And if you're just starting out in this, I would highly recommend the Thomas Keating's App Centering Prayer, which is absolutely free. You can download it from the App Store and it allows you to choose a sound and a timer that will begin and end your silence. So you can choose a chime that's unique, like not the same sound for the notifications for everything else on your phone. And you can choose a time frame that's manageable. You can set a clock for one minute or two minutes or ten minutes. Don't be aspirational about your silence. Be consistent. Give God just a little bit of time to work with and show up day after day after day and see what He can do with that. And then finally, or thirdly, use breath prayer as an anchor. Look, you're going to get distracted. You just will. Saints throughout history have gotten distracted and they were indoctrinated to a whole lot less noise than you and I are. Thankfully, though, we have the time-tested sacred practice of a breath prayer to anchor us. And a breath prayer is exactly what it sounds like. It is a prayer that you can pray in a single breath. So just pick a breath prayer and then pray that aloud every time you notice that your mind has wandered, just as a way of pulling you back to the attentiveness to the presence of God where you intended to stay. Here's how it works. Let's say that you just simply picked the name of Jesus and it would go like this. Jesus. Now I'm thinking about that text that I forgot to send. Jesus. Now I'm wondering if the chicken from four nights ago is still safe to eat for lunch today. Jesus. Now I'm ruminating on that unresolved argument that I'm having with my sister in Minnesota. Jesus. Now I'm thinking about how awful it would be to live in Minnesota where it's so cold. You know, Jesus. You get it, okay? Other really common breath prayers sometimes involve something you can pray in an inhale and an exhale, something like, "You are my beloved in whom I delight, or in you I live, in you I rest." For me, I just pray, "Holy Spirit, just don't overthink it. Pick what works for you and use it as an anchor." And then fourth and finally, persevere. Because this quiet and alone way of being with God, it requires perseverance. The very person who knows they need solitude, stillness and silent prayer the most is also the person who's going to have the hardest time observing it. You will quiet down for a few minutes or you will book that retreat at the monastery and you will tell everyone that you're going to retreat and slow down and cultivate this new way of being and then like me on that Brooklyn stoop, you will itch for activity and distraction. You will want entertainment, task and some measurable, verifiable sense of progress. Your fragmented mind will hate the feeling of collecting itself. It will itch for noise. One ancient Christian writer describes the first stages in silent prayer as the experience of someone who has lived forever with an open door policy for their neighbors and then all of a sudden one day without any explanation they just shut and bolt the door. And then what happens? All the neighbors, the visitors who are used to coming and going as they please begin to knock and bang at the door wondering why they're not allowed to enter and it is only after a long annoying wait inside the locked house that those visitors finally realize that they are not welcome and stop coming. Who are the visitors who are banging? They're the noisy voices of your ego, the false self that is too childish to go neglected for even a minute or two. The task of silent prayer then begins with just staying in my cell, just outlasting my visitors, waiting until they get exhausted from all their pounding and finally leaving me alone because those who give in to distraction can be sure that it's just going to come for them quicker the next time. To put it bluntly, if you want to know the fruit of silent prayer, be prepared to persevere through the awkward itchy restlessness that will surely haunt your early days in the practice of silent prayer. Persevere in your solitude. That is the way to the love that spoke you first and the love that speaks over you anew each day. It's the secure attachment of being spoken for by God himself and a deceived world full of lies and noise and the reward for those who persevere is that these visitors, they bang less and less frequently until one day they retreat altogether and silent prayer isn't only something that you practice from time to time, your inner life has become quiet so that you are able to go about the noise and hurry and frenzy of the crowds only doing what you see the Father doing in the words of Jesus. And as I look across biblical and church history, as I look at the lives of all the saints, meaning those who have cultivated such a depth with God that their life echoes far beyond their days calling to the depths within you and me even tonight. As I look and search for what do all of these saints so shaped by Jesus have in common, I just see this one thing that each and every one of them possess a quiet inner life in a very noisy and contested world. A quiet inner life, it seems to me, is the canvas on which God paints his masterpieces. So choose a time and place, create a ritual of transition, use a breath, prayer as an anchor and persevere. That is how you work it. So the practice for this entire teaching series is prayer and the exercise that we're going to engage as we gather in our Bridgetown communities this week around the table is prophetic prayer. As we listen and pray for one another based on the prayer training that we held in this room this past Tuesday evening, but because prophetic prayer is a communal exercise of quietly listening to God, we also want to equip everyone in our Bridgetown communities with silent prayer as an individual exercise to carry into the week ahead for being with Jesus in the love of the Father. But for tonight we'll land here. I kept on showing up restlessly to that Brooklyn stoop. Morning by morning. And as I did very, very slowly and subtly, the strangest thing happened to me. My noisy mind quieted. All those questions stilled. My restlessness finally came to rest. And when I was quiet, love found me there. And today at this point in my apprenticeship to Jesus, there is no more essential practice for me than the practice of silent prayer. Because I have discovered that this side of persevering through all my banging visitors, silent prayer is that sacred place where I let my masks fall in the language of the ancient Christian catechism. It is where I receive the divine love that Jesus prayed would be mine. The only foundation I've found through which I can live in concert with that love and the noise of my days. And that practice of quiet stillness, it is increasingly forming me into the sort of person who is more attuned to that very same divine love coming to me in the course of all of my ordinary days. In the crisp fall air that I feel on my commute into work. And in the laughter that I hear in my children, the love of the Father that I see in the knowing gaze of my wife and the taste of the bread that I break with my community. God loves you friends. God loves you. He loves you too much to wait on you to come and find him. He loves you so much that he will come and find you. If only you will stay still long enough, quietly enough to be found. Why don't we stand and we'll give him our quiet attention even now. Thanks for joining the Bridgetown family as we engage in this teaching series. To learn more about the life of our church and how you can get involved, visit Bridgetown.church/welcome. If you're interested in contributing financially to Bridgetown Church and to our ministry, you can do that at Bridgetown.church/giving. Wherever you're joining us from, we hope this resource blesses you and encourages you to be with Jesus, become like Jesus, and do what Jesus did.