robertosborne.info

This past week we conducted our annual days of prayer here at Westside King’s Church.  This is the first part of a season and a series we call Via Sacra (sacred road).  As part of the days of prayer we constucted a prayer walk, a progressive and interactive approach to prayer which uses various prayer “stations” as places to pray.  We based this year’s prayer walk on the psalms, seeking to see the psalms as our school of prayer.  I am making available the guide I put together for the prayer walk, The Via Sacra 2009 Prayer Stations Guide.  I hope that this resource is of help to you in your desire to pray.

I have spent much of my ministry life thinking about and (with varying success) practicing the art of prayer.  Some years ago, I was drawn to the prayer of Jesus in the Gethsemane garden as a model prayer.  What especially struck me was Jesus’ boldness and frankness at this criticial moment.  It still remains utterly amazing to me that Jesus could ask God to release him from the way of the cross (even though he had long seen and taught that his vocation was to suffer and die, and afterwards to be raised up).  Gethsemane startles us when we take it seriously.  But it also opens up what is the true gift of the gospel: the confident and free expression of our selves before God in prayer and what this actually does to us and in us as we participate.

The exploration into the Gethsemane prayer was part of that process where I was learning that the point of prayer was its exploration of true relational confidence.  I came to see that prayer meant nothing if we did not express our truest self to God.  But there was more.  I saw further that what Jesus finally accomplished for us, his fully yielded will to God’s purposes, was realized precisely in this freest kind of prayer.

So prayer meant at least these two things: the freedom to express myself truly before God, and the way to overcome the short-sightedness of my human perspective and self-will.  This was the essence of what Jesus modelled in Gethsemane.

I am adding The Gethsemane Prayer of Jesus.  It is a substantial piece with varying subtleties of argument.  But I hope that you will see what I have come to see, that in Gethsamene, on the night of his arrest, Jesus modelled a prayer that was in sync with what he always taught: the prayer we call The Lord’s Prayer.

Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. (Colossians 3:1-2)

I am interested in the integration of two aspects of our inner life – mind and heart, or what we refer to as our intellect and our emotions. While I would assert that these are properties of the same self, it usually helps to make the distinction between what we hold as true in our rational mind from that which we moves us in our emotional mind. And while I would also make the case that these aspects are deeply connected, in the popular conceptualization, these properties of self are distinct. As a Christ-follower, then, I am interested in seeing these two aspects of my self become more integrated.

In philosophy-speak, we talk about the principle of co-inherence. This means that one thing can hold multiple properties at the same time. For instance, we might say that the property of “sweetness” inheres in a sugar cube, but this is not its only property. We can also say that the properties of “whiteness” and “squareness” also inhere. All of these properties thus “co-inhere” in the same sugar cube and are not mutually exclusive. I believe that it was Dallas Willard, the philosopher and student of the soul, who first pointed out the spiritual relevance of this philosophical descriptor.

The point is simple when it comes to authentic spirituality: there are multiple properties to it that must exist at the same time. We are one person, but we can never be described by one property. And to my point, mind and heart as intellect and emotion are both vital and deeply human properties that need a spiritual education. Even more specifically: theological soundness can be found alongside experiential vitality. True spiritual life is not a war between what we know rationally and what have come to experience. In the deepest sense, true spirituality is knowledge of the deepest kind, the kind that is truly felt, and deeply known. In the words of my friend Charles Nienkirchen, “what I know, I really know”.

And so my interest in the text above. In Paul’s letter to the Colossian Christians, he takes time to lay down what God has done for his people in and through Jesus. And then, as he often does, he makes a “since-then” argument. He says in effect: since God has done all this for us, we must put both our thoughts and our emotions in order, and do this in a unified and integrated way. It is this deep integration, this recognition of spiritual co-inherence, that is the sign of a truly maturing Christ-follower.

If you live only by how your Christian faith makes you feel (you would hardly be alone), but know little of it’s substance, you need to follow Paul’s advice: pursue depth of insight, pursue content. If, on the other hand, you know a lot of things about the Christian faith, but are hardly moved emotionally by what you know (and you would hardly be alone in this either), then you will need an education of the heart: seek to be a person who feels and is able to respond emotionally to these great things.

Of course, we need help in this and we cannot develop a mind and heart without God’s help in forming us. But whatever your starting point, pursue integration.