Prayer isn't just talking to God. A man in Collinsvale, Tasmania, describes it as joining a continuous conversation among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The real work is listening, like John Maxwell spending hours at meals with his heroes, asking questions and then staying quiet to hear their answers.
Chapters
God speaks. You know, God doesn't just listen to us when we pray. He also— it's a two-way street. And I was visiting this guy once, doing a video drop-off, you know, dropping off the search videos, and this was in Collinsvale, Tasmania. And when I went to his house, if he was there, he would invite me in and he would talk, he would want to have a discussion about the last one that he'd watched. And so we would sit in his lounge room and we would talk. And this day, the one that he had watched was on prayer, or a big part of it was on prayer, and He said, he invited me in and we were sitting there and talking for a little while and he was asking me about, you know, your church and that kind of stuff. And his daughter went to church, but he didn't really go to church. And he said, you know, after watching this video, he said, it didn't really change what I think about prayer. And I said, okay. He said, do you know what I think prayer is? I said, no, what's prayer? He said, well, you Adventists believe in the Trinity, don't you? And I said, yes, we do. He said, so there's Father, Son, Holy Spirit. And they're just like 3 in 1, they're always together. And I said, "Yep." He said, "If you were to ask the Father a question, or Jesus a question, or the Holy Spirit, they would give you exactly the same answer." And I said, "Yep." He said, "Because they're of one mind." And I said, "Yeah." He said, "Well, I think that in heaven, that the Holy Spirit, the Father, and the Son, the Trinity, are always in discussion, even if they're doing different things at different points in the galaxy, that they're always talking to each other, and they're like in this dialogue all the time." And I said, Yeah? And he said, "I think prayer is us joining the conversation." I said, "Whoa!" You know, if we really thought about prayer like that, that we were going into a room with our three heroes, how much time would you spend if you got to go into a room, let's say you were really into basketball, and you got to go into the room with Magic Johnson and 3 basketball heroes. How much time would you spend telling them how good your jump shot is? Probably not much at all. I think most of the time when we went into a room full of our heroes, we would just spend quietly listening to them talking, because there's 3 of them already and they're in conversation. And the truth is that God speaks. And if we see prayer as a true dialogue and we realize if we're praying without ceasing, that means there should be times of silence. Silence, where we're listening. And you know, in Psalms it says, "Be still and know that I am God." Because that stillness, that quietness in God's presence is his chance to speak to us. John Maxwell, who is a Christian leadership thinker and teacher, he says that one of the most interesting things to him is— well, his favorite thing to do is he books in long meals with his heroes, and whether they be a great leader or— he's— because of who he is, he can actually call up the president and say, "Can I have a meal with you?" So he can have amazing conversations with people. And before he goes into these conversations, he said he'll spend hours every week for 2 or 3 or maybe even a month before that conversation planning his questions, crossing out questions, writing them differently, saying, "No, I don't think I'll go there. I'll just stay over here," and refining his question list so that when he sits down with that person, He's ready to listen and get the answers to the questions he's wondering about. And he said, so, you know, sometimes those meals will go 2 or 3 hours, and when he finishes, he feels like, "Yes, I've got so much good information from them." And he asks them questions from their areas of expertise. And he said, "What's really interesting to me is that sometimes," he said, "a young person, a young pastor will call me and say, 'John, I'm gonna be in the town where you live, or I'm gonna be where you're doing a lecture. Could we have a meal together?'" And he said, "I know what that means to me, triggers in my mind, 'Oh, he's gonna be wanting feedback, he's gonna be asking me questions.'" And he said, "Many times," he said, "I'll go and I'll sit at a table with some young pastor and they'll spend the whole time telling me about their ministry." And he said, "It's fine, I don't mind listening about their ministry. I hear it and I reflectively listen and talk to them a bit about what they're saying." He said, It just absolutely flabbergasts me that they have— and he's trying not to pat himself on the back, but John Maxwell is one of the premier leadership gurus in the world, and especially in the Christian world, he's above everyone. He says that they have all this leadership knowledge sitting right in front of them, and they'd rather talk about themselves. And I thought to myself, you know, maybe that's a new way of looking at prayer. Is we've got the God of the universe sitting there with us. How much time do we spend just saying, "What about this, God?" or "What about that?" and then listening, picking his brain, and then opening the Scripture and saying, "Speak to me," and listening through the Scripture, and then praying and listening again. I think that's why in Psalms it says, "Be still and know that I am God."
