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Concluding on the Mysteries of Prayer and Spirit


So, following from my last few posts, what do we do with prayer and the movement of the Holy Spirit?

 

Prayer and the movement of the Holy Spirit as individual subjects, both share a lot of similarities. They both concern how we meet with, understand and experience God, not theoretically, but in our real, everyday lives. We believe that prayer is the way we are meant to communicate with God, that in prayer we come before God with our thoughts, petitions, fears, and whatever else we have on our hearts, and by praying we hope that God will speak into our lives, into our failings, and into our uncertainties, and that things will change through God’s power and grace. At the same time, we also believe that the Spirit of God is the agent that helps to bring about change in our lives. We call upon the Holy Spirit to meet with us, and we believe that our encounters with the Spirit, however they look, can change who we are, spiritually, physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Our understandings of prayer and how the Spirit moves, also inform our perceptions of the Divine, who God is, what God does, and how God does it. As we’ve seen already, Christians don’t always agree on what this looks like and how it works.

 

I can’t say for sure that all movements of the Holy Spirit are false, even the ones that seem crazy to me, or man-made manipulations. I don’t know, no-one does for sure. I’ve raised some concerns based on my own bad experiences, but I don’t know that all charismatic movements of the spirit are wrong. The same goes with prayer, I can’t say for certain that God doesn’t act in response to our prayers. To me, some answers to prayer might appear to be simple coincidences, or things that would have happened anyway, but I don’t know that. I believe that the Spirit of God moves though, and I believe that prayer is good, and they are both things that I continue to explore and learn about, and I’m open to what God might say or do, in my life and in the lives of others. However, I do feel that how we pray, and how we seek the Holy Spirit, can become distractions in themselves. We want to experience God so desperately, and so certainly, that our needs get in the way of us actually seeing God.

 

When Moses went up Mount Sinai to meet God and receive the Law, the Israelites who were waiting at the bottom of the mountain, became so impatient to hear what God was all about, and what God had to say to them, that they created a version of God that they could worship, in the shape of a golden calf. I think this is why people have been caught out, performing tricks and illusions, passing them off as the Holy Spirit, because ultimately that’s what people have wanted. They have wanted to see and feel the power of God, and so they’ve allowed others to provide an experience for them, and they have let themselves believe it was real. Again, I’m not saying that every single account of the spirit moving is a trick or a lie, but I do worry when I see leaders at the front of churches, behaving like Holy Ghost hunters, creating an environment which might feel bewitched, uttering incantations and asking for signs. If I look in the Bible, I don’t see the Spirit of God operating in that way. The Spirit is either there quietly in a moment, or existing within people, guiding them almost imperceptively; it comes upon people and moves them to do or say certain things, apparently without warning, or it is given to people when hands are laid upon them. It isn’t there through invocation, through music being played a certain way, through specific phrases and words being spoken, or through pushing people, or attacking them in any other way.

 

Equally with prayer, we want to believe that God is moving in our lives, but I think that we sometimes put all of our focus on having evidence of God working in our lives and we miss God’s presence. We come to prayer with a list of demands, hoping to experience something supernatural, because it’s the experience of God that we want, rather than the experience of God that we need. I think it’s good to pray for things that we want and acknowledge God’s goodness, and be thankful when things work out, but I worry that our prayer life can get lost in asking for things that we don’t need, and us getting disappointed when we don’t get what we want.

 

That said, I don’t know everything and I’m just a finite human, trying to figure out an eternal mystery, and so I leave you with this poem, which I have adapted slightly.

 

 

Light Shining out of Darkness by William Cowper

 

God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines
Of never failing skill;
He treasures up his bright designs,
And works His sovereign will.

You fearful saints fresh courage take,
The clouds you so much dread
Are big with mercy, and shall break
In blessings on your head.
Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust him for his grace;
Behind a frowning providence,
He hides a smiling face.

He has the power to heal with haste

But then to take it back
A wrapper bears a plastic taste,
But inside, sweet it’s snack.

We all are living on a prayer

As Jon Bon Jovi mused
God is his own interpreter,
He’ll make all unconfused.

 

 

Text taken from “Unanswerable: Exploring the Complexities of the Christian Faith and Biblical Truth”, which is available from Amazon, and from all good book shops. An audiobook is also available at https://mindmole.bandcamp.com/music

 

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