2025-05-18 Being With God

Well, it is really good to be home!

I know I didn’t ask anyone’s permission, but thank you for allowing me to be absent for the last 2 weeks. As many of you know my mom had a stroke back in January, and I hadn’t been able to get up to see her yet. Thank you for the many of you who have been praying for her, and for my family, and for me as I was away.

My mom is doing well. She was released from the hospital this past Thursday, but it wasn’t to go home, which is one of the big reasons I made the last minute plans to head up there. It’s also why I didn’t say anything the Sunday before I left, because she watches our services online and we took the opportunity to surprise her with my arrival. It worked. I drove into the hospital parking lot as my dad was pushing her in the wheel chair for a ‘walk’.

But, with the stroke and her current physical limitations, we had to come to the decision to sell my parents home that they have lived in for 39 years. I was 4 years old when we moved in. It’s the only home I really know of my family. So I spent about 10 days helping pack up the home, getting my dad moved into their new retirement apartment, visiting with my mom and dad as much as possible, and my sister and her family.

It was a really good time with my family.

It was a difficult time going through all of the memories that are attached with things and a home you grew up in.

It was a challenging time for my dad moving into a new place while my mom was still in the hospital.

And continues to be as they adjust to this ‘new life’.

Please, if you think of them, continue to pray for healing, and for physical restoration and strength. Her ability is still progressing, and she will continue therapy, and we continue to pray and believe for mobility of her left arm and hand, which is yet to come back at all, and also general strength and those neural connections to be made again between her brain and her body.

But let me tell you, while you were here talking about prayer. Thank you David, by the way. I was at home putting to practice the discipline of prayer.

One of the things we have talked through this year, and it’s going to keep coming up, David mentioned it last week I believe, is that / / in our process of discipleship we sometimes come face to face with the trauma, the hurts, the pain of our past. And the enemy will try to use those things to keep us from finding freedom in Jesus Christ.

I’m amazed at the way God has created us:

First of all, that we have the capacity to hold within ourselves, memory, and by that, i mean emotional, physical, psychological, spiritual memory, and sometimes, when it is connected to pain, we hold it without even knowing it.

Until at some point, and I believe that point is when God, through the Holy Spirit highlights to us that we are ready, and He is willing to work in and through us to bring healing, these things resurface.

I mean, imagine if all of our past hurt and pain came flooding in one moment? I don’t know about you. I can only speak for myself, but I would be a puddle of tears curled up in the corner in the fetal position.

Why? Because I, like most of you, have experienced some things that maybe we are glad we don’t remember, or maybe we spend time trying to forget, but either way, we haven’t actually dealt with it, or healed from it.

Why bring this up again today? Let me tell you. / / It is very difficult to heal from our past if we do not embrace a life of prayer.

Let me say that again. / / You can NOT and will not heal from your past fully if you do not embrace the closeness of relationship to God that only prayer will provide.

That is not to say this is the only way, or the only thing involved.

We wash ourselves with the word.

We are cleansed by Christ’s sacrifice and forgiveness.

We find healing, of all kinds, emotional, physical, spiritual healing in God through the work of the Holy Spirit by the power of Jesus’ finished work on the cross.

We also do the hard work. There is a reason I have a therapist.

She helps me wade through the waters of the swamp of my life, helping me identify what matters and sometimes what the enemy is just trying to use.

And it’s so interesting. Leading up to my trip there were things that I was dealing with with my therapist that I couldn’t necessarily pinpoint, but I felt like it had to do with my past. Then suddenly here I am, driving to my home town to stay in my old bedroom for 2 weeks. Not only that, but day 2 of me being there we moved my dad to their new apartment so for 8 days I was completely alone in in my childhood home. What better time to face your past.

I can’t, or at least not yet, fully articulate all that God did, but I do know that I spent a significant time the first night I was there in prayer to and with God while listening to Him. Those three areas we have looked at over the last three weeks: / / Talking TO God, Talking WITH God, Listening TO God.

Without those things. A recognition of my pain and a willingness to talk about it and heal from it through honest conversation, real work and prayer - I am just in my old home, with a bunch of memories, some of which still have an effect on my life today. Some of which are negative. Some of which are holding me back.

I was saying on Thursday night in our discipleship class, if you’ve seen the movie Shrek, Donkey says it best, I’m like a parfait, I have layers. And although everyone loves parfait, they are complex, layered things. And my life, like your life, is made of layers.

God invites me to heal in an area of my life.

Then maybe I hit a sweet spot, a layer of cream, you know those times where life is great and you’re not dealing with anything heavy.

then the invitation comes to deal with another layer,

then maybe another sweet spot,

and then to another layer. and so on and so forth.

But with each time I experience a greater measure of the freedom that Christ revealed through the Cross.

And prayer is an integral part of this process.

I was thinking this the other day. We so easily say, “God wants to heal the pain…”, and although I believe that to be true on many levels, I also know that / / sometimes the thing we experience is God in the MIDST of our pain, which sustains us.

Paul said in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10, / / So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

Now, no one knows what that thorn in the flesh could have been. Some speculate he had problems with his eyesight. Others think he’s talking about the false apostles he’s dealing with in the church - people that are working against him. It could have been another ailment of some sort. But one of our confessions, our doctrinal beliefs, is that we believe the Holy Spirit inspired the writing of scripture, and I kind of like to think this passage is nondescript so that it is applicable to any number of situations.

Someone dealing with sickness can use this as hope of God’s presence in the midst of it.

Someone struggling with addiction can do the same.

Trauma, depression, illness… you name it, in our weakness, / / no matter WHAT that weakness is, God proves His strength through His Grace. And that is a beautiful thing.

Think about it. The most well known Scripture in the Bible, world wide, is Psalm 23. And verse 4 says, / / Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

It doesn’t say, “You take me OUT of the valley.” it says, “You’re WITH ME in the valley.”

In 2 Corinthians Paul doesn’t say, “God heals me of my weakness.” He says the complete opposite, “It is BECAUSE of my weakness that I experience His strength!” But in order to experience the strength, I must be willing to embrace, or at least identify that I have that weakness.

So Paul says he was given / / “a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me.” N.T. Wright explains that when a Roman general or emperor would come back from war, and ride through the city streets to cheers and parades and accolades, he would have a slave beside him that would continually whisper in his ear, “Momento Mori” which in english is / / “Remember, you too are mortal!” - he says in his commentary, / / “The ancients recognized - mostly - that it was dangerous to become too elated; you could become guilty of what they called ‘hubris’, arrogant pride. Paul, too, has something that whispers like that in his ear: ‘a thorn in my flesh’.” reminding him that he too, is mortal.

So, / / whether we experience healing, by the grace of God, or strength to endure weakness, by the grace of God, it is in prayer we encounter Him. That whole passage in 2 Corinthians 12 is wrapped in, / / Three times I pleaded with God…And he answered me…

In his affliction, God met him.

So, over the last three weeks David has really covered these three aspects of prayer. / / Talking To God, Talking With God, and Listening to God.

I love the little story of Dan Rather’s interview of Mother Teresa, when he asked her. “When you pray to God, what do you say?” and she responded, “I don’t say anything. I listen.” And then he turns it around and says, “Ok then, when you pray to God, what does He say to you?” And she’s quiet for a minute, and then answers, “He doesn’t say anything. He listens.”

We’re pretty good at talking, aren’t we? I mean, most people are.

Or, maybe you’re the quiet one and you find yourself often relegated to the listening position with your friends that are the talkers. But either way, someone is talking…

The point of that little Mother Teresa story isn’t to be confusing. Although maybe it is. But it points to something much deeper than just the words we use. It points to the person we are with.

And that’s what we want to focus on today, in this fourth week on prayer: / / Being with God.

/ / If prayer is about anything, ultimately, it’s about being WITH God.

Whether that is in a time of talking to him, with him, or listening, or as we will see today, simply just enjoying His presence, we must learn to be WITH Him in this life.

The reality is, we will always have to ask God for things.

We will always need to hear his voice of direction, or correction, or love.

But / / we also want to come to a place in our lives where the agenda of giving or receiving is eclipsed by the opportunity of simple connection.

So we move within these various moments, or habits of prayer.

Talking TO God, Talking WITH God, Listening TO God, Being WITH God.

/ / We must be a people of prayer because prayer is about our connection to God.

Since the beginning of the year we’ve been talking about our discipleship to Jesus. This is the life of the Christian. It is not two separate things. You get saved, and at some point you become a disciple. No, to be Christian is to be a follower, a disciple of Jesus Christ, and the mission He gave us is to lead others to become disciples of Jesus Christ. That’s the whole thing. Be a disciple. Help others be disciples.

In the Great Commission in Matthew 28, Jesus tells his disciples to / / “Go… make disciples… teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you…”

Observe means to do, to model and teach what the life of a follower of Jesus is meant to be.

What was one of the major questions that David pointed out last week? / / “Jesus, teach us to pray…”

So, He does. And then tells them to go make disciples, teaching those disciples what he taught them.

And what I hope you have noticed through these last few weeks is that the point is not getting it perfect, or even that there is a perfect or right way to do it, but that / / it is a constant invitation to connect with God.

Whether that is praying scripture, like picking a Psalm and sitting before the Lord and in a heart of contemplative reverence, speaking it out with the intention of relaying that scripture to God, to understanding it more, and to reflect on what God has spoken through it.

Maybe it’s taking a specific prayer, like the Lord’s prayer, “When you pray,” Jesus said in Matthew 6:9-13, / / “Pray then like this…. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil…”

I didn’t grow up learning you could simply pray what Jesus prayed. And yet, at the same time, it was so often stated that we wanted to be a Book of Acts church. There’s this writing called the / / Didache, it’s an early writing also called the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. And it outlined for the early church what Christian life should look like. And historians suppose it was written somewhere between 70AD and 180AD. So, very early in the life of the church.

Well, it says this on the topic of prayer, / / “…do not pray as the hypocrites, but as the Lord directed in His Gospel…” and then quotes the Lord’s prayer and finishes with this, / / “Three times in the day pray thus…”

The point is this, prayer, in its many forms and functions, is ultimately about our connection to God, whether that is utilizing previously written words on a page, a psalm, a song, spontaneous words from our heart, listening for God’s voice, OR, simply being in silence WITH God, it is about connecting with Him.

John Mark Comer says this about relationships, / / “As a general rule in relationships, with God or otherwise, you can gauge the level of intimacy in that relationship by how comfortable you are being alone together in the silence.”

There is a time to read the bible.

There is time to pray TO God with our own words or with the words of Scripture.

There is time to actively listen to the voice of God.

All of those things are good.

But / / how do you do when it comes to simply sitting in silence in the presence of God with no expectation?

As we grow in relationship with people, the more we get to know them, the easier it is to be with them without the expectation of the right conversation or thing happening. You simply learn to enjoy being with them.

Now, some personalities might be more prone to this than others. And that doesn’t mean better or worse or anything like that. I think of being out for dinner. Sometimes I will finish a meal and want a cup of coffee and I can just sit there and sip that cup of coffee for a while, I’m in no hurry. And there have been times where Kelley is on the other side of the table like, “We paid, we can leave right?”

She doesn’t drink coffee. She doesn’t want to just sit there in silence and watch me drink coffee. I don’t blame her, I suppose.

And maybe that doesn’t make much sense in a restaurant. But sometimes at the end of the night, we’ve watched a bit of TV together, sitting on the couch, and I turn the TV off, and we just simply sit there for a moment. Just to be there, with each other, in silence, enjoying each other’s presence.

I like to be with my wife.

And I would like to think she doesn’t get awkward and uncomfortable when I just sit there and stare at her without saying anything, or sit there and just hold her hand.

If you read scripture and some of the early church fathers, the union of a marriage is the high mark of metaphors for our union with God. It is an earthly example of what God desires with us. Paul finishes some of his thoughts on marriage in Ephesians 5:31-32, / / “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

Well, this idea of being WITH God in a place of prayer that maybe has or does not have words, maybe has or does not have requests, or scripture, or waiting for a response, is called / / Contemplation, and throughout church history has been termed Contemplative Prayer.

Before we get into it, let’s define the word contemplate. / / Contemplate means to look thoughtfully for a long time at, think about, think profoundly and at length; to meditate.

So, I want to talk through four dimensions of Contemplative Prayer:

/ / Looking

Yielding

Resting

Transform

/ / 1. Looking at God

This could be described as / / Looking at God, looking at you in love!

Let’s read from 2 Corinthians 3:18, from the NIV, / / And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

A couple things in that verse.

First, there’s this imagery that we just made reference two in the relationships of a bride and groom representing our relationship with God. So / / with unveiled faces, without the separation. So, we have that aspect, the veil being lift to fully reveal the bride.

Now think of the / / temple curtain that was torn when Christ gave his life on the cross, completely and forever removing the separation between God and man, that we can now experience the glory of God, each of us individually, not just the High Priest on the Day of Atonement.

So, with unveiled face, we contemplate, or look at, thoughtfully for a long time. The ESV says, / / beholding the glory of the Lord.

Next thing to note here is what it is we are looking at, what are we beholding? Paul says it is / / the Lord’s glory. Contemplating the Lord’s glory, or beholding the glory of the Lord.

What does this mean? What is the glory of the Lord here?

Biblically speaking, in the / / New Testament language this is the beauty and presence of God.

In the / / Old Testament when the cloud descended on Mt Sinai, it was attributed to His glory. When the presence of God filled the tabernacle, it was His glory. The cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night.

Ok, so we can now propose what we would call a working definition. / / To contemplate the glory of the Lord is to look at his beauty, goodness, and love, pouring out toward you.

This is really the essence of our faith. This is what sets Christianity apart from any other religion. / / Our God is real, and reveals himself in His glory. In the Old Testament it was in a cloud. In the New Testament John 1:14 says, / / And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. Hebrews 1:3 says / / Jesus is the radiance of the glory of God…

Likewise the very presence of God, the Holy Spirit, is given to us to fill us.

Our God is a God who reveals himself. And not just reveals himself as a God to be worshiped, but as a God deeply in love with and attuned to the humanity He created.

A.W. Tozer said, / / “Faith is not a once-done act, but a continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God. Believing, then, is directing the heart’s attention to Jesus. It is lifting the mind to ‘behold the Lamb of God,’; and never ceasing that beholding for the rest of our lives. At first this may be difficult, but it becomes easier as we look steadily at His wondrous Person, quietly and without strain.”

/ / Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of his glory and grace.

Now, for some that might make perfect sense…for others you might be asking, how do we look at a God who is invisible? Scripture even says, “No one has ever seen God.”

Bonaventure, a 13th century Franciscan bishop, described how we see God as having three visions, or three eyes: Obviously we have / / the eyes of our body, our physical eyes - we see the world around us. Then he described / / the eye of our mind, just a different way of explaining how we think and perceive thoughts - how we see the world within us. And then / / the eyes of our heart, by which we see God.

St. John of the Cross, 16th century friar said / / In contemplative prayer we... “remain in loving attention on God.”

That is the simple, most basic understanding of what contemplative prayer means, / / taking time to give loving attention to God, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.

/ / 2. Yielding to His love

So, we’ve covered over the last few weeks making petitions before God. Using words with God in prayer. Having conversation, and allowing time and space for response, actively listening for the voice of God. All of that is wonderful, good, and necessary.

Yielding to God in prayer is almost the opposite approach. For this we look at Jesus’ prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. Yes, he first prays, / / “If there be any other way, let this cup pass from me.” But then yields to the will, the love of God in the moment and says, / / “But not my will, but yours be done.”

The first part is a prayer a request for change of the circumstances of his life, maybe even a prayer of hope, we could say. “Father, let this cup pass from me!”

But the second part is the yielding. The giving over of his own will and desire, to surrender to the will of God whatever it might be, as fearful as it may seem, as difficult and unknown as it may be… we give our lives over to His purpose. And that is really the heart and intention of contemplative prayer.

/ / When we trust that God’s intention for us is good, we can yield to his purpose and will without fear.

This is a great statement from Robert Mulholland, / / “The deep inner posture of a joyful release of our life and being to God in absolute trust, without demands, without conditions, without reservations… [it is] neither a passive resignation nor a fatalistic acquiescence to whatever comes. It is, rather, a consistent posture of actively turning our whole being to God so that God’s presence, purpose, and power can be released through our lives into all situations.”

If acquiesce isn’t part of your regular vocabulary, it simply means to accept something reluctantly. What Mulholland is saying is that this isn’t a submission because God is all powerful and we’d be smart to submit to him. It’s a recognition of His love for us in every situation, so we can pray with confidence and surrender, “God I know you love me, and I love you, and I surrender myself to your will and purpose because I trust your love for me.”

I think the human desire will always be to ask God for a way out: a healing, a diversion, a rescue… But / / do we trust God enough to yield to his purpose for our lives no matter the cost to our own?

Now, hear me clearly. I am not saying God makes people sick. I am not saying God punishes people with sickness. And I am not saying God is the One who put you in to your particular valley of the shadow of death.

BUT, if we are doing our best to be led by the Good Shepherd, and we find ourselves in the midst of a valley of fear and death, let me encourage you that the best thing we can do is cling to and yield to the shepherd, because it is the shepherd who can protect us, and it is the shepherd who can lead us out. Of this I can guarantee.

If I find myself with sickness. I want to lean INTO God more.

If I find myself in confusion. I want to rely on God more.

If I find myself in fear, depression, trauma, anxiety, whatever the case may be, I want to yield to the good shepherd whose rod and staff, or better said, correction and direction, will lead me to where He is going. And in that closeness to God, regardless of my situation, I can pray as Paul does in Romans 8:18, / / …what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later.

/ / Contemplative prayer gives us opportunity to recognize our situation, and regardless of what we may feel about it personally, internally, rationally, we yield to the purpose and will of God, to work in and through us for His glory.

/ / 3. Resting in God’s Love

So again, asking, talking, petitioning, interceding, whatever names we give to our life of prayer, all of which are wonderful and good, are not truly resting. They can actually feel like work, because, in reality, it is. Not work like physical work, but work in that we are concentrated on what we are doing - praying, speaking, asking, petitioning toward God’s throne. And that’s a great thing. Scripture says that Christ is in heaven interceding for us, and so in many ways we are partnering with, or co-laboring with him in seeing His kingdom purposes worked out in our lives when we pray in that way. But it’s not resting.

Orthodox Jews even go as far as to restrict intercessory prayer on the Sabbath because it is a day where there is meant to be no work.

/ / Contemplative prayer, on the other hand, is less like work and more like rest. So although Talking To God, Talking With God, Listening To God are all active in their participation of doing something, / / Contemplative prayer is less about something WE do, and more about something God does in us.

It’s about coming to rest in His love. And yes, we do that in our moments of prayer no matter what the emphasis, but this is an intentional, purposeful heart posture of resting in God’s love.

Paul prayed for the church in Ephesus in this way, / / [I pray] that according to the riches of his glory [the Father] may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith - that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:16-19)

/ / Contemplative prayer is giving priority, space, and invitation, as much as it has to do with us, to be filled with all the fullness of God.

St Teresa of Avila called contemplative prayer, “Silent love”

St Augustine said, / / “True, whole prayer is nothing but love.”

And this is hard for us to get in todays culture because literally everything is performance driven.

School, work, relationships, it all seems to be give and take. But just resting so we can receive. That seems…. are you sure?

Romans 5:5 says that / / the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us... and we receive the Holy Spirit as a free gift when we have faith in Jesus Christ. This is no work of our own, but the grace of God.

/ / Contemplative prayer is resting in Him and receiving the love of God so that our identity comes from being well loved sons and daughters, like Jesus, who when John baptized him, the heavens were opened, and before he had done a single miracle, a single work, a single teaching, the Father spoke from heaven, “This is my Son in whom I love and am well pleased…” and the Holy Spirit rested on him. Not by works, but for the sake of love.

And / / out of us receiving that love we then have love to offer in worship and praise and service.

1 John 4:19, / / We love because he first loved us.

/ / If I want anything to truly give, I must start in the place of receiving what I can not manufacture myself. True and genuine love.

Which brings us then to the fourth aspect of Contemplative Prayer: being

/ / 4. Transformed by His Love

/ / Transformation is the heart of contemplative prayer, which is why contemplative prayer is at the heart of our spiritual formation. Remember, we’re talking about practices in our discipleship to Jesus that lead toward being transformed to be more like Him. To be with Jesus, become like Jesus, do as Jesus did.

We read earlier from 2 Corinthians 3, about / / beholding the glory of the Lord… Paul says as we do this, behold his glory, contemplating the glory of God, we / / …are being transformed INTO the same image from one degree of glory to another.

That image is our likeness to Christ. And transformation comes as we rest in the love of God, beholding his glory.

Paul’s direction here is specific - / / if you want to be transformed to be more like Christ, you must gaze at the beauty and glory of Christ in His presence.

Here’s a bit of a warning: the opposite is true. / / What we behold, we become. Whether that is right or wrong, good or bad. Holy or profane. Divine or demonic.

And this is not in a way of what the world might call “manifesting into reality”.

You don’t scroll instagram of people only showing their good lives, the boats, cars, girlfriends or boyfriends, money whatever and end up with those things.

This is not a magnetic universe incantation.

This is the reality that the spirit behind the thing we behold begins to work on our hearts and produce in us the reason for the post in the first place. So we stare at these posts that are presented in their perfection to cover up someone’s inadequacy, depression, fear of failure or fear of what other people think, and even though the post itself looks great, it breads in us the very darkness it’s covering up, and at the very least makes us more angry, anxious, or emotional.

Spend your days watching dirty TV and out of your mouth will flow the contents of a corrupted heart.

That’s what Scripture says. Jesus said in Matthew 12:34-35, / / “…out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil.”

He also said in Matthew 15:19, / / “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander…”

That’s why Proverbs 4:23 (NIV) says, / / Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.

We look at sin and corruption, we see the problems in this world or in the church and we think, “wow, they really have a sin problem.” or a Character issue. Or they are evil…. What they have is a heart issue. An affection issue. Their attention is fixed on the wrong thing.

/ / Contemplative prayer is the yielding of our hearts to the work of the Holy Spirit, being washed by the blood of Jesus Christ, and the Love of the Father, so that out of our lives flow what has been poured into us.

Rivers of living water can only flow out of bodies of living water…

Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist, and for all I can tell, not a follower of Jesus, but has dedicated his life to researching the impact of religion and God on the human mind, wrote a book called, How God Changes Your Brain, and he wrote, / / “If you contemplate God long enough, something surprising happens in the brain. Neural functioning begins to change… [we have] a nervous system that actively participates in its own neural construction, something we do not see in other animal brains.”

Let me try and explain this without sounding like I’m completely out of my depth here. Which I am, but that’s ok.

There’s a part of our brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, it’s between our limbic system and our prefrontal cortex. It’s involved in a wide range of cognitive and emotional functions, including impulse control, error detection, attention, and decision making. When it is stimulated, it decreases our impulses of anger and fear and increases our feelings of compassion. So, as we contemplate the love of God being given to us through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, meaning, to gaze at intently for long periods of time, this neuroscientist is saying that part of the brain is stimulated and it literally rewires our brain to be less angry and fearful and more loving and compassionate.

This is not science proving we don’t need God because obviously within ourselves us humans are awesome. No, no, no. This is science revealing God’s miraculous creation and work in us, and that the invitation of Scripture to be transformed by the renewing, or renovation, you could say rewiring of our minds, is 1000% accurate.

Now, this is also why correct doctrine and theology matters. You go, huh? Where are you going now?

Because the opposite is true. Studies show that if your view of God is an authoritative, angry, vengeful tyrant in the sky, it can have a similar effect as PTSD and you will actually become more fearful and aggressive.

William Temple, an anglican bishop in the early 1900s proposed that if people have a wrong view of God, the more religious they become, the worse they will become. This is why it is so critically important to have a right perspective of who God is.

We have a high view here of what is called Christology. Basically it is Hebrews 1:3, that Jesus Christ revealed the heart of God fully, that he is the very radiance of God, that he expressed the character and nature of God in his life.

One of the best ways to understand then the heart of God is to read Scripture, specifically the four gospels, to see how Jesus lived and acted, taught and talked to people.

And taking that - what we know of God, through the work and life of Jesus, and the power of the Holy Spirit, and the love of the Father and yield ourselves to God in prayer.

So, Hebrews 1:3 says / / Jesus is the radiance of God, and Psalm 34:5 says, / / Those who look to him are radiant…

Think of the impact that the presence of God had on Moses as he came down the mountain. His face shown so brightly that he had to cover it with a vail. This is also another reference made in 2 Corinthians 3:18, that we, with unvailed faces, behold the glory of God. Why? Because the vail has been torn between the people and the Holy place.

The word beholding, or contemplate, also holds an element of being a mirror, to reflect what we look at. As we behold him, we become like him, and we look like him, and we radiate like him through our lives and our actions.

So, in closing:

/ / To pray contemplatively, you have to at least begin to adopt a contemplative lifestyle.

To be with Jesus in this kind of way, we have to slow down to a more prayerful pace. It does not work if we don’t learn to slow down.

/ / Which requires arranging, or rearranging our lives around God. To give priority to Him.

I mentioned earlier that the early church prayed the Lord’s prayer three times a day. This comes from the Hebrew tradition before it of stopping to pray three times a day. Jesus, as a faithful Jewish man would have most likely done this, morning, noon, and night.

And having a rhythm of prayer, whether that is 1 time a day, 2, 3 or more times where you consciously stop to focus your attention on God becomes what A.W. Tozer called, / / “Constant conscious communion.” Or what 1 Thessalonians 5:17 encourages, to / / “Pray without ceasing”.

If you’ve heard the story of Brother Lawrence, the 17th century friar who wrote what would become The Practice of the Presence of God” If you are intrigued by this conversation around contemplative prayer, I encourage you to buy the book. Also, The Eclectic Contemplative, by Eddie Piorek is a bit of a more modern look at the same.

But listen to this writing from Brother Lawrence. It seems he was so humble that he even writes this as if he’s received it from another “brother”, yet it’s believed he was writing of himself, but he couldn’t get himself to talk about himself. / / “For more than forty years, this brother’s principal endeavor has been to stay as close as possible to God, doing, saying, and thinking nothing that may displease Him. He has no reason for doing this, except to show his gratitude for God’s pure love, and because God deserves infinitely more than that anyway.”

I think the statement we read earlier really sums all of this up so well, / / “Looking at God, looking at you in love…”

Now, I get this has its complications in todays word. How on earth do we carve out time for this? We all know how busy we all are. We all know how distracted and dysfunctional our world is. And no, I’m not saying you should all become friars or monks in a monastery somewhere, and dedicate your lives to silence and solitude 100%. That’s not your reality. It’s not mine.

But what I am pretty convinced of is that / / God is probably always looking at us in love. The question is, / / how often is it that we stop what we are doing and even if just for a moment turn to look back at him, as he looks at us in love?

So, to close out this morning I want to simply give you this challenge…. / / Start.

Start at some point this week to rearrange your life, even just a little bit, around God.

My guess is everyone of us has a pretty jam packed life. But if we think about it, I’m confident we can begin to take just a moment to focus on Jesus Christ, allow the Holy Spirit to be present with us, and invite the Love of the Father to wash over us. Just simply being content in His presence. Content in His love. Content to just be WITH Him.

Don’t put pressure on yourself like this is now a task you have to find time for everyday. Maybe you will. Maybe you won’t. The Goal is not perfection, it’s relationship that brings us deeper in love with the God who loves us.

The more I implement these practices, the more I am finding that I desire to live in them, but also, when my life goes haywire and I can’t, or simply don’t for a moment, I don’t walk in with discouragement or condemnation, but I embrace the moment I am in.

This past week I realized I had not taken consistent time to read scripture on a daily basis for quite a few days. Now, I had an unbelievably whirlwind and busy couple of weeks. Do you know what I did? I sat in my chair in my office, had my cup of coffee there beside me, looked up what the daily bible reading was for THAT day, and read it, in the presence of God, because I know He is with me, and with a heart to know His word, know His heart, and allow Him to work in me.

I didn’t beat myself up for not reading the day before.

I didn’t put on myself the impossible task to catch up 10 days of reading or whatever it was.

I simply looked up that days reading, read the Scriptures, and found life in God through the pages of the Bible.

While I was away I was busy, focused on packing my parents home, sorting all manner of things and doing my best to help them. I did not fast on Wednesdays….oh for shame… I don’t feel shame… I don’t feel condemnation, and even this week, at about 4pm I decided to give my body some food, even though I wanted to fast through the day, I didn’t feel the burden of perfection, or the physical capacity to do it.

I gave God what I had. I will give him more this week on Wednesday. I will live and learn to honor Him in these ways, not because the goal is works or perfection, but because I desire to be, as Brother Lawrence said, as close to Him as possible.

It is the same with prayer.

Especially something like this, where we hear a story like Brother Lawrence who found that place of continual connection with God, living under a fountain of love.

That’s ok. Maybe one day we get there, but for today…just start.

And if you get distracted, miss it, forget. Start again.

Start with making God a priority.

Start by looking to Him.

Start yielding to His presence, His love, His power to transform.

Start living in the moment with God.