Prayer: Being With the Father

I wrestled with a bunch of short titles to capture what I've been learning about how we miss prayer when we turn it into technique. Titles such as:

• Relationship Before Ritual

• Before Prayer Was a Practice

• Prayer Was Personal

• Father Before Formula

Ultimately you can see where I landed with Prayer: Being With the Father.

What if we have sometimes started in the wrong place when we talk about the prayer life of Jesus? We study His habits, identify His practices, and teach the spiritual disciplines of prayer and solitude.

None of that is necessarily wrong. But it can leave us studying what Jesus did without paying enough attention to whom Jesus loved.

Jesus didn’t simply practice prayer. Prayer Was a Relationship Before It Was a Discipline.

Jesus loved His Father.

That changes how we see everything else.

Watch Where Jesus Is Aimed

Our study for Getaway Like Jesus began with a surprisingly simple question: When did Jesus get away? Following the Gospel accounts, we identified 22 distinctive getaway moments.

What caught our attention wasn’t simply that Jesus withdrew. It was what was happening around those moments.

Again and again, someone wanted something from Jesus. There were people to heal, crowds to satisfy, expectations to meet, opportunities to seize, and ministry to accomplish.

Something else could reasonably have filled that moment. Often someone was actually asking Jesus to spend that moment differently.

Yet Jesus chose differently.

Across those 22 getaways, we began noticing four recurring rhythms. Jesus made room to pray, rest, equip and share life with His friends, and align His heart with His Father’s heart and will.

These weren’t four boxes Jesus needed to check. They certainly weren’t four disciplines He mechanically practiced.

They revealed where His life was aimed.

That’s kavanah.

The frequency mattered because it revealed priority. When competing voices were saying, in effect, Jesus, shouldn’t You be doing this instead?, His choices let us see what mattered to Him.

That is why Getaway Like Jesus is ultimately about pace and prayer, not must-prayer.

Flusser Helped Us See It Again

Recently, Jewish scholar David Flusser’s The Sage from Galilee gave us a fresh angle on something we had already been deeply drawing our hearts into. Flusser spent a lifetime studying Jesus within the Jewish world of the Second Temple period.

He helps us see that Jesus did not invent prayer, Scripture meditation, blessing, synagogue life, Sabbath, Kingdom language, love of God, or love of neighbor. These strands were already part of the Jewish world in which Jesus lived.

And that’s what makes watching Jesus so fascinating.

The strands were already there. Watch what happens when Jesus lives them together.

Jesus braids them into one life.

At the center of that life isn’t a technique. It is His Father.

Flusser’s attention to Jesus’ prayer, His withdrawals to quiet places, His Father-language, and His distinctive consciousness as Son helps us resist turning Jesus into a modern practitioner of spiritual disciplines. We begin to see something warmer and much more relational.

Jesus wasn’t withdrawing to practice solitude. Jesus was getting away to be with His Father.

The practice served the relationship.

The relationship did not serve the practice.

From Saying Prayers to Paying Attention

That distinction may help us see something about our own prayer lives. Prayer can easily become assumed.

We pray before the meal. Someone prays to begin the meeting, and someone else prays to close it.

We bow our heads at church. We have a devotional time and may even develop a faithful prayer routine.

All of those can be good. Yet somehow we can do all of them without experiencing much of what seems so unmistakable when we watch Jesus.

He loved being with His Father.

Maybe the invitation isn’t primarily to pray more. Maybe it is to become increasingly Fatherward.

We notice Him. We listen and respond. We enjoy Him, ask, receive, linger, trust, bring what hurts, and celebrate what is beautiful.

We wrestle honestly with what we don’t understand. We keep bringing our hearts back into alignment with His heart and His will.

Prayer begins becoming less something we perform for God and more life with God.

And Then Jesus Invited His Friends In

This may be one of our favorite discoveries. Jesus’ relationship with His Father was deeply personal, but it was never merely private.

His friends watched Him pray. They traveled with Him, heard Him bless, watched Him withdraw, and experienced His dependence upon the Father.

That brings us to what we’ve been calling haver—friends paying attention to God together.

At first we may need some techniques to help us relearn this kind of life. A good question can slow us down, a passage of Scripture can give us somewhere to linger, and a small circle of friends can help keep one voice from becoming the teacher while everyone else becomes the audience.

Those structures can help us learn.

But they’re not the destination.

Over time we begin discovering the warmth of mutual community—friends leaning into one another’s love for the Father and love for each other.

One friend notices something in the Word another missed. Someone asks a question nobody can answer.

Someone shares where his or her heart is drifting. Another friend quietly reminds us what God is like.

We listen. We linger. We pray. We love.

Nobody has to be the expert in the middle because God is already in the middle.

This is haver.

Friends paying attention to God together.

Maybe Prayer Is Simpler—and Warmer—Than We Made It

Jesus gives us something much better than a prayer technique to master.

He gives us a life to watch.

Watch Jesus love His Father. Watch Him make room for that relationship when other voices are asking for His attention.

Watch Him pray and rest. Watch Him share life with His friends and bring His heart again and again into alignment with His Father’s heart and will.

And then notice something beautiful.

Jesus doesn’t keep this life to Himself. He invites His friends in.

Perhaps that’s where renewal in our own prayer lives begins. Not with another commitment to pray more, but with an increasingly simple desire:

Father, teach us to enjoy paying attention to You.

And maybe even better:

Teach us to do it together.

ps. If you want to walk more with us in what we're learning from Jesus I invite you to engage our Kavanah and Jesus Book Series. Our hearts are full to overflow with, Life Between the Miracles, Paying Attention to God Together, The Disciplemaking Genius of Jesus, Walk with Jesus and Getaway Like Jesus moments. Available on Apple Books and Cadre's Online Bookstore.