In this episode Gina and Ali Ash begin to deconstruct and reconstruct our understanding of prayer. Addressing common baggage and confusion, Gina and Ali blow up the boxes most of us have placed God and our identity in. Prayer begins here.
Ali Ash is a leader, mentor and life-coach on staff at New Community Church in Vista, CA.
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The Foundations of Prayer
Gina:
We are living in crazy times and there’s a lot going on in the world. A lot of pain, a lot of fear, a lot of trauma surfacing, a lot of things being exposed and it is driving a lot of people to prayer, to call out to God, whether or not they have a relationship with Him.
I really felt compelled to do a series, a very basic series on prayer. What is it? Why do we pray? And in this episode, I’m calling this the beginning of prayer. We’re going to dive into who God is, who He isn’t, who we are, who we aren’t and therefore what prayer is.
I hope this encourages you. I hope this begins to unlock something in you and gives you permission to explore prayer, not as empty words that you repeat or things that you scream out, although those things are important, but that you could encounter and receive the depth of relationship that is available through prayer.
Ali, I invited you because I love you. You have a lot of wisdom and you teach skills classes at New Community Church. That is how do you take the Gospel and Biblical narrative and the truth of God’s Word and how do you apply it in your life and live out the freedom that we’ve been given by Jesus.
There’s some very practical things that are so powerful in the church and prayer is a huge part of that. That’s why we’re here. There’s a couple of things to lay the groundwork and the foundation of our conversation. Even as believers, we don’t understand and fully take advantage of the gift that prayer actually is.
As I say in my prayer class, we’re going to deconstruct and reconstruct our understanding of prayer. We’re going to blow up the box that we’ve placed God in and our own identity. You deal a lot with identity in your skills classes. That’s a big part of the things that you are wrestling with people and helping them tackle.
Then how do we have freedom and confidence in our relationship with God, ourselves and other people? How does that play out and how does prayer play a part in that? There really is nothing more precious and sweet and miraculous than the fact that we can meet with God as His kids.
The holy place of meeting anytime, that’s what prayer is. We’re going to talk a little bit about the baggage and the confusion wrapped around prayer. We’re going to talk about relational versus transactional.
Ali:
It’s important, like you said, to deconstruct. I’ve realized that in my own mind, because it starts in my mind before it comes out of my mouth and then it comes out in action or behavior. If I’m not able to connect some of the false understandings I have about who God is, what prayer is, who I am, then it’s really hard to be able to identify when I’m outside of that relationship that God has created to have with me.
In order to move closer to God, I have to be able to deconstruct the things that are keeping me from experiencing that. Being able to talk through, like we’re doing right now, a conversation about prayer sometimes brings to light things that we didn’t even realize that we thought of, or we’ve experienced, or we’ve created around how we pray or, when we can, or what that looks like. In order to step into the truth, we have to understand the lies that we’ve been living in.
Gina:
Depending on our upbringing, our culture that we’ve lived in, if we did go to church, if we didn’t go to church, if we went to a Catholic church versus a Protestant church, or if we were not churched at all, or if our only understanding of prayer is from the movies, we have very narrow understanding.
Hollywood usually depicts someone praying with their hands folded right in front of their face and kneeling, or there’s these very stereotypical understandings of prayer, or it’s an amen at the end of something a spiritual pastor priest rabbi says and then I agree with that, or it’s a repeated thing: The Apostles Creed or the Lord’s Prayer or the rosary I’m going to repeat this over and over again.
Some of those may be parts of prayer, but there’s so much more. Let’s start with some basics. Let’s start with God. And let me say, this is a very elementary level conversation. We could have a podcast that lands and stays on prayer for the rest of our days and probably not get to all of it. This isn’t a dissertation on prayer, this is the beginning.
Some of these things we’re going to hit on you, I want to encourage you, it may trigger something in you, there’s going to be some stuff we say that you may want to explore deeper. You may have questions that I want to encourage you to go to the Father with, but you can also email me, I will have links at the end of this blog.
If you go to a church and have a pastor or a trusted friend who’s a believer, you could go to them and ask for help and prayer to process some of these things, because these are potentially big issues, but we’re not going to take the time to unpack this topic super deep. We are going to identify some of that baggage and confusion. My hope would be that this would start a journey for somebody.
Ali:
The topic in itself brings up so many different thoughts and emotions that we try to unpack. Even thinking about times that maybe you’ve been embarrassed when you’ve stepped out to pray, or times that you’ve wanted to pray, but something in you is resisting it because maybe it’s easier in that moment to think you’ve got it under control, and if you step into prayer, are you losing control? Because now you’re admitting that you actually need it.
If anything that we share or anything that we’re talking about brings about this feeling of your heart beating, or “I didn’t like what that brought out to me.” What an opportunity to grab a pen, grab a piece of paper and write it out, journal it out, because I believe anytime we have some wrestle or some tension that’s a good thing.
It’s an opportunity for us to hear God in a way that we may not have before. Push into it. Stay curious, because you’re onto something there and God has new for us and we don’t want to miss it. Don’t brush it off. Keep seeking and saying yes.
Who is God?
Gina:
Discomfort, if we lean into it, oftentimes leads to healing, because it exposes things that we can address. It brings about the things, the fear, the insecurity, the anxiety. It starts to open that door so that we can let God into those places. It’s an opportunity not to be avoided and run away from, but to actually lean into.
So let’s start with God. I want to start with what God is not. God is not an angry Punisher. There’s a lot of depictions of “The angry God and the Guy who’s waiting for us to mess up so that He can punish us. Therefore that is why stuff is happening in the world or to me.” God is not an angry Punisher.
God is not a genie in a bottle. He’s not someone when suddenly you’re in crisis you’re frantically rubbing the lamp and saying, “Please, please rescue, help, give me, do this.” So many people, even believers, go to God in that way. Please hear me, none of these statements are accusations, these are simply distorted understandings that keep us limited in what we have access to.
God is not a cosmic force. It’s not like Star Wars, “the force be with you”. He’s not without a personality, without emotion. He’s a person. God is not passive or disengaged. He’s not a God who is sitting on a throne somewhere, and occasionally He might turn His head our direction if we’re so lucky.
That is not who He is. Those are some of the biggies. Do you want to add anything to that? How you’ve seen those manifest with people or with yourself.
Ali:
We all bring experience based on what we’ve seen or the homes we’ve been raised in. This is never to put blame on anyone, specifically our parents or our family. But we build our perspective based on those experiences. I know for me, a lot of it was works. You learned to do certain things and when you did those certain things, only then you were able to receive something.
The biggest one, personally for me, is that prayer was something that I had to do the right way after I had done A, B and C, in order to then grow closer to God. That’s not the way relationship works. That’s not the way God relates to us or communicates to us. I feel like there’s a lot of freedom when you’re able to realize the misunderstanding or the even unintentional ways that we perceive who God is.
All these things that God is not, those are sometimes hard to discover until we realize who God is. We start to understand who He is in His entirety, which I don’t think we will fully ever understand until we’re face to face with Him. But the seeking of knowing Him more reveals and brings to light the things that we’ve learned or fallen into believing that limits Him, because God is not limited.
Gina:
It’s not, “If I do this, then I’ll receive this.” In your prayer life, these distorted understandings would probably manifest like this: if you think He’s an angry Punisher, then prayer is shame driven “I’m terrible. I’m a worm. I am dirt.” We’re all sinners saved by grace, but it becomes very shame and condemnation driven, rather than grace driven.
If He’s a genie in a bottle to you, then it’s Hail Mary prayers. You don’t really engage until you need something or you want something or you’re desperate. Then you can get very offended if you don’t feel that response right away, “Something’s wrong with me, because He did for them, but He didn’t do for me.” That could be how that manifests.
If it’s a cosmic force, then you don’t even really pray, “I need to be positive” or “I need to stay in this place.” You don’t even know how to engage in prayer. It becomes more repetitious, vein repetition. Almost babbling the words over and over again, because you feel like you’re supposed to do that, eventually it’ll all come together and the universe will somehow work in your favor.
If He’s passive or disengaged, then you may not even be inclined to pray. “What’s the point? I’ve tried, nothing happens. Therefore, I won’t.” That is a little bit of how those things may show up in terms of your prayer life.
Now, let’s hit on who God is. These are broad strokes. Let’s talk about the big things that are very foundational. God is good. He is good. He’s intrinsically good. He is a good Father. God is kind. His kindness leads us to repentance.
If you had an absent father in your home, if you have a hard relationship with your father, this isn’t an accusation, but some of these may be difficult to accept. The idea that God is a good father, if you’ve never experienced a good father, that’s really difficult. If you never experienced a kind father, that may be very difficult.
This is about blowing up the assumptions and coming back to the Truth, whether or not right now, I experience that, or I believe that, or I feel that, this is what’s True. He’s holy. He is a holy God. We talk about Jesus being our friend. He’s our friend, but He is also holy. There’s a holy fear. That’s not fear of condemnation or shame based, but fear as in reverence and awe that He is God and He is on the throne and He’s the lover of my soul.
He knows the hairs on my head and He hears me. There’s that juxtaposition, that beautiful balance between “You’re good. You’re kind. But You’re holy. You’re just” You know, we’re recording this right now in the middle of the George Floyd death and all that has triggered in the country and the world, which is so painful, but so necessary. Justice is a big theme right now. One of the hardest things is waiting for justice.
But we have a God and He will have the final say, and there will be justice in the end. Some of it will happen in our lifetime for us, for our friends. Some of it won’t happen in this lifetime, but He’s a Redeemer. Redemption is the beautiful miracle about the character of our God that He does. And it doesn’t make sense until you live it, that He does work all things together for our good and His glory, and that includes the hard.
The biggest thing is that God is love. The Bible says that God is love, which is hard if you have never experienced love. If love for you has been something that has been manipulative, that has had conditions, that has been twisted in some way, then that could be a place of deep hurt and pain that needs to be healed. But the Good News is that God is love. He’s motivated by love. Everything that He is encompasses love, healthy whole love.
Ali:
It’s hard to understand in our limited abilities, to grasp “God is love” if we’ve experienced these negative ways of love affecting us in our life. We all have because we live in a broken world. Unfortunately the truth is that we have all been violated in love and love really tells us who we are. It tells us a lot of our identity. It tells us that we are unique, that we have value, that we’re worthy.
We find ourselves here now trying to figure out how to restore what’s been broken. It’s so beautiful to look at God as that perfect love and that we have this innate need and desire in our hearts to be in a relationship that is perfect love.
What does that mean for us as we talk about prayer, as we talk about who God is and that ultimately He is the only one that can meet that need that we have, that He put in us to be in a love relationship with our Father. I’m excited to continue to talk about what that means that God is perfect and that He’s love and He’s good.
Gina:
If we say, “He is love.”, then what is love? We pull that from 1st Corinthians 13, which is the love chapter. If you’ve been to a Christian wedding, you’ve probably heard the love chapter. Let’s define love. Here are some characteristics and traits of true unconditional love. This is the list straight out of 1st Corinthians 13:4-8.
Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not jealous. Love is not boastful. Love is not proud or rude. Love does not demand its own way. Some of you right now might be going “Well… He’s God. He demands His own way.” But no, that’s what free will is, it’s the beauty of free will.
Love is not irritable. Love keeps no records of wrongs. That’s a huge lie that people have that God’s got this laundry list of everything you’ve done, and as soon as you come face to face with Him, He’s going to read you the riot act.
But He keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not rejoice in injustice, but rejoices in the truth. Justice is a big thing for God. The truth will win. We get to the end of the book, He wins. Love never gives up. Love never loses faith.
Love is always hopeful and it always endures through all circumstances. God is love. He is good. He is kind. He is just. He is Holy. All of that is through the filter of love. That love is a healthy, beautiful, championing love. That is who He is.
Ali:
He’s unchanging and always who He says He is. Even right now, I want to go away in a little corner and be in conversation with Him because I hunger for those things. Someone that never gives up on me, that endures forever, that’s nothing that we’ve tasted and seen in the temporal. We get bits and pieces of it, which is a gift, healthy relationships with others, what a gift God has given us.
When you read through that Scripture of what love is, who God is, that is a craving and hunger that we all have. Knowing that makes me want to spend more time on my knees, on my face, in His Word, driving in my car, singing praises and talking to Him because that releases me to be me in a way that nothing else does.
Who Are We?
Gina:
Because if He is all of these things that love is, then He is trustworthy. We have an enemy in this world who wants to distort, steal, kill, and destroy. Probably his biggest success is in creating that place of distrust, that if I’ve experienced love, other than this, then I’m going to project that onto my image of God, therefore “He’s not a trustworthy, safe place to go to.”
There’s that separation. What has been stolen, is what we’re hoping, even in this conversation, you’ll start to receive. Something’s been stolen and we want to help set the table for that to be restored. Here are a few of the truths that we can live under: We are not an accident. We didn’t happen. We weren’t stumbled upon. I really encourage you to read Psalm 139. It talks about how God knit us together. That we were intentionally made lovingly made.
As someone whose parents were not married, whose parents were alcoholics and in a really unhealthy, ugly relationship, where my mom wanted to marry my dad, my dad was a player didn’t want to marry her. My mom got pregnant on purpose to trap my dad. When I came to Jesus, when I was 12, when I encountered God’s love for the first time, one of the things I really struggled with when I first read it was Psalm 139.
I grew up believing I was a mistake, that I was an accident, that I was not intentional, that I wasn’t wanted. Here I’m reading this Scripture, that’s saying that I was purposely woven together. Why would it be God’s will that this terrible relationship happened And then I was a result?
But that’s the beautiful miracle of redemption. I want to say to you, whoever you are, whatever circumstance of your life, your birth, whether you are adopted, whether you are in a family that’s married, whether you’re in a broken home, whatever it is, you are not an accident.
Ali:
God has intention in why you are where you are right now. He not only meets us there, but it’s a continuation until the day we’re face to face with Him. If there’s anything that you take from this blog, I do pray that it is that God is for you, that He intentionally knit you together for purposes that only He has already set in motion for your life. Whether you feel like you are living that out right now or not, pause and turn towards Him in a way where you’re inviting Him into the moment you’re in right now.
Gina:
We are not an accident. We are not without hope. There’s a lot of hopelessness right now in our world, but we are not hopeless. We are not without hope. We are not. We are not without purpose. Every human being, every son and daughter on the planet, if we choose to, have a purpose, have a design, we have gifts.
We’ve been knit together on purpose. We have a voice and nobody looks like us. Nobody sounds like us. Nobody can stand in our shoes. To believe the value that we have is significant. We are not unwanted. We’re not an accident. We are not unwanted. We are chosen. We are wanted. We are not unworthy.
There’s a lot of shame, a lot of condemnation, a lot of self-hatred and self-condemnation that deems us not worthy, “Everyone else is, but I’m not. If you only knew what I’ve done or what I haven’t done.” Or maybe you’ve been told all your life that you’re not good enough. Or you don’t haven’t succeeded enough or done the right things.
In God’s kingdom, you are worthy through Jesus. We’ll get to that a little bit later. That’s what we are not. Let’s talk about who we are or what we are. We are seen. First of all, the truth is that there is a God that is holy, that He is on the throne, but He’s loving, good and kind. He sees you. Wherever you are right now, He sees you.
Ali:
You matter so much to Him. He doesn’t see you like the Santa Claus song. It’s not this. “I see you from a distance.” It’s more of this love that pursues you wherever you’re at. He chooses to see us because of how much He loves us and cares for us and how much we matter to Him. It’s this desire to be in an intimate relationship with you. That’s why He sees us. That’s why He seeks us. That’s why He’s the pursuer of our souls.
That’s why He’s a good Father. We have to rewrite the definition of a good Father, because when we use that language or at least for me, the only thing we can compare it to is our earthly experience. That’s the faith piece, where, by faith, you have to allow your brain to go to places that feel a little bit confusing in a way, because you can’t define Him.
Gina:
We’re known by Him. Psalm 139 says that there’s no place we can go that He can’t reach us, where He can’t be with us. If we’re in a place where we feel shame, that may be a scary thought. But if we’re in a place of believing that He’s good and trustworthy, that is the best, most comforting truth that we can hold on to. We’re seen, we’re known, we’re loved.
The entire narrative from creation to today, the entire Old and New Testament is this narrative of the pursuit of God’s love coming after us. We are loved. That’s why Jesus came. John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” The next verse needs to be as memorized as the first. John 3:17 “For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.”
That is who He is. We’re loved. We’re chosen. We’re wanted. We are not an accident. We’re not without hope. We’re not without purpose. We are not unwanted or unworthy. We are seen, known, loved, chosen, and we are wanted by the Creator of the heavens and the earth. If we are loved, if God is a good and loving Father, then we are made for a relationship with Him. And if that’s all true, then what is prayer?
You may feel like we’ve taken a long time to get here, but all of that is so imperative for us to understand what prayer is. Prayer is a conversation. Prayer is presence with God and us, with one another. Prayer is intimacy.
That’s a word I believe has been hijacked by the enemy and our culture. It’s been turned dark and ugly and attached to really profane things. But intimacy is seeing and being seen, knowing and being known, loving and being loved. Prayer is conversation. It’s presence. It’s intimacy. It’s safety.
Ali:
Before defining who we are and breaking down some of those misconceptions, if you miss any of those points: the conversation piece, the presence piece, the intimacy piece, then it’s more of a monologue or transactional instead of the dialogue and the relational. That’s why we spent so much time with the preface, because to understand the gift that prayer is and the power it has.
The power that you step into when you’re actually in conversation with the presence of a Holy God, it’s mind-blowing. That’s why His Word tells us that He brings us peace that the world doesn’t understand that the world can’t give to us. Being in God’s presence, in conversation, in an intimate relationship with Him, brings the peace that right now, more than ever, is so clear that our world needs and desires and that we were created for.
What is Prayer?
Gina:
Prayer is the very definition of relationship in a lot of ways. That changes everything. Prayer is holy and completely relational, it is not transactional. The religious systems of the world and being in a broken world has reduced prayer to a transactional thing.
“If I do this, then I receive this.” Even a confessional, I’m going to confess, and I’m going to be forgiven. I’m going to do my right “Hail Mary’s” or whatever my penance is there, so that I can reconcile. But the reconciliation is done. It is finished.
Let’s go to the beginning. Most of us know the Creation story about Adam and Eve. God created the world. He created Adam. He created Eve. And in the garden was this time of unhindered unencumbered relationship.
No barriers, healthy intimate exchange between God and us. What’s really powerful about this story, about the serpent, Satan, who comes and tempts Adam and Eve. The temptation wasn’t to sin. The temptation was simply to doubt.
To doubt that God is good, to doubt His motives. That seed of distrust and that willingness to consider that doubt is what led them. They led themselves right to that choice to eat of the Tree of Good and Evil. That created separation, suddenly they had awareness of how small they were, how big God was. Suddenly shame entered in. Suddenly all of those things started to come. That’s what created separation.
One of the most heartbreaking statements in the Bible is when Adam and Eve hid themselves, and God says, “Where are you?” Depending on our understanding of God, we think that’s an angry “Where are you?” But it wasn’t that, it was a broken-hearted, “Where are you?” It’s like when you know what your kid did and they’re hiding, and you’re like, “Where are you?” He knew where they were, but there was that breach in the relationship.
The thing about God’s love is the moment that act, before he even says, “Where are you?”, the moment that separation occurred, God set into motion His plan to win us back. His plan of redemption, which was Jesus, to willingly live a perfect, sinless life, be Holy God and holy man, and lay his life down so that relationship can be mended, so that all those barriers could be taken out of the way.
Now that veil of separation is torn. In the old Testament there were all these sacrifices and rituals you had to go through in order to be in God’s presence. The High Priest of Israel would be able to enter into the Holy of Holies once a year, and would enter in past this huge veil. When Jesus died there was an earthquake and the veil in the temple was actually literally ripped in two, and it wasn’t a curtain from Ikea. It was thick.
There’s no way humans could have done that. It was a symbolic tearing that said “No longer is there going to be a separation between God and man. No longer do we need to go through all these jumps. All we need is to have a relationship with Him, when we can come boldly into His presence.”
I want to say, especially to people who believe in Jesus, you have access to the throne room. You don’t have to be a pastor or a priest to pray and to hear God’s voice. You can hear Him. You can be in an intimate, loving relationship with Him. It’s a conversation. It’s allowing Him in and inviting Him in and letting Him speak to you as you speak to Him. That’s what prayer is.
If you don’t have a relationship with God, it’s a very simple thing. Tell Him you want to know Him. He’s going to reveal Himself to you and you, as well, have access through Jesus and the sacrifice that He made, to be reconciled into that relationship with Him.
Ali:
The reality that wherever you are right now, whether you’re in your car at home, at work, in your bedroom, in the bathroom, wherever you are, you have access to the living God. He’s a living and active God. He’s not passive. He’s actively pursuing you right now, because relationship is what He desires with you. That is such a gift to us. We cannot separate our full understanding of who God is from our full understanding of who we are.
That access that we have, to be in His presence and to create space, to listen to His voice, that is that sweet spot. I can’t say enough about the blessing of prayer and that sacred space of being in the presence of a Holy God, who knows us intimately, who loves us perfectly, who always is for us and is waiting with arms open for us to turn towards Him.
Because He’s a God of grace. He’s a God of justice. He’s perfect. But that doesn’t mean He’s not always waiting with open arms for us, because He loves his children.
Gina:
He’s with us. The whole New Testament, the Gospels, Jesus’ life, is Him demonstrating what it’s like to live connected to His heavenly Father. It is living in constant relationship and dependence. That’s what we’re invited to. We’ve reduced religion, reduced the Gospel to “You’re a sinner and you need a savior. Jesus died, repent, and you’ll go to heaven. You won’t go to hell.”
That is such a one dimensional understanding and a cheapening of the beauty and the complexity of who God is and what the Gospel brings. It’s an invitation to be restored in the right relationship with the One who made us and Who knows us, Who designed us, Who created us, Who wanted us, Who chose us and Who has a purpose for us.
He’s with us, in the good and the bad and the hard. It isn’t that I accept Jesus and my life is perfect. No, we live in a broken world and it’s hard as we see right now, our world is broken. It’s groaning with the brokenness and the pain and the trauma. People are imperfect. We inflict a lot of pain on one another, and we have an enemy, but God is present with us right in it.
You are loved. You are being pursued. If you know Jesus, but maybe you’ve been in a place of feeling distant, stagnant, your Christianity has been reduced to attending church, but somehow you ended up here. God’s inviting you back to hear His voice. He’s set a table for you to get to know Him. He already knows you. He’s inviting you deeper.
If you have never entered into a relationship with God, you’ve never received the gift of salvation through Jesus, you have an opportunity. All you need to do is ask. All you need to do is come into His presence and say, “Jesus, forgive me. I need you.” Invite Him in.
Ask Him to cleanse your heart and to fill you with His Spirit and begin to have a conversation with Him and listen. Father, God, we come before You. I thank you that You are good. I thank you that You are kind, that you are on the throne, that You are holy, that You are the Creator of the heavens and the earth, but you’re also the lover of our souls and the pursuer of us.
Father, would You wake us up to Your presence and to Your voice. Lord, would You expose the things that are in the way. Would You bind and remove fear and anxiety, shame. Lord, would You replace those with peace, with your presence and with your love? We love you in Jesus name. Amen.
Check out the rest of this conversation: How Do I Pray?
Ali Ash is a leader, mentor and life-coach on staff at New Community Church in Vista, CA.
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