When I came to Christ as a young adult, it was natural to be centered on myself (or self-centered). After all, I’d been cultivating that for a couple decades. As I started to practice praying, I’m pretty sure the biggest topic of my conversations with God was—you guessed it—myself! It reminds me of my friend Doug who used to say jokingly after talking about himself too long, “Well, enough talking about me, what do you think about me?” It’s funny, but there’s some truth to it. We humans love to talk about ourselves.
It’s not wrong, of course, to talk about ourselves to others or to God. In fact, it’s good. But if we want to talk to God all day long, every day, 365 days a year, until our last breath—we are going to have to find something other than ourselves to talk about. Because, well, there’s not that much to us. Maybe you are inexhaustibly mysterious and fascinating—and I’m happy for you—but I’m pretty simple. And I think most of us are. When I started praying as a new Christian I think it took less than a week to tell God everything about myself ha!
I think part of the reason our prayers dry up is because we center them too much on ourselves. And there's only so much we can say about ourselves. We should pray confessions and concerns, dreams and details, but prayer will expand much wider when we focus on God Himself. It's a good practice to pray to God about God.
Conversation strain
Can I be real for a moment? It’s hard to find things to talk to God about. It’s even harder because it feels like we are the only ones talking since we don’t hear His audible voice. Have you ever had a conversation with someone who just doesn’t talk at all? They just nod and smile. All the pressure is on you to keep the conversation going, right? I feel like I’m pretty creative, in general, but sometimes I struggle to think of anything to say about anything. I’m pretty sure it’s not just me that feels the same kind of struggle in prayer.
What should we say to God? This isn’t really a big deal if our prayers are sporadic or if our daily time with God is like sixty seconds. We come against this problem of “filling the time” when we set out to pray for at least an hour a day. It leads us to depend on all sorts of tricks, such as reading formal written prayers, or breaking prayer into pieces—5 mins for adoration, 5 for confession, 5 for thanksgiving and 5 for supplication, or letting other people pray and just agreeing with them (yeah, God, what she said). These things are fine, of course, but in this pursuit of God we dream of praying for 3-4 hour blocks. We dream of praying without ceasing from morning till night. We dream of occasionally retreating into the hills to spend several days with the Lord. What are we going to talk about?
Praying to God about God
What I want to encourage you in today is to work on talking to God about God. This seems almost strange because what would we say to God about God that, well, He doesn't already know. Nothing! So why do we do it? It is not to inform God of anything, and it's not to get anything from Him.
It's essentially worship.
And we see this all through the Psalms—“Salvation belongs to the Lord, the Lord hears, God is a righteous judge, how majestic is your name, the Lord is my shepherd, the Lord is my rock and my fortress” and so on.
Here’s what I’m saying: when we proclaim to God who He is, we are worshipping. And worship is inexhaustible—we will worship for eternity!
Worship
Worship can feel unproductive though, right? When we are asking for things, it feels like we are getting stuff done; when we are praying for others we feel productive—but worship is just worship.
Let me say all this a little more plainly. If our prayers are primarily about ourselves, we will never graduate spiritual kindergarten. It’s okay to pray for ourselves but we must learn to make most of our prayers about God. In other words, worship.
What is worship exactly? This is a huge topic since worship encompasses literally every aspect of our lives. Worship is not just what we say but what we do and who we are. It’s not just a song we sing but it’s the life we live. But part of worship is this simple act of proclaiming who God is with our lips or our pen or quietly in our minds. It can be loud or it can be a whisper. The writer of Hebrews says,
Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. — Hebrews 13:15
NYC
My wife and I moved to the big city right after we married. We had both been Christians for about a year. In my first year as a Christian, living in Western Massachusetts, we struggled to find churches that could teach us to pray. I knew I needed to learn how to pray so I started to carve out lengthy blocks of time to do it. I really had no idea what I was doing. I just started pouring my heart out. Because most of my praying was about myself I often just ran out of things to say. With little to say, prayer felt very very difficult at times. I’d beat myself up for not being more creative in prayer, thinking—“What is wrong with me? Why can’t I think of anything to say to the Creator of the Universe? Why is my mind so bland?”
But in NYC, all that changed. I’ve run with a lot of different Christians through the years including Baptists, Catholics, Presbyterians, Charismatics and many others. My library includes books from a variety of theological streams. I’ve learned valuable things about the pursuit of God from each of these different movements. In New York, for a little over two years, I was steeped in a Pentecostal type church.
One of the valuable things I learned from the Pentecostals was the practice of proclaiming God to God. At first glance the practice appears unintelligent. They take simple phrases like, “You are good” and “You are mighty” and “You are holy” and repeat them incessantly over and over. Some really latch onto the word “hallelujah.” Oh they might vary the expressions along the way, but they don’t seem to fuss about being eloquent. They just cry out to God about God.
Because I was such a young Christian, I just stepped into this practice with a genuine heart. I especially loved the pre-service prayer at the altars. About a hundred or so people would show up 20-30 mins early, go to the front and pray. I always got as close to Pastor Charles, the prayer pastor, as I could and, sort of, hung onto his coattails. He would ask for things (supplication) but mostly he just proclaimed the greatness and glory and beauty and majesty and excellencies of our God. So I did that too—albeit not nearly as beautiful :/
My experience doing this before service carried into the lengthy Thursday prayer meeting and also the long worship blocks in the church services. I also found myself practicing this proclamation praying on my almost 90 minute commute into Manhattan from Queens every day. It set me free from fussing about what to pray about. There were times, of course, when my prayers were quiet, thoughtful, conversational, personal and even eloquent. But I didn’t force that. My default was just praise.
One thing this proclamation praying did was fill me with the Spirit. I was so young in the Lord that I didn’t even know exactly why this happened. But I just knew that if I kept proclaiming God to God that my heart would be drenched with the Holy Spirit. Being with 100 or 1000 people—all doing this—is quite an experience! You just get caught up into it, and when you come down to earth you realize the presence of God is all over you—and you’re glowing!
Barbaric babble
As I continued through the years in my pursuit of God there were seasons I got away from this proclamation praying. It just seemed too juvenile, unintelligent, barbaric. I wanted to offer fancy prayers, prayers that would be so beautiful and eloquent that people would say, “Wow.” But I learned over time that this was actually—ironically—unintelligent. And I also, again, found myself running out of things to pray!
What helped me to understand that proclamation praying isn’t unintelligent babble was coming to a deeper understanding of worship. I realized that every spoken word of adoration, every sentence of worship penned, every phrase of praise whispered under my breath—it’s all good and fitting and glorifying to God! I realized that in some mysterious way the Lord hears and is blessed. It reminds me of the old song I learned as a baby Christian.
I love you Lord.
And I lift my voice
to worship you,
O my soul, rejoice.
Take joy my King,
in what you hear.
May it be a sweet,
sweet sound in your ear.