‘A man prayed and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until he realised that prayer is listening’ – Søren Kierkegaard. Everyone can learn to recognise the voice of the Lord because prayer is a ‘living conversation with a loving God’ - it’s all about relationship! God loves to listen to us and he also loves to speak to us. As we pray, how can we learn to recognise and listen to the voice of God? What helps us and what hinders us? Through faith let’s discover how Father God would have us develop in our ability to hear from Him.

‘The Bible is way more honest about unanswered prayer than the Church’ – Pete Greig. One of the great pains of many of our lives is when we have prayed and it has seemed that God has remained silent. When we learn about prayer we don’t just want to deal with its wonders and its invitations, we want to travel to the painful places of prayer that have remained unanswered. Jesus himself dealt with unanswered prayer, no more so than in Gethsemane out of which there was no simple or easy way. We want to learn how to both lament those places of unanswered prayer while also moving towards a place of relinquishing all that we cannot understand or control into God’s hands.

‘To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world’ – Karl Barth. The greatest revivals in the world all stem back to a small number of faithful, prayerful people. Sometimes it can seem like our words are small in the face of the world’s vast problems, but the Bible teaches us that our prayers are powerful! To intercede is to ‘stand before God in the gap on behalf of the land’. How can we grow, and what does it mean to be people who stand in the gap and intercede for those in our lives, for our city and for our world?

‘Our primary privilege as God’s children is to ask audaciously and repeatedly for everything we need, expecting him to answer, naturally or supernaturally’ – Pete Greig.

Asking is probably the thing we associate most with prayer, it’s often how we first come to prayer, it’s the thing we do in the moments of panic, it’s basically prayer 101. Prayer is many things and it is incredible to explore all the depths of it through contemplation, through worship, through many other facets. But prayer, even in the very formation of the word, is simply to ask. What would it look like to live more audaciously into this privilege we have of asking?

‘Prayer is more than you can ever imagine, because God is so much beyond what you can conceive’ – David G. Benner.

Why is worship a necessary part of prayer? What does adoration of God begin to form in us? How are we changed, and how is our view of God changed by it? Praising God can help us more than we know, not because it stops us from thinking about our problems but because as we ‘hallow’ God’s name, all our stuff is bathed in the light of his presence. Praise, worship, adoration is a necessary part of the joyful formation of our prayer lives.

‘The best way to start praying is actually to stop praying. To pause. To be still’ – Pete Greig.

Too often and too easily we see prayer as an activity of busy-ness and action, in many way, a means to an end. Perhaps that is because we too are people of busyness and activity! Stillness does not come naturally to us, we find the change of pace jarring, we stumble into prayer and wonder why we find it so hard. Our desire over this series is to learn that prayer is not something we say, or something we do, rather it is something we become and it starts by being still.

As David comes to the end of his life, the legacy he leaves is one of great humility - it influenced his perspective, it drew him to solitude with God and it was a foreshadowing of the perfect humility we see displayed for us in Christ.

David was secure in his identity as one loved by God. In 2 Sam 22 David sings a song he wrote much earlier in his life - Psalm 18. This song was written in his early youth, before his later public failings. In it he speaks of his innocence but we know and he knew how he had sinned against God and yet he still sings this song, these words don’t stop being true for David and more importantly true about God. It wasn’t because of his innocence that David was secure, it was because of his identity as one loved by God. Identity is not just about us feeling good about ourselves, but about us being secure in ourselves as children of God. Where are the places of insecurity in our lives, what are we standing on, what or who has become our refuge, our rock, the place we run to – is it a person, a relationship, a calling, a place, our possessions, our savings, or is it truly God. How can we live in this security as children of God? (1 John 3:1)

Under the law of the Torah, David deserved to die, yet God spared him. God forgave him and restored him. There were still terrible consequences for him because sin scars and it doesn’t just affect us, but David did not get what he knew he deserved. He was forgiven. So are we! We have died to our sins and we are made alive in Christ which totally changes things for us. Restoration in Christ is not just the precarious rebuilding of the things we’ve broken in our lives, restoration in Christ is an overhaul, a new and much better building in us than we could ever have imagined.

David’s life is a roller-coaster, we see the whole arc of it throughout this story. He messed up and so do we. David saw what he wanted in Bathsheba and he did whatever he could to get what he wanted and then we see the spiral. Sin has a way of working its way into our lives so we end up doing things we never thought we’d be capable of. The fact is, sin is real and we have to take it seriously. We often underestimate the hold of sin in our lives but even more than that we underestimate the sheer magnitude of God’s grace and his ability and desire to forgive. Because of Jesus our sins are forgotten, completely atoned for once and for all. David lived under a system of sacrifice and so he had to go through a lot more than we do to be forgiven, Jesus atoned for our sins, he has won for us what we could never win for ourselves. There is a call for us to be real about our sin, a call to be real about saying sorry but over it all, a call to stand in awe of God’s grace and complete forgiveness of us.