AUTHOR: Joe Lescano
“Prayer is the application of the heart to God, the inner exercise of love.”
Madame Guyon mid 1600’s
I’ve been thinking about what to post, and even though I would like to write about health optimization, exercise and hormones, I feel influenced to write about my experience with prayer. We share life with our King, in the incarnation He became one of us, so that we can become just like Him (Athanasius), but in our life of walking with the King, we all have our own individual way of relating and praying to Him.
Sometimes in our “Evangelical Journey” we lose our individuality in the way we talk and relate to God, after our coming to Christ experience we begin to adopt the mannerisms and styles of all those who surround us, and then comes the day when we all sound the same, move the same, address Him the same, rock our bodies back and forth like everyone else, do you see it yet? We lose ourselves and become another evangelical clone.
The Royal Life is a life of individuality, a life of co-expressing hearts, Spirit’s and ours, in one inseparable heart.
One of the ways the life of Holy Spirit is manifested in our lives, is in the way we relate to our Father. In the beginning, was the Logos and the Logos was with (pros=facing towards) God, and the Logos was God. Each one of us who has his blood running in our veins is free to be himself/herself and manifest one of the trillions of facets that is his life in us.
Many of us have a prayer life that doesn’t look like the conventional evangelical format. Some of us who are more spiritually introvert types find a great delight and pleasure in enjoying an awareness and knowledge of our unbroken union with Spirit, an effortless union, a work-free union, a stress-free union.
In ancient times, the most secure place in a kingdom was in the throne room where the king was, surrounded by the kingdom’s most elite guards protecting that room. In this New Covenant, we have become that throne room, and the one who has the title deed to the universe not only lives in us, but decided in his precious inclusive incarnation, to make us participants of the Trinity itself.
IN CHRIST, has been humanity’s new normal for the past two millennia, and this beautiful gospel is the proclamation of it. You may now be asking, “What does this have to do with prayer?” I tell you, for me, it has everything to do with it. This royal life is a life of unbroken union with our King, ever present with Him in the throne room of our heart, our thoughts, desires and feelings. Never absent from Him. His heart and ours beating as one. His mind and ours as one.
So how do you pray Joe? In my life, I have come to the realization that I am always in “his presence,” and He is always in mine. Never separated. I never have to “enter it”, “pull it down”, or “work it up.” Every moment of my life is prayer. Whether I open my mouth or not, when I exercise, homeschool the kids, or I’m sunbathing I’m praying.
My dear princes and princesses of the Most High, His blood runs in your veins. You’re not royalty by your Bible reading, worship or verbal utterances, you’re royalty because your life has been absorbed by the last Adam. Your life ceased to exist at the cross, and now you are of Christ and IN-CHRIST, for eternity and beyond.
I leave you with these words of Madame Guyon:
“You see, the only way to be perfect is to walk in the presence of God. The only way you can live in His presence in uninterrupted fellowship is by means of prayer, but a very special kind of prayer. It is a prayer that leads you into the presence of God and keeps you there at all times; a prayer that can be experienced under any conditions, any place, and any time.
Is there really such a prayer? Does such an experience with Christ truly exist?
Yes, there is such a prayer! A prayer that does not interfere with your outward activities or your daily routine.
There is a kind of prayer that can be practiced by kings, by priests, by soldiers, by laborers, by children, by women, and even by the sick.
May I hasten to say that the kind of prayer I am speaking of is not a prayer that comes from your mind. It is a prayer that begins in the heart. It does not come from your understanding of your thoughts. Prayer offered to the Lord from your mind simply would not be adequate. Why? Because your mind is very limited. The mind can pay attention to only one thing at a time. Prayer that comes out of the heart is not interrupted by thinking! I will go so far as to say that nothing can interrupt this prayer, the prayer of simplicity.”