Ep. 265: Where Prayer Becomes Real

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the indoubt Podcast, where we explore the challenging topics that young adults often face. Each week we talk with guests who help answer questions of faith, life, and culture, connecting them to our daily experiences and God’s word. For more info on indoubt visit indoubt.ca or indoubt.com.

Isaac Dagneau:

Hey, welcome to indoubt. My name is Isaac, one of the hosts of indoubt, and I’m also the pastor at North Valley Baptist Church in Mission, British Columbia in Canada. We are very privileged to have with us on the show today speaker, writer and professor Kyle Strobel. So thanks so much for being here with us today Kyle.

Kyle Strobel:

Hey Isaac. So good to be with you brother.

Isaac Dagneau:

I want to begin… And again, lots of interviews begin this way because it’s important. We just want to begin by knowing who you are. So what is your life in a snapshot? How does Jesus play a role in that? Or maybe the other way around, how do you play a role in what Jesus is doing? However you want to address that.

Kyle Strobel:

Yeah. Well, it’s a hard question because it is such a big question. But a lot of folks probably have heard of my father, Lee Strobel-

Isaac Dagneau:

Great.

Kyle Strobel:

Yeah, that’s the orienting reality of me. So if you know anything about my father’s story, in many ways I was born into the family of an atheist who very quickly after my birth became a Christian. And so as far as I knew, I was in a long line of Christians and I grew up in the mega churches. I grew up at Willow Creek. And so in an era where everything was big and exciting and lots going on and I had no interest in it, quite honestly, for most of that time.

Kyle Strobel:

And I had kind of a life crisis after, after high school, so this is right before college then. I had no ambition to go to college. I had no ambition to study. And the Lord really was kind to me in that season and in a very odd way, in many ways, just push me into a college, a small Christian college. And I literally didn’t apply until July, which they don’t even usually let you apply that late. And you put down a major and I was like, “I don’t care about any of this stuff.” I saw biblical studies and I was like, “Sure, why not? I don’t know anything about the Bible. I might as well do that.” And it just changed my life, this small Christian school and studying scripture and it awoke in me something profound. And ever since then, I was on a trajectory that was either… I wasn’t sure at the time, I was either towards pastoring or towards the Academy.

Kyle Strobel:

I knew I would do both to some degree. And yet for me, what became clear is it is, at least in terms of full-time job questions, more of Academy, but I was never in service to the Academy. And what drove me and what drives me still are existential questions of life with Christ. How do we actually make sense in reality? Not just on paper, but the lived reality [inaudible 00:03:21] things. So that has been my trajectory for a long time now and I’ve been incredibly blessed to land where I have where I’m in a department that this is just the stuff we get to teach and think about all the time. And so it’s a real blast.

Isaac Dagneau:

Cool. Well thanks for sharing that. That’s awesome. So anyways, you and another author, John Coe, have recently written a book on prayer and you it’s titled “Where prayer becomes real. How honesty with God transforms your soul.” So for your listeners, that’s the title of this book, just a way to springboard us into some of the more details. What is the the general gist of this book? And maybe another way to ask it is, what are you giving to the church?

Kyle Strobel:

Yeah, well, one of the things we really want to do, for us, the Christian life is a life of prayer. So in many ways, all that we do. It’s what we think of as a meta discipline. So if you think of all the disciplines you do reading the Bible, going to church, there’s all of them… Fasting, whatever it is. All of them need to be done perfectly to be done Christianly. There’s a mode of being with God and presenting ourselves to God, to use Paul’s language from Romans, and this presenting ourselves to God is a [inaudible 00:04:35]. And yet we find that prayer is the place where people are most isolated and alone. Prayers oftentimes one of the places where people are most unknown in their lives. I know a few Christians where their prayer life is known by others.

Kyle Strobel:

And not just do you pray, although I know a lot of people have probably never been asked that question. But even like, “Well, what is it like for you to pray?” And one of the things we’ve seen, so we teach seminary students, obviously, mostly in our context. And I’m on a preaching team at a church and when I speak in the church on prayer, I consistently talk to folks who have these expectations about what prayer should be, and they’re not meeting them. And in this weird condition where they’re saying, “Why isn’t this working? Why do I feel alone? Why is my mind wandering? Why am I falling asleep?”

Kyle Strobel:

And one of the problems I think, and one of the things that really struck us is, there’s a million books on prayer. And there’s a lot of good books on prayer, quite honestly. And I was asked by someone, it was a new Testament scholar who’s a friend of my family who said, “Hey, Kyle. I’m embarrassed to admit this because I’m a biblical scholar, but I struggle with prayer. So what is your go-to book on prayer?” And I was like, “Oh, you really should read…” And I just paused. And I realized I didn’t have one. And I know there’s lots of good books. So I had a crisis a little bit in myself like, “Well, wait a second. Why can’t I immediately think of this?” And I realized that there’s good books that talk about prayer theoretically, there’s other books usually that talk about prayer practically, but rarely they do both.

Kyle Strobel:

But then the element that I realized that I missed, that caused me to stop and not have a book on hand to offer, was that I think a good book on prayer has to talk about it theoretically like, “What is Christian prayer like? What does that mean to pray?” Practically like, if a book doesn’t help me pray well, then it’s not a good book on prayer is it? It’s got to help me actually in the act of prayer. But what we wanted to do was add an element of what we think was the existential element. And so we want people to come to the book and hear us talk about their prayer life. And what we found is that most of us have the exact same experiences in prayer. When I go somewhere and I talk about falling asleep in prayer, my mind wandering, I never have a person that’s like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Whenever I close my eyes to pray, I see a light. And then Jesus.”

Kyle Strobel:

And yet what’s funny is, we’re all having the same experience. And no one’s talking about that. Why aren’t we talking about this stuff? Because that’s where the average person is at. And I worry that people… For both John and I, we went through a season in our life and we’re both academics, we both did biblical degrees in theology. And at some point in our development we came to believe that maybe prayer was only really cut out for the experts or for those people who are good at it, and maybe we just need to keep our heads down and study the scriptures. And we stopped praying, meaningfully at least. And, and that was tragic. And so we really want to help people not to stop praying and we want to help people to stop praying as they think a good Christian should. And to pray in reality, rather than in this kind of fantasy world of what they think God expects their prayer to be like.

Isaac Dagneau:

That’s so good. Well, we’re going to get into some of those specifics. So thank you for that general overview. Let’s back up a little bit, and perhaps someone’s listening who thinks they know what prayer is… But every worldview and religion prays,. What is prayer and how do you and John explain what is Christian prayer? What’s the distinction of Christian prayer?

Kyle Strobel:

Yeah. It is one of those funny things where we… Every religion, I suppose, has an element of what prayer is. I imagine even Atheists probably have some version of prayer. But it is important to know the Christian version is utterly different in pretty much every way. And the main reason for that, which is the main reason of most differences with Christianity, is that we have a triune God who has given Himself to us. And so for the Christian, prayer isn’t something you generate. It’s not something you create. It’s not even something you start. Prayer is something you enter because we have a great high priest in Jesus, who we’re told always lives to intercede for us. And we have a Holy spirit who’s been given over to us into the depths of our souls, who groans with groanings too deep for words.

Kyle Strobel:

And so before you say a word, there’s already prayer going on and we in fact are caught up in their prayers. One of the most obvious biblical elements of this is when we’re told that we should cry out Abba father. In Romans we get this command. But in Galatians we’re told the first thing that happens in our souls when we receive the spirit is the spirit prays Abba father. And what’s interesting about that prayer is that isn’t your prayer. That’s not your prayer to pray. That’s Jesus’s prayer that you’re now internalized into. And so we are now caught up in the prayers of the son and the spirit, just as we are caught up in salvation in the life of Christ.

Kyle Strobel:

And so in many ways, this is one of those revolutionary notions scripture gives us, that again, we just don’t talk about very often.

Isaac Dagneau:

Totally.

Kyle Strobel:

The difficulty for many people with prayer, is we think of it as an activity primarily. And so then it gets stuck in this register in our minds of, it’s like a performative act. And then we begin thinking about, “Am I good at this? Am I bad at this? What’s the right language to use? What’s kind of things should I say?” And we get stuck thinking about the performance of it and we forget that this is something God has done for us. And to be honest, this struck me a new we wrote this, one of the most fantastic things the scripture says. One of the most astonishing pieces of good news is when we’re told by Paul that when God looks at you, he says, “You know, you don’t know how to pray.” The most incredible thing.

Kyle Strobel:

And that he does something about it. He sends his spirit to pray for us. It’s one thing that Christ died for us and our sins. Praise God that he met us and praise God that he’s our substitute. But he even presents himself as our substitute for our prayers. That is astonishing. And it means that we need to just take a deep breath and allow ourselves to be bad at prayer. God’s already told us he knows we’re bad at prayer. It’s funny, I posted an article not all that long ago about this, about being bad at prayer. And I saw a bunch of comments, usually I don’t look at comments online for all sorts of good reasons, but I saw several comments that were like, “You know, I don’t think God thinks anyone’s bad at prayer.” And I was like, “No, God, literally tells us”

Isaac Dagneau:

You are bad at prayer.

Kyle Strobel:

He knows this already. And it struck me as funny. I was like I get their instinct. I get what they’re saying. They know prayer should be just authentically but they’re missing a part of the good news. They’re actually missing the freedom we can find in the fact that God knows, he understands, and he’s done something about it. And so that Christian prayer is utterly different. We don’t have to come like the profits of Baal and do a song and a dance to woo God to our side. He has given himself to us and he has already done all that we need.

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah. That’s so good, Kyle. Yeah. It’s true. Even for myself, who’s done studying the word and pastoring a church, even just opening up this idea that prayer is entering into something that’s already going on is really fascinating. How would you respond to this? I think a lot of people, they love just the simple definition of, prayer is just talking to God. Just talking to God. How would you want to fill that out more?

Kyle Strobel:

Yeah. There’s a good in. You know the funny thing about prayer? Prayer is one of those areas where most of our cliches are actually quite good. I was thinking about it. I’m like, “Most of these cliches are good.” You know what the problem though with them are? Is we think if we understand the simplicity of them, that somehow it’s deeply meaningful. And one of the responses to our book which I thought was so interesting, and I loved this response, this was so encouraging to me, is a woman who had been Christian now… What did she say? Was it 35 years or something? Said, “My whole Christian life I’ve been told, “You can tell God anything”.” And she’s like, “I never knew what that meant until I read your book.”

Kyle Strobel:

And she’s like, “I knew what those words mean.” But you see the problem is, we don’t understand that the problem in our prayer life isn’t that we just don’t have the right information, that if we could just get it right in our minds like, “Oh, okay, I just can give God everything. That makes sense.” We don’t know how much the flesh has actually blinded us. Let me give an example. So my seminary students, most of them come in and they really want to work hard, and they should, they work very hard on their theology of the atonement. They want to get what does the Bible say about the cross? What has Jesus done in his sacrificial death? And they think about that a lot. And then they really do a good job of really nailing down what’s going on here, theologically, what does this mean for us? And it’s really good.

Kyle Strobel:

And then they go to pray and they try to atone for their sins in their prayer life. And it’s really interesting to see. And what the funny thing for me is, I didn’t know I did that until I saw them doing that. And at no point would me just telling myself that the atonement would have changed that because I didn’t even see it. And the problem with prayer because we’re so alone and isolated in it, we often don’t see the kinds of things we do that are really fleshly. For both my co-author and I, for both John and I, we both began to see that we would be praying. Something would go on in our prayer life, maybe we fell asleep. Maybe our mind wandered, maybe something came up and we started thinking about that, whatever.

Kyle Strobel:

We would pause prayer. And in this weird fantasy, God was no longer there. And we’re just talking to ourselves and sometimes we’re pumping ourselves, “Wake up. What’s wrong with you?” Or sometimes we’re like, “Okay, leave that stuff alone. We can think about that later. Now’s the time to pray.” And we began to rethink it as God’s still sitting there going, “You know I’m here, right? I’m right here. I’m listening to you talk to yourself.” And there’s a sense where we need to hear that. Prayer is the simplest thing of telling God everything, but it actually gets complicated the more you try to give yourself to that. And I think one of the things that we advocate in the book is learning to pray the Psalms.

Kyle Strobel:

And one of the things the Psalms do is they train you in how your flesh has actually cut off parts of your life from God. And how most of us just deeply believe that God either can’t handle or simply just doesn’t want to handle our anger. He doesn’t want to handle our sin or he can’t handle our sin. And so we end up talking about our sin to God after we’ve cleaned ourselves up, where you’ll never see the Psalmus do that. And we need to allow the Psalms and the Lord’s prayer, the set prayer scripture gives us, to actually train us so that we can do that cliche, because a cliche is good. But that isn’t simple. It’s actually quite profoundly difficult because prayer touches the deepest things about what we believe about God, what we believe about ourselves, what we believe about salvation, on all of it. And so I can’t remember the last time I heard a cliche that wasn’t good about prayer, but the problem is the actual entering into that isn’t cliche. It is actually really difficult and really deep.

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah. Kyle, you already started touching on it. Maybe we can go a little bit further. What do you mean when it comes to being honest to God in our prayers. You already started touching a little bit. The Psalms are training us this way. What does that mean to be honest in your prayer life?

Kyle Strobel:

Yeah. Well, one of the things is… Well, let me take two things here and one a little more practical. But the first is that… It’s funny because one of the criticisms… It’s not really a criticism, but pushback maybe I get in this in class because I’ll have so many students say, “You’re pushing us to pray this way. And yet it doesn’t feel like I’m revering God.” And I was like, “The opposite of honesty is dishonesty. It’s not lack of reverence.” And there’s something there that I know what they’re saying, because what they’re actually naming is a feeling. But the feeling is fleshly. It’s that God can’t handle this and that’s why it feels like it lacks reverence. And yet you think about the two men who go to the temple to pray in Jesus’ parable.

Kyle Strobel:

The one who prays in his goodness does not leave justified. But the one that wouldn’t even lift his eyes up to heaven, that only threw himself on the mercy of God as a sinner left justified. And Jesus was attracted to folks who were very leaky people. They were very messy, they didn’t get… They’re not the people I’m attracted to because I like people that know social customs. They don’t break into parties they weren’t invited to and wipe my feet with their hair and all these other things. I like people that know social customs. And yet Jesus was just profoundly attracted to people who were leaking all over the place and their sin was on the surface and they were like, ” [inaudible 00:18:14] this, help me.”

Kyle Strobel:

And so in one element, we can only come as we are. I’ve already talked about the Spirit’s praying for you already in your soul with groanings too deep. Well, the spirits praying for you in reality. The spirit doesn’t pray for your Christian avatar. We love our Christian avatar. We go to church and we try to wear it. We love to send our avatars… Like the Israelites at the mountain of Sinai. It’s like, “Moses, why don’t you just be our avatar and go up this scary mountain and we’ll stay back here.”

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kyle Strobel:

And we love to do that. And yet God cannot transform your avatar because it’s not real. And the place that prayer goes to die is when you pray the way you think a good Christian should. There’s a 20th century writer who talked about how no one on the Titanic had the problem with their mind wandering when it was going down. It’s just a great image in my mind. And he says as well, children don’t have a problem with mind wandering when they’re telling their parents what they want for Christmas.

Isaac Dagneau:

Sure. Yeah.

Kyle Strobel:

Because when we are in touch with the things we most deeply desire, then we come alive. And a lot of us, prayer’s the place where we fall asleep, not only physically, but even if we stay awake physically our soul falls asleep because we pray the way we imagine a good Christian should and we’re just not actually present to it. And so some of what that means is, instead of talking to yourself… So instead of like, when John and I both had this experience, we’re hitting the pause button in prayer, and we’re talking to ourselves like, “Kyle, get your act… Can you just focus on prayer? Why are you thinking about the rest of the week? Why are you worried about your taxes?” Whatever it is.

Kyle Strobel:

Instead of just getting into this weird dialogue with yourself, tell God. “God, I’m so distracted. God, I’m so much more interested in the worries of… God I deeply think that if I just wrestle with my worries more then I’ll be able to fix them. I’m not turning to you with them clearly. I’m just wrestling with myself with these things. God why does it feel like you’re not here? God, have you abandoned me? Because it feels like you’ve abandoned me.” That’s now praying like the Psalmus prayed. And even more so, “God have you fallen asleep on the job?” My favorite line in the Psalter is when the Psalm demands to know if God’s falling asleep.

Kyle Strobel:

That’s a great Psalm. That’s a great prayer. Most of us would never pray it though, because we worry that God can’t handle our pain. There’s something very childish in this. And I don’t mean that negatively like, “Oh, this is just childish.” No, this is how children think actually. When children experience their sin and their brokenness and their anger often, they’re worried that mom and dad can’t actually receive it. It feels so big to them that they can’t… Mom and dad might collapse under the weight of it. And it’s like, wow, how small has our God become when we worry that he’ll collapse under the weight of our sin and brokenness? Yes, it was in our sins that he died for us. But now he’s so allergic and afraid of it, that if I bring it to him, that he’ll somehow collapse.

Kyle Strobel:

And I think many of us fall under the temptation of sin. Sin always tries to convince you that the place of healing is the place to protect yourself and the place to hide. This is why Adam declares, “Run, hide,” when the Lord shows up in the garden. Why doesn’t Adam say, “The Lord’s here. Thank the Lord he’ll know how to protect [crosstalk 00:21:28]-“

Isaac Dagneau:

“We’ve messed up.”

Kyle Strobel:

Yeah, that’s right. But being in his brokenness now, the Lord becomes the problem to manage. In the original sin, we see that this is the original sin of prayer. That the Lord becomes someone to manage in prayer, rather than someone to come and invite into our nakedness and shame.

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah. That’s so good. This is so much to think about Kyle, you’re giving so much. It’s so good. Backing up a little bit. I want to move into, as we even approach our time here, some of the expectations that we put on prayer. Because earlier you were saying, you’re trying to pray and then taxes come to your mind or problems, spousal issue or friendship issue. And then you stop praying, you try to focus on those things. Maybe we do that because we don’t actually expect something to happen in prayer, who knows? So what are some of the expectations that we put on prayer? And what should we expect? I think that’s even the better question. What should we expect?

Kyle Strobel:

Yeah. The mind wandering one is a big one because in our flesh we all assume that mind wandering is a signal that tells us you’re praying badly. Whereas what we want to say is “No, no, your mind wanders because you come into the presence of the Lord and where your treasure is there, your heart will be also.” And you see this consistently, the presence of God just opens the heart and says, “This is interesting. This is what you treasure,” because you know who else does this? Jesus. Jesus is on the way to the cross and what are the disciples doing? They’re debating which one of them is the greatest. The scene is shocking and yet that’s the reality. And what does Jesus do? He opens that, “What are you guys talking about?” And he brings it to the surface.

Kyle Strobel:

And so our expectations should be, if I’m actually showing up in prayer, I’m going to see the truth. And the truth might be… In my own life, I realized when I go to pray I realize I come before the whirlwind, like Jobe. I come before a God who’s untamable. And what that does to my heart is it causes it to turn to things that I feel like I have control over. And so maybe that’s work, maybe things I feel competent at. Maybe it’s my calendar like, “Oh, okay, I’ll do this then I’ll do this,” and just planning out my week. And I’ll find my mind turns there almost as a defensive mechanism to protect myself with the presence of God.

Kyle Strobel:

And I needed just take all of those things and not stop doing it. I need to take this as, “Lord, you’re showing me the truth. This is what I should be praying about.” Because this is where my heart is, clearly. And sometimes it’s on really dumb things. It’s on sports and I’m hoping my team wins the next game. Look at my heart, it’s everywhere. Or sometimes it’s profoundly deep, “Lord. I’m worried about my children. Lord, my marriage. Lord, my job. Lord, my bank account.” And now these are the places where we don’t stop this and shut it down or, “Sorry I’m doing that, I’ll be better.” But imagine that, God’s going, “Let’s talk about this.” And you’re saying, “Sorry, I’ll be better.”

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kyle Strobel:

It’s like, no, this is the opposite of the case. One of the things that, again, I just don’t hear anyone talking about and I think it’s so tragic, is I think every Christian when you come to pray, you have this weird sense that you project on God. It isn’t God, it’s some weird sense you have. You have a weird sense of how God receives you. And I can’t tell you, so many of my students when they go to pray… And these are seminaries, these are future pastors. When they go to pray, God rolls his eyes. God rolls his eyes at them. He just goes, “Oh, here we go again.” And what I’m constantly pressing them is well, “Why do you think…?” Because that isn’t God. That is, as we hear in first John 3:19 when he says, “When your heart condemns you.” That’s your heart condemning.

Kyle Strobel:

That’s your heart claiming these things. God is greater than these things. And he knows everything. Take these to God. But I think we so often in prayer project what our heart’s doing onto God. And so we have so many people out there that feel condemned. And so they’re trying to perform well or they feel that God doesn’t receive them. And so they’re trying to show God that they’re receivable. And we’re doing this one man and one woman plays in the presence of God, rather than saying, “God, you’re greater than this. Look at this Lord. You’ve died for me here. You know it. The Spirit’s praying for it. Lord meet me in this place.” And so unfortunately for many of us, because of our expectations, prayer becomes a place in fact where we spend more time hiding from God rather than actually being with Him.

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah. Yeah. That’s so good. Kyle, thank you so much. That wraps up our time. To our listeners, we’ll make sure that you have all the accessible ways that you can find Kyle and John’s book. But anyways, thank you so much Kyle for taking the time to do this. We’d love to have you back on the show again, hopefully on sanctification or on the person or something like that, soon.

Kyle Strobel:

I would love that, man. It was so good meeting with you.

Isaac Dagneau:

That was speaker, writer and professor Kyle Strobel talking with us about prayer. Hope you enjoyed it. As we’ve already mentioned, Kyle has just written a new book with another author on prayer called, “Where prayer becomes real. How honesty with God transforms your soul.” If this conversation has caused you to think more about prayer or made you more interested in prayer, then definitely go and pick up Kyle’s book. You can go to whereprayerbecomesreal.com to get a copy. Well, we hope you join us next week. I have the privilege of talking with mentor, author and speaker Carson Pughe. Come listen in, we’ll see you then.

Speaker 1:

Thanks so much for listening. If you want to hear more subscribe on iTunes or Spotify, or visit us online@indoubt.ca or indoubt.com. We’re also on social media so make sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Isaac Dagneau:

Hey, this is Isaac. One of the hosts of indoubt, a ministry of good news, global media. Is it possible that being a Christian young person could be any more complicated than it is today? How do we make right choices and decisions when so many opinions around us seem contrary to what it means to live for Christ. At indoubt, we hope to help make sense, biblical sense, of those difficult choices, decisions and the complexity of faith, life and culture in 2021. So join us every week for another challenging conversation in our response as God’s people. For everything indoubt, visit indoubt.com. And if you’d like to help us continue to offer this program, you can make a gift of any amount at indoubt.com or by calling 1844 663 2424.