[Transcript of “A 5 minute cuppa” published by Horley Baptist Church on YouTube[1], March 2021]
Hi everyone, welcome to ‘a five minute cuppa’. This is the place that you can come any time of day, just for five minutes, to relax, put your feet up, have a cuppa and listen to a few words to help you grow in your relationship with God.
In the last five minute cuppa we were thinking about the importance of having a secret place to go to to be alone with God, a place to find sustenance and wisdom so that we are prepared for whatever lays before us in the coming week. Today we’re going to think a bit about how we make that secret place, somewhere we want to be, a place that we want to run to, a place that we would miss desperately if we hadn’t found the time to go there.
We know from the records of Jesus’s life that he withdrew from people frequently to be alone with his heavenly Father. We have little recorded about what actually went on during this time though I wonder how he spoke with his Father, how he had two-way communication. I doubt very much if it was like some of the prayers that we hear when we go into a typical church service. We could forgive anyone popping into church on the odd occasion, or even our own children that grow up in some of our churches, thinking that you have to develop a prayer voice, a particular way of talking that’s different from the sound you use with everyone else; a monologue rather than a conversation, a place to reel off a list of ‘thank you’s and ‘pleases’.
I’m pretty sure that when Jesus went to the secret place his conversation was one of intimacy with his Father; communication where he spoke honestly and openly and heard his Father speak back to him. You can see the fruit of this close relationship in his daily actions with others. He was so used to hearing his Father’s voice in the secret place that he could hear it everywhere he went. How else did he know what people were saying behind his back and how to respond to this with such wisdom? How did he know accurate details of people’s lives he had never met and what was on their hearts?
When Jesus was teaching his disciples how to pray he he talked about asking for God’s will to be done on earth as it was in heaven. Here lies our question and our dilemma: how do we know the Father’s will? How can we know the mind of the father so that we are talking to him about the things on his heart and then seeing those things that are important to him happening in our own lives and in our communities?
Maybe it’s time to stop modelling our prayers on what we have typically seen and instead practice that two-way communication that the Father and Jesus obviously enjoyed, but how do we do that practically? What does it look like?
I don’t think it’s as hard as you might think.
Start by asking Him a question – “What’s on your mind, Lord? What shall we talk about? What are you doing?” then most importantly leave a space for him to speak back. Don’t try too hard, you don’t have to work yourself into a frenzy to hear His voice. I’ve found that after I ask a question a thought will pop into my mind or a person or a situation. Before launching into a monologue prayer I will ask another question: “What’s going on for that person or situation? What do you want to do?” Often I’ll get something that adds to what He has said, sometimes an image or a reminder of a similar situation I have known, often alongside some words or a story from the Bible that helps me to pray into the situation with understanding.
I love it when I begin to recognize His still small voice in my everyday life, when I’m prompted to speak to a particular person or ask a question that opens up a conversation about something that’s troubling them or when I’m woken in the middle of the night with an image of a person on my mind that is on the Father’s heart, and I can there and then ask Him what’s going on and agree with Him about what he wants to do in that person’s life.
If pausing and asking questions and listening to responses isn’t something you’re used to why not give it a go? I think you’ll find once you become familiar with this two-way communication with the Father you’ll want to run to your secret place. Who wouldn’t want to have a relationship with the all-knowing, all-powerful sustainer of the universe who also calls us His friends?
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[1] YouTube link: What’s on your mind, Lord?
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Contributed by Sandy Turner; © the Author
