This particular cause has been one that I’ve received a lot lately.  Maybe because I’m a Youth Pastor and the sender of such cause invites assumes that I believe in their petition.  The cause: Put prayer back in school.

Put prayer back in school!

The heart of the sender is good and they deeply believe in the cause.  But, I sometimes fear that we expect too much out of government institutions (such as public schools).  In a public school, in one classroom, you can range from born-again Christians to Muslims, atheists to agnostics.  Do we really want to impose our prayer time on them?

But really, this only scratches the surface of the issue.  This issue is intrinsically tied to the Ten Commandments debacle and the call to bring God back into the public sectors of our nation.  We fear that “In God We Trust” has been removed from coins.  Politicians aren’t getting sworn in on a Bible.

The madness stems from this misunderstanding that somehow the United States is a Christian nation.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The U.S. wasn’t even founded as a Christian nation.  Our founding documents show great influence of the Enlightenment and seek to separate, as much as possible, the state from the Church.  We live in a highly secular, skeptical society.  Plain and simple folks, our culture is open to spirituality but it is not ideologically Christian.

But really, the issue even goes deeper than that.  We followers of Jesus have failed to recognize the most basic principle of theology.  Upon acceptance of Jesus Christ and commitment to Him as our Lord and Savior, we were indwelt with the Holy Spirit.  Think how crazy that is for a moment…God lives in us!

So, when a student goes to school, the following Scriptures are lived out:

⁹You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ. ¹⁰But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. ¹¹And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you. (Romans 8:9-11, NIV)

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? (1 Corinthians 6:19)

We do not need the government to sanction out a space for God to be present in schools.  Governments are of this world.  This world will continue to be the fallen mess that it is.  Our job is to be the light of hope, love and grace.  We are to bring renaissance and renewal to public sectors like schools.  We do not wait around for a law or an amendment to put back up our sacred items or carve out sacred space for us.

When students walk into schools, this is what should be happening

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23, NIV)

These fruits should be exemplified in all our lives.  As the Holy Spirit takes dominion, judgmental attitudes, meanness, bitterness, narcissism, anger, hatred, gossip, demanding things to be my way…all of these things should be purged out of us.  As the old self flakes away, what is born is a life of love, a spirit of joy, a presence of peace, an attitude of patience, an outlook of kindness, a modeling of goodness, a call to faithfulness, a reputation of gentleness, and a commitment to self-control.

Attention Christians in America: the difficulties we face are not because prayer is out of school.  It’s not because Barack Obama is president.  It’s not because of our secular culture even.  Our world is programmed into sin…it knows no difference.  We cannot keep expecting the world to act like the Church.  Furthermore, the Church needs to stop acting like the world!

What this world needs to know is what we, as Christians, are for and not always what we’re against.  Prayer in school should be happening because the people of God are there.  God’s presence in school should be evident because the followers of Jesus there are shaped by Him and model Him to those around them.

It is time to allow this hope of Christendom to die.  We need to stop propping up these relics of putting prayer in school and hanging the Ten Commandments.  We need to stop hiding behind statements, government wish lists, bullying, and being sin detectives in the world around us.  We need to instead pick up our role laid out in Romans 8:

¹⁸I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. ¹⁹The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. ²⁰For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope ²¹that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

²²We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. ²³Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? ²⁵But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. (Romans 8:18-25, NIV)

If we want prayer back in school, maybe we should begin developing a life of prayer becoming more and more aware of His presence.  If you want the Ten Commandments in public places, maybe we need to live lives shaped by their virtues.  If we want God back in schools, maybe we need to A) exhibit the fruits of His Spirit in the schools and B) grab hold of His purposes outlined above each and every school day!

Remember: God is in school when His people show up!

The prayer is very simple in its more common, extended form:

“Lord Jesus Christ Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.”

Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, the late Russian Orthodox Moscow Patriarchate’s diocese for Great Britain and Ireland said the Jesus Prayer, “more than any other,” helps us to be able to “stand in God’s presence.” This means that it helps us to focus our mind exclusively on God with “no other thought” occupying our mind but the thought of God. At this moment when our mind is totally concentrated on God, we discover a very personal and direct relationship with Him.  One Eastern Orthodox theologian has said, “It also serves as perhaps the most succinct Gospel message available.”

The Jesus Prayer is one of the oldest of Christian prayers, dating in its original form to the words the two blind men cried out to Jesus in Matthew 20:31. It was formalized by the Orthodox Churches in the 5th century.  Contained in the prayer is a uniquely clear summation of the Christian faith:

Jesus the man is declared by name to be the Christ, the annointed one of God, as well as being the Lord of our lives; he is declared to be the Son of God, and therefore divine; he is declared to be in the position of judgment and mercy, and we confess to be sinners requiring His grace.

The practice of the Eastern Orthodox Churches calls for the Jesus Prayer to remind them of  constant prayer that the Apostle Paul speaks of in 1 Thessalonians 5:17, where the prayer is kept on the lips and in the hearts of believers at all times.  In its ultimate form, this prayer method is called Hesychasm (Greek: ἡσυχάζω, hesychazo, “to keep stillness”).

A spectacular jewel from Eastern Orthodox theology is their view of repentance.  In the West, we take a very juridical understanding of sin and repentance; a wrong has been committed, somebody needs to pay, Jesus paid, we come to Jesus and make a transaction, we take His righteousness and He takes our sins, we are blameless before God, the Father.

This age old understanding of justification is not wrong by any means.  Nor is it complete.  Eastern Orthodoxy takes a different approach to repentance.  John Chryssavgis, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, wrote the following in his essay, “Repentance and Confession”:

Repentance (Greek: μετάνοια, metanoia, “changing one’s mind”) isn’t remorse, justification, or punishment, but a continual enactment of one’s freedom, deriving from renewed choice and leading to restoration (the return to man’s original state).

The Jesus Prayer stands at the center of this journey.  It is merely two statements and a petition.  The first statement is the declaration of Jesus Christ as Lord.  The second statement is the acknowledgment of one’s own sinfulness.  Flowing out of the meeting of the two is a petition for mercy as holiness meets sinfulness, divinity meets humanity, strength meets weakness, love meets scorn.

As the pray-er recites the words of the prayer, the hope is that an inward journey takes place.  At first it is an oral prayer as we encounter for the first time the words and recite them allowed.  The second is the prayer of the mind as we analyze and explore the meaning of the prayer we are reciting.  The final movement is the prayer of the heart where we begin to become the prayer.

My friend, Jerry Flora, often tells a story of a prayer retreat that he attended many years ago.  He was struck at how the prayer gathering began.  The woman leading closed here eyes, paused for a few minutes of silence, and then proclaimed, “We are sinking into prayer.”  Prayer wasn’t so much a formality to begin a meeting as it was likened to a giant, overly-stuffed chair that enveloped him that day.

Brennan Manning in his latest book, The Furious Longing of God, writes:

When the night is bad and my nerves are shattered and the waves break over the sides, Infinity speaks. God Almighty shares through His Son the depth of His feelings for me, His love flashes into my soul, and I am overtaken by mystery. These are moments of kairos — the decisive in-break of God’s fury into my personal life’s story.

It is then I face a momentous decision. Shivering in the rags of my seventy-four years, I have two choices. I can escape below into skepticism and intellectualism, hanging on for dear life. Or, with radical amazement, I can stay on deck and boldly stand in surrendered faith to the truth of my belovedness, caught up in the reckless raging fury that they call the love of God. And learn to pray. (pp. 130-131)

His words bring tears to my eyes.  It seems that I have been misunderstanding this prayer thing all along.  I should not come to prayer because I should but because I must.  Prayer is not encountering an omnipresent, narcissistic deity.  Instead, prayer is crawling into the lap of my Dad.  I may ramble, I may fall asleep…but my Dad just loves when I come to Him.

The Jesus Prayer just might be the great reminder to the church through the centuries that prayer is more than a transaction of sins for righteousness.  It’s not a rags to riches story.  It’s not a laundry list of demands and requests.

Prayer is a becoming.  Prayer is a belonging.

The Jesus Prayer reminds me that I am becoming more and more like Him with every day that I surrender my life and will to Him.  With every decision of every second, I look at my dear friend, Jesus, and decide whether my decision will honor our friendship, will promote His Lordship, and will allow me to experience the deepest of intimacies from God’s parenthood over my life.

The Jesus Prayer reminds me that I belong.  I belong to a passionate, wild, reckless, extravagant, hilarious, steadfast, committed, stay-at-home, out-on-the-street, head-over-heels in love Daddy who would love nothing more than to woo His children back into His arms.  Oh that I could hear His heartbeat and feel the warmth of His embrace!  The tears that would be shed as Abba/Daddy whispers to me, “I’m proud of you, little guy…I will always love you.”

The Jesus Prayer reminds me how simple it really is.  The Gospel is not in need of vast textbooks or great exposition.  It is more than a relationship…it is two lovers meeting and upon their encounter find it unable to take their eyes off of one another.  As close as my next breath is the desire for God to meet with me.  As close as your next breath is the desire for God to meet you.  Are you meeting Him?  Can you feel Him?  Does He bring life to your weary soul?  Does He provide moisture and sustenance to your dry, and brittle bones?

Take the next week and practice the Jesus Prayer as you live each day.

INHALE: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God…”

EXHALE: “…have mercy on me a sinner.”

Inhale His goodness, completeness, love, mercy, renewal, and passion.  Exhale your failures, doubts, insecurities, trivial lusts, pains, sorrows, wrongs, hurts.  May each breath be a reminder of the Gospel, the good news for everyone.  May the good news begin transforming you!