Name: Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools
Rating: 4 (1 reviews)
ISBN: 9780310365358

Tyler Staton

An Invitation to the Wonder and Mystery of Prayer

Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools

He enjoys Gods presence - he looks forward to being with God

Jesse Stevenson

I fell in love with the God I wasn't sure was listening. I discov- ered that I didn't just "need" God in some ultimate sense; I liked

What does God see, can you get out of yourself and see how God sees 

Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God's point of view" 

Stillness is the quiet space where God migrates from the periphery back to the center, and prayer pours forth from the life that has God at the center.

Ashlyn Barrett

Prayer invites you to learn to listen to God before speaking, to ask like a child in your old age, to scream your questions in an angry tirade, to undress yourselt in vulnerable confession, and to be loved-completely and totally loved, in spite of everything.

Prayer is the source of my life's greatest celebrations, most heartrending disappointments, and most confusing (and still unanswered) questions.

…because He finds this kid in all of his insecurity, awkwardness, and adolescent nervousness to be irresistibly lovable.

I'm better acquainted with a subconscious drive to control the circumstances overwhelming me than with accepting the unburdening freedom promised in prayer.

Even in a very busy, very distracted world, people still make time for what really matters to them. So there's something deeper, beneath the surface, that keeps us from praying.

I think it's this: for most of us, prayer doesn't resolve our anxiety. 

We don’t pray for fear of being naïve.

Prayer always means submission. To pray is to willingly put ourselves in the unguarded, exposed position. There is no control. There is only humility and hope.

To pray is to risk being naïve, to risk believing, to risk playing the fool. To pray to risk trusting someone who might let you down. To pray is to get our hopes up. And we’ve learned to avoid that, so we avoid prayer.

Prayer means the risk of facing silence where we’re addicted to noise.

We don’t pray for fear of selfish motives. 

We don’t pray for fear of doing it wrong. 

We simply drag God into our overwhelmed lives, and the only way we can make him fit is to shrink him down to a reduce size. 

Without trust, we suppress the disappointment that God‘s silence leaves with us. We build a wall to protect ourselves from the very God we pray to. We carefully nuance our prayers, guarding ourselves against allowing God to disappoint us like that a second time.

With trust, we can come, with brutal honesty, to the God whose character doesn’t seem to match his silence. 

Prayer is the source of Jesus's most astonishing miracles and the subject of Jesus' most audacious promises, and yet, most people - even most Bible-believing Christians - find prayer to be boring, obligatory, disappointing, confusing, or, most often, all of the above. If you've ever felt this way, Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools is your invitation to trade your conceptions and misconceptions about prayer for prayer in its purest form: a vital, sustaining, powerful connection with God that is more real and alive than you could have ever imagined. In these pages, Tyler Staton - author, pastor, and national director of the 24/7 Prayer movement - addresses common roadblocks to prayer and gives you the confidence to come to God just as you are. Through biblical teaching, powerful storytelling, and insights on historic Christian practices, Staton helps you ... · Express your doubts and disappointments about prayer · Discover and practice multiple postures of prayer, including silence, persistence, confession, and more · Understand and embrace the wonder and mystery of prayer in everyday life · Realize that prayer is a powerful invitation to partner with God in the redemption of a fallen world · And, ultimately, open or reopen the line of communication with your Creator and experience afresh his divine power on earth. Prayer is a journey, and this book will help you transition your prayer life from a path littered with half-hearted requests to a treasured journey of ever-deepening, adventurous relationship with Jesus.

Very good little book on prayer. Tyler Staton makes the case that it is of the absolute essence that Christians build their lives on Christ through prayer. Intimacy with God, according to Staton, is found in and through prayer. Intimacy is built on fidelity and that requires commitment and daily rhythms of relationship through prayer.

Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools An Invitation to the Wonder and Mystery of Prayer

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