The Little Prince - The Fox's Secret

"Goodbye," said the fox to the little prince. Then he continued:

"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

"The eyes are blind. One must always look with the heart..."


            --From The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

                                                       ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Open the eyes of my heart, Lord

Open the eyes of my heart

I want to see You, I want to see You

See You high and lifted up

Shining in the light of Your glory

Pour out Your power and love

As we sing holy, holy, holy

Open the eyes of my heart, Lord

I want to see You!

     Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, "Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him."

     In reply Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again....You must be born again."    

            -- John 3

     That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified..."

          -- Romans 10:9-10

Madame who? Part 2

Madame Guyon's study focuses first on Praying the Scripture. (part 1)

She summarizes it like this:

In "Praying the Scripture" you are seeking to find the Lord in what you are reading, the very words themselves. In this part, therefore, the content of the Scripture is the focal point of your attention. Your purpose is to take everything from the passage that unveils the Lord to you.

Throughout her writing she says things like, "Remember I am addressing you as if you were a new convert...I would like to address you as though you were beginners in Christ, one seeking to know Him..." And that is her whole writing style -- gentle and thoughtful, teaching her audience as if they were children.

I wish I had known her -- she does remind me of the pastor's wife in the church where I grew up. Her name was Alvina and she was a great prayer warrior. Our pastor's name was Harry Burch (we called him Bro Burch, or Rabbi, if the occasion permitted it). Often Bro. Burch would come to me at church and tell me he saw Alvina on her knees for several hours that day and he heard her mention my name. That thought has sustained me many times when I really needed prayer. She also had a gentle, thoughtful spirit and touch.

Well, anyway, Madame Guyon moves to her second way of coming to the Lord in prayer. She calls this method Beholding the Lord or Waiting in His Presence. And this how she describes this way of approaching prayer.

The second kind of prayer which I described as "Beholding the Lord" or
"Waiting in His presence" also makes use of Scripture, but it is actually not a time of reading...now you come to the Lord in a totally different way. Perhaps at this point I need to share with you the greatest difficulty you will have in waiting upon the Lord. It has to do with your mind. The mind has a very strong tendency to stray...Therefore as you come before the Lord to sit in His presence, beholding Him, make use of the Scripture to quiet your mind.

You begin by setting aside a time to be with Him. When you come, come quietly. Turn your heart to His presence. How is this done? You turn to Him by faith.
By faith you believe you have come into the presence of God.

Next, while you are before the Lord, begin to read some portion of Scripture. As you read, pause. This pause should be quite gentle. Remember, you are not reading to understand or learn, you are reading to turn your inward thoughts to Christ...to turn your mind from outward things to the deep inward parts of your being.

The Lord promised to come and make His home within you (John 14:23). He promises to meet those who worship Him and do His will. The Lord will meet you in your spirit. St. Augustine once said that he had lost much time in the beginning of his Christian experience by trying to find the Lord outwardly, rather than by turning inwardly.

Once your heart has been turned inwardly to the Lord, you will have an impression of His presence. You will notice His presence more acutely because your outer senses have become calm and quiet. Your mind is no longer on outward things; instead, sweetly and silently, your mind has become occupied with what you have read and by the touch of His presence.

It is not that you will think upon what you have read, but you will feed upon what you have read. You swallow what you have tasted.

This may seem difficult at first....have you not, at times, enjoyed the flavor of a very tasty food? But unless you were willing to swallow the food, you received no nourishment. It is the same with your soul. In this quiet, peaceful and simple state simply take in what is there as nourishment.

Be assured that as your soul becomes more accustomed to withdrawing to inward things, this process will become easier. There are two reasons that you will find it easier each time to bring your mind under the subjection of the Lord. One is that the mind, after much practice, will form a new habit of turning deep within. The second is that you have a gracious Lord!

The Lord's chief desire is to reveal Himself to you and, in order to do that He gives you abundant grace. The Lord gives you the experience of enjoying His presence. He touches you, and His touch is so delightful that, more than ever, you will be drawn inwardly to Him.

Madame Who? Madame Guyon

Madame Guyon (1648-1717) wrote a profound and yet simple little book called Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ. Sometimes another title is used for this book: A Short and Very Easy Method of Prayer. I like the second title better, because I think it is a more definitive introduction to her work.

Madame Guyon spent much of her life imprisoned under royal order in a convent and then in the Bastille because of her devotional beliefs.

This is a summary of some of her thoughts (the complete booklet is about $10 at Amazon).

She says there are two ways for us to come to the Lord in prayer: (1) Praying the Scripture and (2)Waiting in His presence.

Her simple, gentle style is easy and comfortable, yet she pierces my soul.

Praying the Scripture

This is what she says to do: Turn to the Scripture and choose some passage that is easy to understand. "Then come quietly and humbly to the Lord. There, before Him, read a small portion of the passage you have opened to.

"Be careful as you read. Take in fully, gently, and carefully what you are reading. Taste it and digest it as you read...you do not read quickly. Do not move from one passage to another, not until you have sensed the very heart of what you have read. You may then want to take that portion of Scripture that has touched you and turn it into prayer.

"You will be surprised to find that when your time with the Lord has ended, you will have read very little, probably no more than half a page.

"Praying the Scripture is not judged by how much you read, but the way you read.

"If you read quickly it will benefit you little. You will be like a bee that merely skims the surface of a flower. Instead, in this new way of reading with prayer, you become like the bee who penetrates into the depths of the flower. You plunge deeply within to remove its deepest nectar.

"Of course, there is a kind of reading the Scripture for scholarship and for study--but not here...To receive any deep, inward profit from the Scripture you must read as I have described. Plunge into the very depths of the words you read until revelation, like a sweet aroma, breaks upon you.

"I am quite sure that if you will follow this course, little by little you will come to experience a very rich prayer that flows from your inward being."

Following this advice has helped me. Actually I am more eager to begin my prayer time with this system -- I am excited to see what God is going to reveal to me in those few words. And I have had some wonderful surprises!

And prayer seems to flow outward in a natural way, streaming forth to search out the things I already wanted to pray for. It's almost like the water cascading down as a waterfall, and then spreading out to cover the landscape. Also, it seems to reduce the problem of distractions, which is a major problem for me.

And it reminds me of Philip Yancey's book on prayer. He talked about a mountain summit, with the melting of the snow pack, how the streams flowing down into the valley below became rivers and then lakes. I need to go back and read that again because I am not getting it correctly some of the time.

He gives us what we need - - C S Lewis

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.

But God wills our good, and our good is to love Him (with the responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him; and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces.

If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God -- though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain.

Yet the call is not only to prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine life, a creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires.

We are bidden to 'put on Christ,' to become like God.

That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. 

Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.

                -- From The Problem of Pain

What's So Important about Prayer?

 

What's So Important About Prayer?

To say that 'Prayer Changes Things' is not as close to the truth as saying, 'Prayer changes me and then I can change things.' Or, 'Prayer changes the way I look at things.'

God has established and arranged our relationship with Him so that prayer, on the basis of our redemption, changes the way we see and understand things.

Prayer is not a matter of changing things externally, but one of working miracles in a person's inner nature.

We tend to think of prayer as a way of getting things for ourselves or for others, but the biblical purpose of prayer is to get to know God Himself. We need to seek His mind and His heart. Determine and ask for what would please Him and bring glory to His Name.

That's what so important about prayer. Our prayers.