A Small Shift in How We Pray | Small Shifts, Big Faith Wk 3 | Lenten Study 2026

0:13 Welcome back to our Lenten study. This is week three of our four-week study, Small Shifts, Big Faith, Lenten Practices to Transform Your Life. And I'm Joshua. I'm our lead director for adult discipleship. Hey, I'm Bo. I'm our adult discipleship director at our downtown location. We're glad that you're here. We're glad that you have stuck with us over these last few weeks. We've been having a little bit of fun, and we hope you are too. and more than fun, we hope that you're learning something and even more than learning something, like learning practices that you might be able to integrate into your faith life that deepen and enrich your faith. And no matter where you're watching from, so some of you may be listening in on the commute into work or maybe you're at work already in your office or maybe you're at home. Some of you are watching as part of a small group, a Sunday school class, and others of you are just doing this on your own as personal reflection and devotion through the season of Lent. We're glad that you're here.

1:12 We have a study guide that's available on the website, and I encourage you to download it to guide you over these weeks of study. What we're trying to do, this is the big point of this study, we want to share with you, and really even more than just share, we want to invite you into these simple, purposeful practices, spiritual practices, Christian practices, and in this season of Lent, as we practice them, what we find is that they have the power to transform our lives, to change our lives in really big ways. And it's a shift in how we think and how we practice, but it isn't big shifts that we're trying to make. Rather, these small, simple shifts that over time make a big difference in our lives. So that's kind of where we've been over the last few weeks. Yeah. Yeah. And if you've missed the last couple of weeks, I thought it'd be good to just catch you up to speed. And you can go back and watch those. But in week one, we talked about communion and fasting. And the last time we talked about reading and living scripture.

2:11 And then today we turn to the practice of prayer. Yeah, you might notice that there's a pink Jesus here on the table. We're not going to tell him yet about pink Jesus. So you got to stick with us for just a little bit and we'll start to explain a little bit more about pink Jesus. But we're talking about prayer today. We're talking about the shift in how we pray. And prayer is one of the most central practices to our faith. Why? Why? Because it connects us with God in some really powerful ways. It's constant conversation with God. Prayer is as simply put as this. Like, it is talking with God and conversing with God, communing with God. And what's amazing about praying, prayer, is that when we do pray, like, we find ourselves changing a little bit over time. God works through prayer to change us, transform us.

3:04 And I love this idea that, you know, if you don't want to change, don't pray. If you don't want to change, don't pray. And maybe that's why prayer can be one of the forgotten practices of our faith life. Or it's not that we forget it. It's just that our lives get so busy or we get stuck in these rhythms or habits or patterns. And, you know, I know this is true of my life and maybe it's true of your life. You just, you get busy. and what is the first thing to go? In my life, it's often prayer. I just kind of go from one thing to the next thing to the next thing. And, you know, and sometimes prayer can be difficult. Sometimes we wonder like, God, are you listening? Do you hear my prayers, God? Or maybe we've walked through difficult circumstances and it just feels like God is silent or doesn't respond, right? Yeah, and you're not alone in that. You know, the years that I've done ministry, talking to people, prayer is difficult.

3:58 People have a hard time praying. There's some misconceptions about prayer, but also people just wonder, does this even work? You know, is God hearing me? Does God hear my prayers? That's something that a lot of people wrestle with. But what I've found is that the real challenge of prayer isn't just doing it. Oftentimes it's just starting. It's getting into that habit or that routine of praying regularly. Maybe you've felt this way. I know I certainly have that. You know, I know I should, I want to, I need to, I just don't. Right. And you're not alone in that. And that's the, that's the thing. The hardest part of any practice isn't doing, it's a lot of times getting started. I know like I have a mound of laundry on my bed. I'm just like, oh man, once I do it, it's like, oh, that wasn't too bad. Oftentimes it's getting started. Prayer and laundry.

4:49 There's, there's a metaphor there in just getting started. I love thinking about habits and how we form habits. And we've kind of mentioned over the last couple of weeks how we form habits. Last week, we talked about the habit loop and how that works. This week, we're talking about the two-minute rule or introducing the two-minute rule. And the two-minute rule is this simple. It's been popularized by people like David Allen or James Clear. and the idea is that in two minutes, what can we do to reduce the friction just to get started? And like the two minute rule is just do something for two minutes, get started. You don't have to spend five minutes or 10 minutes or 20 minutes or an hour doing it. Just getting started is the biggest step that we can take. So how this kind of plays out is, you know, if you wanna read more books, the two minute rule would say, just start with one page.

5:44 Like take two minutes to read that one page. Or if you want to write more, don't start by writing a book. Just start with two minutes. Writing for two minutes. Maybe it's writing one page to get started. One sentence. So similarly to prayer. If we want to integrate prayer more into our lives, maybe it's just beginning with hello, God, or thank you, God, or Lord, I need you today. right? It's that simple start that if we just get started in those first two minutes, we find ourselves on this, you know, trajectory where we find our prayer life enriched. Yeah. Yeah. And an important note, like that two minute rule, it's not about doing less. It's about doing the thing that leads to more. And that's exactly what we're talking about through this whole thing. These small shifts can lead to so much more. So how does this help us with the practice of prayer. Yeah, so let's talk about that shift, the shift in how we pray. Now, you've been wondering to this point, like, what is Pink Jesus doing up here on this table with us?

6:48 It's a good question. If you are wondering that from wherever you are, it's a good question. It's a fair question. There's a funny story behind Pink Jesus here, and I found Pink Jesus, well, I found him in an old youth room, like amongst all kinds of, you know, fun, interesting, odd youth ministry things. And Pink Jesus captured my attention. Like my eye was drawn to him probably because he's pink, right? And so I saved Pink Jesus because as much as we love Jesus, this Pink Jesus is actually kind of an illustration of the opposite of how prayer works. So it's kind of like a magic eight ball and you can, you know, shake pink Jesus. And on the bottom here is a die that kind of gives you an answer. So, you know, I'm thinking back to where I was at as a young person. And, you know, when I was in youth ministry, like, should I ask this girl out and you can shake pink Jesus?

7:47 And you might get the question. This one says, wait for a sign. Or, you know, Jesus, can you make me a millionaire? there. You know, shake it. And once it stops spinning, okay, here we go. It says, let me ask my dad. So that's not a no. That's not a no. Or, you know, you think of really important prayers that we might pray or meaningful prayers. Like I think of people who've prayed for healing before, like, God, please heal me. And, you know, if you shake pink Jesus, the answer you might get back is wait for a sign keeps coming back up. Wait for a sign. Like, okay, the point of being Jesus is to show us that our prayer life isn't just a magic eight ball that we can shake and hope for, hope for something good to happen. It's much deeper than that. And while Jesus invites us to ask, to seek, to not, for anything. Prayer is more about aligning our hearts and our lives with God and God's purposes so that we experience love and mercy, that we experience forgiveness and grace.

9:01 Prayer is God working within us and our conversation with God over time. And so I appreciate how Richard Foster talks about prayer as being simple. There is just simple prayer, prayer that we can offer that is simple. He says this, that in simple prayer, we bring ourselves before God just as we are, warts and all. And really simple prayer is about talking with God. It's the most common form of prayer in the Bible where like some of the most challenging circumstances that people experience in the Bible, they talk with God, they go to God in prayer, they communicate, commune with God. And so simple prayer looks like this, begin where we are. or don't be discouraged by our lack of prayer. It means letting go of trying too hard to pray. And it also invites us to find a habit that works for you, that works for us. And you wrote a prayer journal.

9:56 I did, I did. Yeah, I wrote a prayer devotion not too long ago because I recognize that for so many prayers, it can feel difficult to get started or there's so many questions around prayer. And I wanted to invite people into enriching their prayer life And so you can actually find that prayer devotion on our website. We'll link here. So go and find that and download it. But I was looking through Jesus, his life, and how he prayed. And, you know, it's interesting. Jesus had a rhythm to his prayer. He would find a certain time, a certain place, a certain pattern to his prayer. I think about particular scripture passages in the Gospels. So in Mark, we read this. Early in the morning, well before sunrise, Jesus rose and went to a deserted place where he could be alone in prayer. I love that phrase. He went to a place where he could be alone in prayer.

10:48 He also, he had a certain time early in the morning. He had a certain place. So in Luke, Jesus went out to the mountain to pray and he prayed to God all night long. I love that at the same time, Jesus is a morning person. He's also a night person. So if you find yourself to be a night person, that's okay. And if you're a morning person, like there are rhythms here that are good. And Jesus, he had a rhythm as well. So we read this also in Luke. Jesus was praying in a certain place. And when he finished, one of his disciples said, Lord, teach us to pray. They were looking for a rhythm, a pattern to their prayer. And of course, what follows is the Lord's prayer that Jesus taught his disciples. So Jesus had a certain time, a certain place, and a certain rhythm to his prayer life. I'm not sure what your rhythm is, but what I've found works really well for me is I actually serve on our care team downtown. So I always have a working list of just congregants who are in need of prayer.

11:45 And I tend to carve time out of my lunch each day to look over that prayer list and spend time in prayer for our congregants downtown that are on that list. That seems to work well for me. In the mornings, I'm usually pretty productive with work stuff. And in the evenings, I've got a family. And so that's what I found really works well is over that lunch hour. What about you? Yeah, for me, a lot of my morning running is like focused on prayer. I don't pray every step, but I find like as I'm running in the morning, it's this time to connect with God. And I think through the day, I think through different circumstances or I think about people. And so I find myself praying, prayer in motion, kinetic prayer. But I also think about like certain patterns that we can introduce into our prayer life that deepen and enrich our prayer. And there's a five-fold pattern of prayer that we practice. I included this in the devotional, and it comes from Pastor Adam in his book, The Walk, where he invites us into five kind of patterns of prayer. And those patterns are praise, praise being the expressing of awe and wonder as we offer our praise and love to God. Thanksgiving, so sharing gratitude and joy for the gifts and blessings we receive. Confession, acknowledging and confessing our sin and asking God's forgiveness petition, interceding or asking for God's help and praying on behalf of others, and then yielding, which is surrendering to God and offering our life to be used by God for his purpose. That fivefold pattern, praise, thanksgiving, confession, petition, and yielding are these kind of five ways of praying. Sometimes you might pray them all at once going through each of those five or other times you might find that you just pray those in different seasons of life.

13:32 Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned five because there's also a really practical strategy that might help you if you're wanting to make a habit of prayer. You can take each finger, and Pastor Adam talks about this as well, but you can take each finger and be a reminder of when to pray during the day. You know, the first one being when you wake up, the second one being when you eat breakfast and then lunch and then dinner. And then when you go to sleep, you can just take just a moment. And I try to do this, but oftentimes the prayer is just a couple sentences. God, thank you so much for the breath in my lungs. Help me be sensitive to your spirit today. Maybe something that simple. This is a great strategy that will get you going on this journey of prayer. But here's the point. The point is this, that if you make a shift in how you pray, if you make this shift, this simple practice, the point is just getting started. Just get going.

14:25 Make that small shift. Maybe it's two minutes and practice that prayer and talk with God and see what happens. Yeah. Yeah. Now, there's another small shift that we can make within thinking about how we pray. So introducing prayer into our lives. And it's the shift from talking. So prayer is in part just talking to God. But it's also listening. Listening to God. Listening for God to speak. And I love this quote from Soren Kierkegaard. He was a Danish philosopher. He was a theologian in the 19th century. Some call him the father of existentialism. He might have had a little too much time to think on his own. I don't know. But he was a really powerful thinker. And he once said, a man prayed and at first he thought that prayer was talking, but he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized that prayer is listening.

15:22 That's good. This is really powerful for any of us to kind of make that shift from talking to listening for God to speak. And I think about the young prophet Samuel in the Old Testament. God is speaking to him, and Samuel's response is, Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening. And it was this really powerful moment. Listening for God, it invites our attention. It invites our openness. It invites our humility and even our availability to respond to God and what God might be saying, what God might be nudging us toward, whispering to us, compelling us to do. We see it slightly in the New Testament as well, this idea of being slow to speak, quick to listen. Yeah, that's good.

16:13 There's a powerful story about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and kind of how prayer was part of his life. Of course, he was the powerful, influential civil rights leader and Christian leader. And prayer is one aspect of his life that's often overlooked. And so I'm taking from Louis Baldwin, who was a scholar at Vanderbilt, a professor at Vanderbilt. and I believe he's emeritus now, but he examined Dr. King's prayer life, and he noted that prayer gave Dr. King strength to continue, you know, despite the arrests, public conflicts, even killings during the civil rights movement. And in 1956, someone called Dr. King's home well after midnight. It was a phone call to threaten him, intimidate him, to convince him to step away from his civil rights work. They threatened to destroy his home, his family, to kill him. And immediately after the call, Dr. King related that he had one of the most powerful transformative prayer experiences of his life. And so Lewis Baldwin talks about this experience saying, Dr. King retreated to his kitchen and over a cup of coffee poured his heart out to God, praying, Lord, I'm down here trying to do what is right. Now I'm afraid and I can't let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.

17:45 And I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I've come to the point where I can't face it alone. And it wasn't long after this prayer that Dr. King recounted that he heard this voice, this gentle whisper, this inner voice assure him, King, stand up for justice. King, stand up for justice. And in that moment, he knew that God was leading him, that God was guiding him, that God was there with him and had not left him. And Coretta Scott King, she writes about this experience in her book, Standing in the Need of Prayer. She wrote about it saying that when Martin, when her husband, when Martin stood up from the table, he was imbued with a sense of confidence and he was ready to face anything. You know, sometimes we don't have the words to pray. Sometimes we feel like we're at our very end. We don't know what to do next. And sometimes we experience hardship and loss and grief. And sometimes we even wonder if God is listening.

18:48 but when we move from talking to listening for God, we find that God speaks in powerful ways. Sometimes it's through that inner voice, through whispers and nudges. Sometimes it's through other people too. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm glad you said that because, you know, I meet with a lot of people and sometimes they say they just don't have words. You know, it may be a season of grief, of hardship, of trial in their life. And I know I personally have experienced this recently. The last few months, I was dealing with a really hard thing with a friend and I was in a season of deep grief. And I felt like in that season, it was, if it weren't for the community of people around me that were praying for me when I didn't have words, I don't know how I would have made it. I mean, I felt just so much love and so just cared for in that season by the community of people around me that were lifting up prayers on my behalf in a season, which I didn't have words. And I just was just listening. You know, I was just in a season where I didn't, I didn't know what to say, But the community of people around me really helped me and was awesome.

19:48 Yeah. It's powerful when a community surrounds one another in prayer. And we find that sometimes we are the answer to prayer. We're the answer to somebody else's prayer. God wants to use us. As we talk about prayer at resurrection, you'll often hear it framed in that way, that sometimes God works through us to be the answer to someone's prayer. And it requires both our talking with God. It also requires our listening, listening for that inner voice, that nudge to respond. And the point that we want to make is that the small shift in our prayer life, it simply begins with just talking with God. Hello, God, here I am. Use me, send me, help me. But then pausing and waiting and listening just long enough to hear from God so that we know how to respond. And what we want to do is make these practices very, very helpful, practical, usable in this season.

20:46 And so here's a small shift. Just start with two minutes in your day. Or maybe it's starting with your hands and thinking through the five times of day when you wake up at breakfast, lunch, dinner, and when you go to bed. Thinking of those five times to pray throughout the day. And maybe it's thinking, using your other hand to think through the five-fold pattern of prayer, praise and thanksgiving and confession and petition and yielding, like exercising those types of prayers that deepen and enrich your prayer life. While we love pink Jesus, there's such a deeper, richer life to our prayer life than, you know, thinking of our prayers as being like a magic eight ball and just responding, but really finding the depth in the life of prayer through talking with God and listening. So we're going to close with this prayer that as we've gone over the last couple of weeks, we've been reading prayers from the Methodist book of daily prayer.

21:44 And we'll conclude today with this one. Ever present God, you are always listening to your children and call me to make my hopes and petitions known to you. Today, I name that which weighs heavy on my heart for that which I need today, for those in my life hurting or suffering, for decisions or choices I'm facing, for local, national, and global leaders, for your people far away who are often overlooked, underserved, or treated unjustly. Hear my prayers, O God, and help me to listen to the ways you are speaking back into my life. Sovereign God, you see fit to move, to speak, and show your presence in your own way and at your own time. Help me to look back and see that even today you are active in my life. I'm grateful for the ways that today you support me and guide me, confronted me and helped me not to feel alone. The ways that you opened my eyes and softened my heart. And as I speak to you, may I also more readily listen to the ways you are speaking to me. In Jesus' name.