To love our success more than God and our neighbor hardens the heart, making us less able to feel and to sense. That, ironically, makes us poorer artists. Therefore, because O’Connor was a writer of extraordinary gifts who could have become haughty and self-absorbed, her only hope was in the constant soul reorientation of prayer. “Oh God please make my mind clear. Please make it clean. … Please help me to get down under things and find where You are.”11
Owen gave due diligence to laying the doctrinal foundation of Christian salvation. Then, however, he exhorted his hearers to “get an experience of the power of the gospel … in and upon your own hearts, or all your profession is an expiring thing.”24 This heart experience of the gospel’s power can happen only through prayer—both publicly in the gathered Christian assembly and privately in meditation.
Prayer is the only entryway into genuine self-knowledge. It is also the main way we experience deep change—the reordering of our loves. Prayer is how God gives us so many of the unimaginable things he has for us. Indeed, prayer makes it safe for God to give us many of the things we most desire. It is the way we know God, the way we finally treat God as God. Prayer is simply the key to everything we need to do and be in life.
In my own experiences, the ideas for companies and investments popped into my head quite out of nowhere. It is important to realize this fact because in most cases people are just too busy to notice. They could pop up while a mother is tearing her hair out getting the kids ready for school. The ideas never stood a chance, crushed by the anxiety of racing to meet the school bus. The concept of nothing is difficult for us to compute mentally. As soon as we try to conceptualize it, we give it identity and form, and it ceases to be nothing. In essence, we destroy it by thinking about it. So let’s not try too hard. The only thing to contemplate, and the only reason I make the distinction, is that because everything comes from nothing, then in nothing must be all of potential. The closer, therefore, we can get our minds to a state of nothing, the more potential for success we would have. - Trevor, 3 steps
Every thought eventually becomes its own experience, energy converted into matter, without considering if that is good or bad for us. This is why control of mentality is critical to your success. Whatever you are against becomes your experience, and you get extra helpings of what you did not want: more dead-end job, more stupid boss, and more boredom. Whatever you are for, more of that comes your way. The only solution is to have more for thoughts than against thoughts, and to make those for thoughts bigger. That is the simple lifestyle change required to control mentality.
Lincoln scholar Douglas L. Wilson wrote: “To approach Lincoln’s presidency from the aspect of his writing is to come to grips with the degree to which his pen, to alter the proverb, became his sword, arguably his most powerful presidential weapon.” He noted that President Lincoln “responded to almost every important development during his presidency, and to many that were not so important, with some act of writing. Every word spoken, every line written was carefully mapped out.”
The only property that concerns us in the Three Simple Steps is that words trigger images, images trigger thoughts, and thoughts become reality. We must consider words as magic bullets that carry the power to create or destroy. Cast like a spell from a voice, pen, or keyboard, they have the ability to make or break us. They also have the power to energize or diminish anyone at whom we fire them. Being aware of the properties of thoughts and the power of emotion-laden words gives you the toolbox to control mentality and maintain individual thought.
“How can it be?” she asks, “I don’t want to be in debt. I hate debt. I’m fed up with always having to watch the pennies. When I don’t want it, why do I keep getting it?” I explain that the thought about not wanting debt manifests as a physical match of itself . . . the situation of not wanting debt. Something will happen in her life that will increase the hatred of debt. It is often an unexpected repair bill, but sometimes it’s a “too good to refuse” offer for a piece of clothing, kitchen utensil, etc. Equally, it could be the tearful eyes of her son when he wants a new bike to be cool like his friends. She can’t stand to see him upset, so she uses the credit card to buy what she cannot yet afford. The more we think about not wanting something, the more we are against it and reinforce that situation in our lives. The answer is simple, but my friend refuses to change. If she managed the thoughts in her head, created images of things she really did want, and carefully controlled what she said in person or over social media, her life would improve.
Paul’s main concern, then, is for their public and private prayer life. He believes that the highest good is communion or fellowship with God. A rich, vibrant, consoling, hard-won prayer life is the one good that makes it possible to receive all other kinds of goods rightly and beneficially. He does not see prayer as merely a way to get things from God but as a way to get more of God himself. - Keller, Prayer
If we give priority to the outer life, our inner life will be dark and scary. We will not know what to do with solitude. We will be deeply uncomfortable with self-examination, and we will have an increasingly short attention span for any kind of reflection. Even more seriously, our lives will lack integrity. Outwardly, we will need to project confidence, spiritual and emotional health and wholeness, while inwardly we may be filled with self-doubts, anxieties, self-pity, and old grudges. Yet we won’t know how to go into the inner rooms of the heart, see clearly what is there, and deal with it. In short, unless we put a priority on the inner life, we turn ourselves into hypocrites. The seventeenth-century English theologian John Owen wrote a warning to popular and successful ministers: A minister may fill his pews, his communion roll, the mouths of the public, but what that minister is on his knees in secret before God Almighty, that he is and no more.32
Many people will pray when they are required by cultural or social expectations, or perhaps by the anxiety caused by troubling circumstances. Those with a genuinely lived relationship with God as Father, however, will inwardly want to pray and therefore will pray even though nothing on the outside is pressing them to do so. They pursue it even during times of spiritual dryness, when there is no social or experiential payoff.
Jesus Christ taught his disciples to pray, healed people with prayers, denounced the corruption of the temple worship (which, he said, should be a “house of prayer”), and insisted that some demons could be cast out only through prayer. He prayed often and regularly with fervent cries and tears (Heb 5:7), and sometimes all night. The Holy Spirit came upon him and anointed him as he was praying (Luke 3:21–22), and he was transfigured with the divine glory as he prayed (Luke 9:29). When he faced his greatest crisis, he did so with prayer. We hear him praying for his disciples and the church on the night before he died (John 17:1–26) and then petitioning God in agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Finally, he died praying.
Prayer also is “a kinde of tune.” Prayer tunes your heart to God. Singing engages the whole being—the heart through the music as well as the mind through the words. Prayer is also a tune others can hear besides you. When your heart has been tuned to God, your joy has an effect on those around you. You are not proud, cold, anxious, or bored—you are self-forgetful, warm, profoundly at peace, and filled with interest. Others will notice. All “heare and fear.” Prayer changes those around us.
Prayer is learning who you are before God and giving him your essence. Prayer means knowing yourself as well as God.
Prayer is awe, intimacy, struggle—yet the way to reality. There is nothing more important, or harder, or richer, or more life-altering. There is absolutely nothing so great as prayer.