Prayer
Finding the Heart’s True Home
by Richard Foster

Week 2
Part 1— Moving Inward
Chapter 1— Simple Prayer

“Pray as you can—not as you can’t.”  Dom John Chapman

OPENING PRAYER

1.  What do you feel  needs to be in place before you can actually pray?
         Competence?
         Training?
         Knowledge?
         Language?

2.  We all come to prayer with a mixture— selfless and selfish, merciful and hateful, loving and bitter,    graciousness and judgement.  Think about your prayers in the          last 3 days.  What do you find?

3.  The Prayer of Beginning Again
         Who is Simple Prayer about?
         Ordinary people and concerns to a loving God. 
         The most common prayer in the Bible.

4.  Moses:  Numbers 11
     Elisha:  2 Kings 2:24
     Psalm 137:9

5.  The Self mixed with amazing selflessness and virtue.
         Ex 32:32
         2 Kings 4:16
         Ps 119:97

6.  In Simple Prayer, we come as a child, with all innocence and our unmasked self.           We come as we are, not waiting to become holier/cleaner/smarter.
         What happens if we try to clean up our act before we come before God?
         We lay our filthy rags before him—tears, anger, frustration—honesty.
         What have you brought to God recently that you weren’t proud of?

C.S. Lewis: “…lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”

7.  Can we pray even when we are waging a war with evil in our hearts?

         
  


8.  The truth is, there is always war in our hearts.   What are some things you are at war with yourself about in your heart?

Prayer Project:
Keep a prayer journal. 
•   Make a note in your journal each time you find yourself in simple prayer.  How many times do you breathe a prayer that asks God to do something to you or for you?
•   Make a list to share next week of the things you found yourself asking for.  Then ask God and your own soul, “Why did I ask for that (demand that)?”

•   Find 3 examples of simple prayer in scripture and write them down to share.

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