Prayer
This is the second in a series of five posts about How to Enjoy God, the book we are reading together as a club this break. For more on the book, or to read for yourself, click here. Johanna’s first post is in our archives. Check back each Saturday for another report from our blog team.

I think many Christians (including myself) tend to artificially concatenate an answered prayer with an enjoyment of God. However, this week’s reading from How to Enjoy God caused me to deeply reevaluate this rather intuitive pair of experiences and to begin to view them from God’s perspective instead of my own. In particular, I want to consider the specific aspect of God’s incarnation and how it relates to enjoyment, since this is definitely what touched me most this week. God’s incarnation turns out to be something profoundly related to a healthy, genuine prayer life.

First of all, I really loved the opening of chapter three, which sets an important groundwork for fully appreciating Christ’s incarnation. It is very difficult, from a humanly religious point of view, to understand that our worship and service to God should have an internal source. In everyday interaction with people, we are constantly objectifying, seeing others as entities separate from ourselves with which we must communicate. I think that this fact of life has unfortunately colored a great deal of Christian worship. We objectify God, seeing Him as a somewhat distant entity to Whom we must direct our prayers and petitions. In radical opposition to this religious tendency, chapter three points out that God is inside His believers – specifically, He is the life-giving Holy Spirit which has been mingled with our human spirit. Because of this, we need to stop objectifying God and start subjectifying Him, realizing that our enjoyment of Him should not stem from directing content towards Him, but instead by allowing Him to fill our being more and more with Himself. Though I had heard some of these facts before, I really enjoyed reading them again.

Now on to incarnation in chapter four. When God was incarnated as the man Jesus Christ, He existed as the epitome of a human being fully mingled with God. He was fully a man, but a man so saturated with divinity that He was also fully God. In our daily lives, we as Christians can apply the principle of incarnation as a way of enjoying God. I like how this ties in so directly with our proper method of subjectified prayer. When we pray, we must realize that the God in us is also praying, and that His desires should be the ones that are manifested in our prayers. If I pray from my mind about something, this is an example of me directing a desire towards God, instead of letting God lead me inwardly regarding what to pray based on His desires. By praying properly, we can engage the principle of incarnation by allowing the divine element (God within us, just as it was within Christ) to operate and spread. Because of this chapter, I think I finally understand what it means for God to be manifested in the flesh. Of course this is Jesus, but it is also every Christian who allows God to move him and operate in him – every Christian who applies the principle of incarnation to be essentially a little representation of Christ (God incarnated) on the earth. This really struck me, and I’m glad that it has helped my understanding come full circle.

By: P. Bixby

Philip Bixby
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