There is no greater gift in prayer than the touch of God. It is both indescribable and undeniable; you know at once that it is God, and that it is strangely familiar. When God touches you, it is from the inside. No one but God can do that. It is always a touch of immeasurable love. Though not a physical touch, it still affects you physically. And also psychically. Like the hymn “He Touched Me” says, God’s touch will heal you and make you whole. Truly, God loves you in your totality, even if you do not.

The wondrous touch of God will bring forth the fruit of the Spirit, which Paul says includes: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22). These all come together in varying degrees, depending on your readiness to accept, embrace, and live out of these fruits.

God prefers to touch you softly, tenderly, like a mother her child or lovers their beloved. God apparently desires that you become sensitive to God’s gentle touch, without fear; and that you trust God’s touch completely, trust that God will never hurt or reject you. God knows as no one else where and when and how you need to be touched, even if you did not realize it until God’s actual touch. Then you heart may exclaim “Thank You! That is just what I needed.”

God can get through to us what God wants to get through, at any time. You can of course seem to close off from God, or turn away in disbelief, anger or despair. Yet if God wants to get your attention, God will. That being said, it is important to understand how God communicates with us during prayer, usually in subtle and unexpected ways.

There are seven essential entryways in us through which God may stealthily make God’s presence and will known during prayer. The better you understand these, the more readily your apparent prayer monologue can be grasped as an actual prayer dialogue, as a “with” rather than “to” God. It is vital to patiently wait upon, and listen for the Lord around these entryways. And also to take on faith that God addresses you daily, in a variety of elusive ways, though most importantly in prayer.

So what exactly is prayer? Prayer is communication with God in all its forms. This includes intimate as well as seemingly distant communication, from monologues to dialogues, from written texts to mystical touch, from speech to silent communion. Prayer establishes the bridge between God and humanity. It is as vital to your personal well-being to develop a flourishing prayer life, as it is to learn how to communicate love to human loved ones.

My purpose in these prayer podcasts is to teach you how to pray to God, so that you can actually come to sense the presence of God, the subtle but significant response of God to your prayer. What I will offer you are time tested ways of praying that will at some point bring you into direct connection with God. Everything is at stake in the long overdue return to the focus on knowing God directly. Such knowledge permeated the Bible and the medieval mystics. I want you to encounter the ultimate beauty, goodness and truth: God.

God has taught me a contemplative form of prayer which I practice every morning, and during brief periods throughout the day. I call it “Abiding Prayer,” and it is based Jesus’ directing us to: “Abide in me as I abide in you . . . Abide in my love” (John 15:4,9). Abiding prayer is less something you do, and more something you permit to happen. That means, Abiding Prayer is God’s prayer in and with you, built on Christ’s own insistent directive.

The focus of Abiding Prayer is on Christ and entering into a heart-to-heart mutual life with Christ during the prayer itself. Abiding Prayer offers a pathway toward attaining what Christ fervently prays for all disciples: “that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one” (John 17:22-23).

Not only is there little knowledge of God in our land today; there is also much fear. And these two facts are deeply interconnected. The presence of fear indicates an absence of the knowledge of, and faith in, God. There was great fear during the time of the prophet Hosea in the eight century BCE. What he declared about the northern kingdom of Israel rings true today: “There is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land. Swearing, lying, and murder, and stealing and adultery break out; bloodshed follows bloodshed. Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish (Hosea 4:1b-4).

Just imagine the calming consequences which would come to us if we could only say, with comforted conviction, the following three verses. They are penetrating words of fear-damping faith; they attest to the courage faith bestows, as we risk leaning fully into trust:

“The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? . . . I believe that I shall see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD!” (Psalm 27:1, 13-14).

As a child, I used to dream of flying on a magic carpet. Little did I understand back then, that prayer can actually become somewhat like a magic carpet, first elevating us and then somehow carrying us to God. And just as amazing as flight to God, as subtle motion of prayer, is the equally amazing sense that we have not really moved at all, that we have strangely arrived at where we already were, but did not know it. This time, however, we are nor alone, as we sense God’s approving presence.

Prayer will slowly reveal to us our unique, private yet shared space with God, already in place from the moment of our birth. It is as if God planned out our entire future, our coming time to be alone with God, at the very instant of our creation. How God can wrap our farthest tomorrow right into our initial beginning of todays, is an unfathomable mystery. But then, so is God, and likely will remain so forever.

Individual prayer will ever remain a private mystical mystery. Such prayer has been called. “The flight of the alone to the Alone.” It is as deeply personal as anything our lives. Thus does Jesus instruct: “Whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:6).

Whenever you pray, you enter into what has been called “the cloud of God”, as God’s unseen Spirit silently descends upon you. You secretly enter heaven’s eternal time and space, where you may come to know God directly with your soul, but not with your mind; where you may see God with your heart, but not with your eyes; where you may hear God with your soul, but not with your ears. In that mysterious cloud, you may also join and be joined by all the generations of Christians who have preceded you in the fulfillment of their faith, and who seek to encourage you to fight the good fight all the way to the end, when you will share with them a destiny in heaven.

This renders prayer all the richer with meaning. The truth is, Prayer and worship are going on in heaven and on earth at one and the same time, concurrently. That means we are not alone. The souls of dearly departed family members and friends are spiritually with us, as we are with them. That means our communion with God somehow includes our communion with them. We may sense, but cannot prove this great commonality between the living and the dead, but it is there nevertheless. Our common prayer and worship transcend time and space. We are sharing in a unity to be ours forever in heaven.

Among the most comforting words Jesus Christ ever spoke, were those uttered shortly before he was arrested and crucified. During my years as a pastor, I said these words at nearly every funeral I conducted. Thinking of us rather than Himself, Jesus sensitively said:

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:1-3).

I have mostly considered these words as referring to Christ coming to meet us after we pass over to the other side. But I recently suggested to a spiritual woman that she meditate on these words in effort to sense Christ’s presence right now. As I said this, the Spirit informed me that these words also mean, “Christ is coming for you now, so that you and Christ can become one in Spirit in this life; and after that, in the life to come.”