Rest in God

Date: 2019-02-24
Title: Rest in God
Speaker: Rev. Selina
Scripture: Isaiah 30:15
Summary by Freedom M.

The prayer of rest is called silent prayer. Each of us must keep heart and body still, inside and out. To enter the ‘prayer of rest,’ we follow two steps:

(1) Connect with God
The Creator breathed into a person’s heart and gave us life; that breath of life testifies to our deep connection with the Creator. To feel this connection, sit upright, place both feet on the ground, and breathe deeply.

(2) Connect with yourself
To feel the connection with yourself, place your hands on your knees, palms up, and breathe deeply. Allow your whole body to relax, and feel yourself being reawakened. Jesus said to the disciples: ‘Sit here while I go to pray.’ (Mark 14:32). Let Jesus Christ pray in us, for us.

Desert monastics adopted a practice called ‘Maranatha’ — meaning ‘Come, Lord!’ This short chant accompanies slow, steady breathing: ‘Ma’ inhale, ‘Ra’ exhale, ‘Na’ inhale, ‘Tha’ exhale. The practice does not place personal emotion within. Keep a calm and peaceful disposition, and practise Maranatha in whichever way is most comfortable.

Connect with the Lord Jesus Christ, and pray with the breath of the heart. As you practise Maranatha, let the prayer of Jesus surround you.

The spiritual learning is to know that you have nothing, that you are nothing — and to know that Jesus owns all that is ours. Let go of our concepts of success and failure, right and wrong, gain and loss, should and should not — and let Jesus pray within us, that we may be more whole. This wholeness exists not only in our imagining; it is the placing of ourselves entirely into God.

In practising Maranatha, remember three S’s: Silence, Stillness, Simplicity. There is nothing else but Christ praying in us.