2 JBC 29:3 (2015): 2–7

From t he Edi tor’s De sk

An Invitation to Speak Up!

by DAVID POWLISON

In the psalms, relationship with God is happening out loud. More than 95%
of the psalms express or invite audible words. Most are spoken directly to
God. Quite often psalms speak to other people, inviting them to join in. And
sometimes a psalm even speaks of the “voice” of the inanimate creation. So when
we read, we hear what is written, because so much of it is happening out loud.
I cry out to you.
Hear the sound of my voice.
With my song I give thanks.
Shout for joy.
Incline your ear to me, and hear my words.
My tongue will sing aloud.
Open my lips.
Consider my groaning.
Let the sea roar…. The trees of the forest sing for joy.
I will call on him as long as I live.
I entreat your favor with all my heart.
Bless the Lord, O my soul.
I will tell what he has done for me.
Hallelujah!
Prayer is a verbal interaction. In the mere handful of psalms that have no obvious
verbal cue, a psalm might speak about human destinies in relation to God (e.g.,
Ps 1), or God himself might be the one speaking (e.g., Ps 110). Our audible

David Powlison (MDiv, PhD) is the executive director of CCEF and the senior editor of the Journal of
Biblical Counseling.
 AN INVITATION TO SPEAK UP! | POWLISON 3

response is then the most natural thing in the world.

In the verbal actions of the psalms—rejoicing in who God is, asking for
needed help, and expressing heartfelt thanks (1 Thess 5:16–18)—we are talking
to someone. It’s fair to say that having a “quiet time” is a misnomer. It’s more
of an out loud, “noisy time”! When you talk aloud you express the reality that
you are talking with someone else, not simply talking to yourself inside your
own head.
“Silent prayers” are not wrong, but they are the exception. Even in Scripture’s
silent prayers, the essentially verbal nature of prayer is still operative. Prayer
expresses blunt, head-on, heart-felt need, gladness, and gratitude. Earnest silent
prayer expresses desires in subvocal speech (to give it the technical name). Words
could be spoken out loud—but perhaps the situation doesn’t warrant it or the
state of mind doesn’t allow it. So when the servant of Abraham sought a wife
for Isaac, he later told her family that the pointed words he had said to the Lord
were “speaking in my heart.” When Hannah cried for a son, she was “speaking
in her heart; only her lips moved, and her voice was not heard.” Nehemiah was
put on the spot, mid-conversation with King Artaxerxes. Before answering the
king’s question, he “prayed to the God of heaven,” a silent pleading for wisdom
and favor. And Isaiah said,“O Lord, in distress, they sought you; they poured out
a whispered prayer.”1
If silent prayers are the exception, then spoken prayers are the rule. Both in
Jesus’ teaching and in his example, a praying person talks candidly and out loud
with the Father—and seeks privacy to do so. He tells us, “Go to your room and
shut the door.” If other people can’t hear you, then you are more likely to talk
straight, and you won’t be tempted to mouth prayers fabricated to impress others.
Jesus sought privacy for himself: “He went up on the mountain by himself to
pray. He would withdraw to desolate places and pray.” Why? He was talking it
out with his father. But his disciples listened in on some occasions: “Jesus was
praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him,
‘Lord, teach us to pray.’” Something about the candor, focus, directness, and scope
of how Jesus sought his father struck them. And when Jesus walked off into the
olive grove that final Thursday night in order to pour out his heart’s distress, his
disciples overheard both his fervent plea and his submission. Subsequent Scripture
reflects on this: “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications,
with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death.”2
You and I can do the same sort of thing. Our relationship with God is not
1
Genesis 24:45; Nehemiah 2:4; 1 Samuel 1:13; Isaiah 26:16.
2
Matthew 6:6; Matthew 14:23; Luke 5:16; Luke 11:1; Matthew 26:36–44; Hebrews 5:7.
4 AN INVITATION TO SPEAK UP! | POWLISON

meant to become so interiorized that we lose the words of direct speech. Close
the door, take a walk, get in the car—and speak up. Of course, in group contexts
throughout the Bible and in public gatherings, God’s people naturally pray
and sing aloud, just as they hear the Bible aloud. We naturally do the same in
corporate worship, when we join in the Lord’s prayer, or in small-group prayer.
The standard practice for both public and private prayer is to speak so as to
be heard by the Person with whom you are talking. Prayer is verbal because it is
relational. Prayer per se is not a psychological experience. It is not contemplative
immersion in an inner silence beyond words. It is an honest verbal conversation
about things that matter, talking with someone you know, need and love.
I’ve known many people (myself included) whose relationship with God was
significantly transformed as they learned to speak up with their Father. Previously,
prayer easily fizzled out amid the internal buzz of self-talk, distractions, worries
and responsibilities. The very things we most need God to deliver us from hijack
our attempts to seek the God we need. It is easy for prayer to become a kind of
muttering to oneself, becoming a bucket list of requests, with little connection to
who the Lord is and what he is up to. It is easy to slide into thinking of prayer as
the evoking of certain religious feelings, or a set of seemingly spiritual thoughts,
or a vague sense of comfort, awe and dependency on a higher power. It is easy for
prayer to meander into vague pieties, and to become virtually indistinguishable
from thoughts. Sometimes it becomes indistinguishable from anxieties and
obsessions! Sometimes prayer is confused with the act of stopping to ponder
quietly and collect yourself. Sometimes prayer becomes a superstitious rabbit’s
foot, a ritual to keep bad things away and to ensure good things.
Then there are the teachings that call for “centering prayer” or “the prayer
of silence” or “contemplative prayer” or “listening prayer,” or the notion that
God is most truly known in experiences of inner silence. There is the repetition
of mantras, even using biblical words as incantations, attempting to bypass
consciousness, seeking to induce a trance state or mystical experience. The Bible
never teaches or models prayer either as inner silence or as mantra or as an
altered state of consciousness. That’s important to notice. On the surface, such
teachings align with Buddhist and Hindu conceptions. They are psychological
techniques designed to evoke an “oceanic experience,” feelings of oneness and
peace. They don’t involve a conversation between named parties who have
something important to say to each other. The gods of silence and incantation
have no name, no personality, no authority, no stated will, make no promises,
and do not act on the stage of history. Such private spirituality can produce
inner ecstasies and inner peacefulness (I experienced that firsthand as a budding
Hindu in the years before coming to Christian faith). But such spirituality does
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not create interpersonal relationships—with God and with others. The mystic,
inner silence does not traffic in interpersonal love, loyalty, need, mercy, honesty,
tears, just anger, forgiveness, anguish, purpose, and trust. It is a super-spirituality,
beyond words.
Jesus and Scripture speak and act in sharp contrast. The Word in person
and in print expresses a humanness that walks on the ground and talks out loud.
Jesus gives a richer joy and a richer peace than the unnamed gods of inner silence,
inner ecstasy, and inner tranquility. The contemplative tradition tends toward
an elite, strenuous, privatized spirituality that is impossible for garden-variety
people. But Jesus speaks with pointed immediacy to the weak, the addicted,
the outcast, the immoral, the disillusioned, the embittered, the remorseful, the
hurting. And he brings elites—powerful, rich, educated, spiritually refined, self-
confident—down to earth.
God also reminds us to be quiet. Be still. Slow down. Stop. Take time to
reflect. Ponder. But the purpose is not to learn a technique for accessing an
inner realm of silence where we transcend the sense of self and experience a
god-beyond-words. The true God quiets us so we notice him, the God-who-
speaks-words. When we notice him, we notice what’s going on around us; we
notice what’s going on inside us. So we become more honest. This true God is
profoundly and essentially verbal, not silent: “God said... and it was so.... In the
beginning was the Word... and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”
So we listen to him. We take the time to hear his words of grace and truth. We
consider Jesus. And we pay attention to what’s going on in our lives, seeing the
world and ourselves in truer colors.
Then we can pray more intelligently and more candidly. We can think
straight, and feel honestly, and choose well. There is great benefit in turning off
the noise machines, the chatter, the music, the crowd noise, the busy, busy, busy,
talk, talk, talk—whether it’s playing inside your head, or all around you, or both.
But your goal is not to go down the paths of wordless interior silence. Turning
off the distractions is not actually prayer to the living God. It’s not how to know
Jesus deeply, or how to relate to our Father, or how to “experience” the Spirit. Do
be quiet, and for the right reasons—so you can notice and listen, so you can find
your voice. This living God is highly verbal and listens attentively to you.
Our understanding and practice changes as we begin to talk aloud to the
God who is here. He is not silent or inactive. He listens. He cares. He acts. We
begin to deal with him person to person. The pious verbal tics, the pseudo-lofty
language, and the vain repetitions of God’s name lessen. Then you start to sound
like you know what you need, and know who you’re talking to, and mean what
you say. Many other ingredients also contribute to wise, intelligent, purposeful,
6 AN INVITATION TO SPEAK UP! | POWLISON

earnest prayer. But out loud prayer becomes living evidence of an increasingly honest
and significant relationship. As you become vocal, your faith grows up.
God wants to catch your ear in order to awaken your voice. When you have your
“quiet” time, or as you walk outdoors, or during your commute, may the decibel level
appropriately rise to joyful noise and cries of need—and may you trust that God
listens to the sound of your voice!

***

Our living conversation with God—the give and take of listening and
speaking—defines the core of Christian faith and life. And that living conversation
bears innumerable different kinds of fruit as faithful people walk out the implications.
Each of the articles in this issue comes at one of the implications. The array of articles
illustrates something of the breadth of our faith’s significance—in visiting people in
the hospital, in changing the starting point of a controversial theological doctrine, in
facing the experience of panic, in dealing with the dehumanizing effect of psychiatric
diagnoses, in considering how to find meaning in life, in deciding how to offer
ministry education.
Longtime CCEF faculty member, Winston Smith, recently completed a
chaplaincy internship at a local hospital. His article “Hospital Visitation: Become
a Companion in the Wilderness” is one of the fruits of that experience. Numerous
conversations with patients and their families shaped his thoughts about how to
speak helpfully to people who suddenly find themselves in a difficult and often
frightening situation.
In “The Dreaded S-Word: Submission and Our Proud Hearts,” Robyn
Huck dispels a common misconception about the biblical doctrine of submission.
Submission is not primarily about marriage or gender, but about how we relate to
God. And our essential submission—whether we are male or female, whether married
or single—is a basic and comprehensive aspect of what it means to be a Christian.
Who hasn’t experienced the stirrings of anxiety, or the more full-fledged panic
that can explode further down that road? Pierce Hibbs’s essay reminds us that no
matter how alone we feel, no matter how dangerous the world seems, we are always
surrounded by the creation that expresses the personal presence of God. “Panic and
the Personal God” will give you new ways to find comfort when panic assails you or
someone you are seeking to help.
Ed Welch’s “Spiritual Growth in the Face of Psychiatric Disorders” puts to
work the theological reality that we are embodied souls. He offers three case studies
of people whose serious troubles include a physically-based weakness. He shows
how they are able to grow in their relationship with Christ within the context of
their limitations.
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In “Man’s Search for Meaning: Viktor Frankl’s Psychotherapy,” Kris Hemphill

describes logotherapy, which was born out of Frankl’s experience in a World War
II concentration camp. Logotherapy has interesting touch points with Christian
faith, because it is neither a pragmatic strategy to alleviate unpleasant symptoms,
nor an exploration of personal history to find supposed causes for personal
problems. Its goal is to help people find meaning in their lives amid life’s great
difficulties. Hemphill weighs its strengths and weaknesses in light of biblical faith.
For our Counselor’s Toolbox, Todd Stryd offers a “More Than a Proof Text”
article. Using Hebrews 12:24, Stryd explains what it means that Jesus’ blood
speaks “a better word” about who we are. He shares how he uses this verse to
help someone who, like all of us at different points, hears the accusing and
condemning voice of sin.
Our book review considers Paul House’s Bonhoeffer’s Seminary Vision. How
are people best prepared for a life in ministry to others? Drawing from Dietrich
Bonhoeffer’s major works, House persuasively argues for several changes in
seminary training that emphasize the role of face-to-face community and
discipleship. Reviewer Wes Tubel agrees with the vision, but offers an alternate
view on the constructive role that distance education can play.
 The Journal of Biblical Counseling
(ISSN: 1063-2166) is published by:

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