1KHO 855: Disappointment Is Not the End | Matt Smallbone, The Prayer Experiment

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**GD Erichson** (0:15)
Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is GD Erichson, the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and I read a book I loved. I loved it, I loved it. It's called The Prayer Experiment, how praying like Jesus realigns everything, our thoughts, our hearts, and our posture toward God and the world author, Matt Sumabone is here. Welcome, Matt. How are you? I'm doing wonderful. I really like this book. Huge congrats to you.

**Matt Smallbone** (0:37)
Thank you very much. Yeah, it was always a bit of a goal to write one and it happened, so that's always good.

**GD Erichson** (0:44)
Okay, let's talk about the premise of this book. It's about the Lord's Prayer, which is just a beautiful piece of writing, but I think it's just something you kind of memorize. Some people do, some people don't. You memorize it and you don't think about it too much. So you go through, the book is about diving into the Lord's Prayer and the different components of it, and I loved it. So I would love to kick it off though with something that I related to, which is that sometimes we feel like prayer is not working, and so we don't really do it.

**Matt Smallbone** (1:17)
Yes.
Yeah, I'm 48 years old, parent of four, I'm an immigrant to the United States, so I spent the first 28 years of my life in Australia, moved here with a six-month-old child who we later found out is on the autism spectrum, which is a big part of that. Man, gosh, that became the meta-narrative of the last 20 years of our life. And then we have three younger kids. So I got three boys and then a baby girl. We're now 20 through 14
And I'm a pastor, but I've loved Jesus since I was 16 I used to be great at prayer.
I felt that was all very easy for me early on.
But over the years, as life has hit and disappointments stacked up, I went, I've always loved Jesus and trusted God, but due to mostly to a lot of unanswered prayer and some personality issue, personality barriers that I have, I felt like I was probably never going to be good at prayer. And so I've always, you know, I've, and so I was teaching, I'm a pastor. So last year, we were teaching through prayer for seven weeks. And I was feeling, it was New Year's Eve, I was feeling nervous about going back to work. And that's problematic when your job title is lead pastor, you know, because we're teaching for a seven week series on prayer. The truth is, I didn't feel very good at it. I was, I felt like I've been disappointed quite a lot. Like anytime I've thrown up my heart, you know, we had a miscarriage. I was like, God, if you're not going to lean in on this stuff, like I do trust you ultimately, but what's the point of asking if things don't fundamentally change? So I kind of, you know, in my thirties, I continued loving Jesus that stopped praying very much is really what happened. So I find myself on New Year's Eve, worried, you know, kind of going, what do I do? I've got to preach this sermon on prayer, this sermon series, two months worth on prayer. I'm not very good at it. You know, what are your options? One, fake it, wordsmith the heck out of your stories or something and figure out the third person way to do this, or you just kind of own it and you learn beside the congregation. And what stood out to me was, I've been trying to follow Jesus' teachings in every aspect of my life for the last 30 years.
It's in this sermon called The Sermon on the Mount. If you're wondering what that looks like, you can just read Matthew 5 through 7 and you kind of get a good picture of what Jesus thinks is the best way for humans to live. I've done all of that except for this one bit where he says, this then is how you should pray. And I'm going, gosh, I'm not very good at prayer. And I've taken Jesus seriously at everything, giving, taking care of the poor, all that stuff, but never once actually tried praying the way he said to pray. I've just had a really haphazard approach to it. So I get pretty pragmatic and I went, you know what? I'm going to try this on for a year. So I had this little prayer experiment and I decided I was going to pray matching my personality. I was going to try and get up at 4 a.m. anymore. I wasn't going to do silent retreats or anything like that. I was just going to try and make it work with who I knew who I was. I was going to figure out what in my mind was a bit of a boring prayer that I've been able to memorize and been able to recite since I was like 3 years old. Like how on earth can this be it? But maybe the secret is in here because it has been in everything else of Jesus that I've taken seriously. So that's what I did. I prayed it exclusively several times a day for the year and figured out that it's actually a framework where you run your prayer request through it. That's just really good for the human heart as if Jesus knows how we work on the inside, perhaps.