Evotional.com - Mark Batterson

I sent out this week's evotional, Y Pray, this morning and I thought I'd post an excerpt.

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Spiritual Priming

I learned something about priming last week. We're painting some of our coffeehouse walls an accent red. Our painter told us he'd have to use a dark primer otherwise the wall would take ten gallons of red. Evidently, red is a tough color to paint if the primer isn't right. I'm no painter, but it seems like one key to painting is priming.

Hold that thought.

In his book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell cites a priming experiment done by a psychologist named John Bargh at New York University.

Bargh and several colleagues chose a group of undergraduates as subjects and gave them two scrambled-sentence tests. The first test was sprinkled with rude words like "disturb," "bother," and "intrude." The second test was sprinkled with polite words like "respect," "considerate," and "yield."

In both cases, the tests were indiscreet. None of the subjects picked up on the word trend consciously. But it primed them subconsciously.

After taking the five-minute test, students were asked to walk down the hall and talk to the person running the experiment about their next assignment. An actor was strategically engaged in conversation with the experimenter when the students would arrive. And the goal was to see how long it would take students to interrupt.

Bargh wanted to know if the subjects who were primed with polite words would take longer to interrupt the conversation than those primed with rude words. They thought the subconscious priming would have a slight affect. But the affect was pretty profound in quantitative terms.

The people primed with rude words interrupted, on average, after only five minutes. But 82% of the people primed with polite words never interrupted at all. Who knows how long they would have patiently and politely waited if the researchers hadn't give the test a ten-minute time limit.

The study dramatically shows the effect of psychological priming. The brain is subconsciously primed by everything that is happening all the time.

Two Dutch researchers did a similar study that involved a group of students answering forty-two questions from the board game Trivial Pursuit. Half of the subjects were told to take five minutes to think about what it would mean to be a University professor and write down everything that came to mind. The other group was told to sit and think about soccer for five minutes.

The "professor" group got 55.6% of the questions right.
The "soccer" group got 42.6% right.

The professor group didn't know more than the soccer group. Gladwell says, "They weren't smarter or more focused or more serious. They were simply in a smart frame of mind."

What does that have to do with prayer?

Prayer puts us in a spiritual frame of mind.

Prayer is spiritual priming. When you live in prayer mode your spiritual radar is on. Your spiritual antenna is up. If you don't pray there will be countless God-given opportunities that come and go without you even knowing it. Why? Because you aren't primed and ready!

Colossians 4:2 says, "Devote yourselves to prayer being watchful and thankful."

The word "watchful" is a throw back to Old Testament "watchmen" whose job it was to sit on the city wall, scan the horizon, and keep watch. They were the first ones to see an attacking army or caravans of traders.

People who pray are "watchmen." They see things before other people see them. They see things other people don't see.

Why? They're spiritually primed.

Colossians 4:5 says, "Make the most of every opportunity."

Life is full of God-given opportunities-opportunities to learn, opportunities to love, opportunities to serve, opportunities to give. Stewardship is making the most of those opportunities. And prayer is the key to seeing and seizing those God-given opportunities!

I think there are two ways to live your life: survival mode and prayer mode.

Survival mode is doing the required minimum to get by on a day-by-day basis. You aren't asking God for anything so your aren't expecting anything. Not only are God-given opportunities wasted on you when you live in survival mode. It's downright boring!

Prayer mode is the exact opposite. You live in constant expectation of what God is going to do next.