If you’ve dipped your toes in the Lenten waters, you’ve likely noticed that prayer is a central part of this journey.

We pray prayers that spontaneously rise up in our hearts, yet we also pray as we listen to the Bible, with saints and heroes of the faith, and using traditional prayers that help us walk through each week of Lent in a posture of attentive listening to the Lord. 

If you aren’t accustomed to this practice, praying prayers written by someone else might feel a bit weird. These prayers may feel stale, impersonal, or detached from the everyday experience of life. You might say, “How can someone who lived hundreds of years ago possibly know what I’m feeling in this present moment?” If you can suspend your skepticism for just a moment, the answer might surprise you.

Written prayers train and inform our spontaneous prayers. And be careful, before you know it, these “stuffy” prayers just might become a prayer of your heart! 

If we’re honest, we don’t exactly know how to pray well. Very few of us would be so bold as to claim expertise in this area. In fact, Jesus’ own disciples struggled with prayer, so at least we’re in good company.


Do you remember how Jesus responded when his disciples expressed their struggles with prayer? Did he tell them to pray whatever came to mind, or to only pray in times of crisis or great need? No, believe it or not, Jesus gave them a “written” prayer: “Our Father, who art in heaven…” (Mt 6:9)

It is essential for us to engage our hearts in prayer, but our hearts are not always trustworthy guides and often need to be helped in the right direction. We can be consumed with our own desires, and so we must learn to pray “thy Kingdom come” before we begin to pray “give us this day.” We say “hallowed be thy name,” which leads us into the contrition of “forgive us our trespasses.” Whether it is the Lord’s Prayer, or the countless prayers based upon it, consider the ways the Holy Spirit might be at work today in and through these ancient words from the past!

Prayer of the Week

O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Prayer for the Second Sunday in Lent

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Lent is a journey with a clear destination.

When I look at where we’re headed, I am today reminded of our Lord’s words spoken in the garden to his disciples: “So, could you not stay awake with me one hour” (Mt 26:40)? In order to walk through Lent in a meaningful and redemptive way, we must hear these words asked directly to us.

In Lent, Jesus looks at each of us with love and compassion and says, “Are you awake?”

Attentive living is closely related to spiritual alertness. It is the realization that we are so often asleep in our faith, drifting from one place to the next without actively or intentionally cultivating a listening ear to the words of God spoken over us.

To be attentive is to be clear-headed. In Lent, we remove the distractions and vices that keep us sleepy and numb to our life with Christ. In fact, attentiveness in Scripture is often seen as the opposite of drunkenness. It is for this reason that Peter encourages Christians to “be sober-minded and watchful” (1 Pet 5:8). 

Sometimes, our spiritual sickness is seen in and through deliberate and obvious actions. We lash out at others in anger or rage. We indulge the flesh. We consume in ways that steal from our neighbor. However, it is our passive inattention that is often our greatest threat.

It is possible to sleepwalk your way through life. To wake, eat, drink, work, play, sleep, rinse and repeat, yet entirely miss God in the process. Lent reminds us that it doesn’t have to be this way. Within every question is an invitation, and today Jesus is inviting us to discover the joy that comes from clear-headed and attentive living.

Prayer of the Week

Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan: Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Prayer for the First Sunday in Lent

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“Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

– Deuteronomy 6:4

Israel grew up listening to Scripture. “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”(Deuteronomy 6:4) Hear. Listen. Allow the words to enter your soul through your ears. Before any of Israel’s great stories of faith and formation were put on paper, they were spoken and heard in the form of narratives, parables, and sayings. Their’s was a listening life. We’ve lost that I think. Those moments where we hear God’s word read over us, where the words ring out in the sky or around the sanctuary or through the miniature speakers aimed at our eardrum. This listening life, a life committed to soaking in Scripture, is what we ought to recover. The spiritual practice of Scripture listening is not just significant because our Christian ancestors did it, it’s significant because Scripture listening forms us in ways that Scripture reading can’t. Listening should not make us diminish the practice of reading Scripture one bit – it’s crucial. It’s absolutely essential for us to understand what the Bible means. I like the way Martin Luther put it, “If you picture the Bible to be a mighty tree and every word a little branch, I have shaken every one of these branches because I wanted to know what it was and what it meant.” Gaining Biblical understanding through reading is foundational, but what I want to draw our attention to is the lost art of listening to Scripture.

The Uniqueness of Reading and Listening

So how do reading and listening shape us in different ways. Let’s take them one at a time. When we read, our default tendency is to study, we want to pull the text apart and piece it back together, we draw conclusions, make decisions, we put the text to work. We’re seeking comprehension. This means we’re searching to grasp with the mind, to sharpen our thinking, to gather, to learn, and above all, to understand. When we read, we want to get something out of it. When we listen, we have to leave all that behind. We lose our ability to be precise, there’s no underlining, cross-referencing, consulting commentaries, starring, or highlighting. Listening is more leisurely. When we listen, our default tendency is to marinate. Instead of reading the words, we steep in them. When we listen we’re gaining apprehension. That means we’re laying hold of something, or better said, something is laying hold of us. We’re seized, captured, engaged and engrossed. It’s similar to what happens to us when we listen to music. We get lost, we’re caught up in it. Scripture listening seeks to put our hearts in a position to simply soak in the Word. In essence, when we listen to Scripture, we’re not trying to get something out of it, we’re trying to get into it. To inhabit it, and ultimately to be inhabited by it.

Listening and Doing

One of the most important qualities of listening to Scripture is that we can listen while we’re doing something else, things like driving a car, lifting weights, folding laundry, or taking a walk. Our heart dwells on the Word while our body processes a routine. We’re hearing God and acting at the same time. There’s a wonderful phrase of Charles Spurgeon’s, he says, “Be walking Bibles.” I like that because it forms a kind of picture in my mind, a picture that represents what I want my life with Christ to be about. I want to live in a state of ongoing communion with God, while I’m getting on with the business of living. When I listen to Scripture, it’s as if I’m in two places at once, I’m with Him and with the world. I’m in it, but not of it. There are few activities that are more restorative than moving through our outside world, while at the same time nourishing our inner one. Listening to Scripture accomplishes that. It deepens and strengthens our experience in the present moment. Spurgeon again points the way forward, “Visit many good books,” he writes, “but live in the Bible.” Listening to Scripture, right in the middle of our ordinary life is a powerful way we can live in it.

To sum things up, Israel grew up in a culture devoted to hearing the Scriptures. They used their ears to hear God’s Word. And we should to. This doesn’t mean we read less, far from it, but what it does mean is that we work to recover and cultivate the listening life, a life that’s committed to listening to Scripture, a life that experiences fresh growth and grace as we keep God’s Word in our ears. May we all become the kinds of people who can say with the young Samuel, “Speak Lord, your servant is listening.”

“I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.“

– Psalm 119:11

When asked about Dwell and its origins, I sometimes begin the conversation by remarking that Scripture listening was never actually the goal of the app. Dwell certainly does that. And it does it well. And we believe it’s an important part of spiritual formation. But listening alone has never been Dwell’s ultimate aim. All along our team has been working to build an app that would help God’s people saturate themselves in His Word, giving them a beautiful and convenient way to essentially “live in the Bible,” as Charles Spurgeon so succinctly put it. That includes listening, but we believe it also includes other spiritual practices like Scripture meditation and Scripture memorization.

The new feature we’re announcing today helps us take a step toward meditation and memorization. We’re calling it Dwell Mode.

What is Dwell Mode?
Dwell Mode allows you to go deeper with Scripture through repetition and reflection. Particularly, it gives you the ability to repeat just about anything you listen to inside the app. That means a passage of the Bible, a chapter, playlist, plan, or even your entire queue can be looped in order to meditate on or memorize it. At the same time, Dwell Mode also lets you add quiet moments of reflection in between whatever you repeat. You can easily control the time between each repetition by adding 3, 10, 30, or 60 seconds between each hearing.

How to use Dwell Mode
It’s easy to get started using Dwell Mode. When you open the player, you’ll now see a new icon at the bottom (Psst! It’s the one circled in the screenshot above ☝🏻). Tapping it will reveal Dwell Mode’s two primary features.

Once opened, you’ll notice two new toggles: Repeat and Reflect. ☝🏻

Repeat
To begin repeating what you’re listening to, just tap the Repeat toggle (If you see pink, you know the feature has been activated 🙌🏼).

When the Repeat feature is activated, you’ll see two options for repeating:

1. This track – When selected, the track you’re currently listening to will be repeated indefinitely (that could be a chapter, plan, passage or playlist).

 2. Queue – When selected, your entire queue will be repeated.

By default, “This track” will be selected which means that whatever you’re listening to will automatically be repeated. In the screenshot above, Psalm 100 would continue to repeat until you either paused the playback, toggled the repeat feature off, or closed out of the app.

But wait! There’s more!

Reflect
If you activate the Reflect toggle you can add a period of silent reflection in between whatever it is you’re repeating.

This is really beneficial if you’re wanting to memorize a certain passage of Scripture, or just wanting to reflect and process what you’re listening to.

The screenshot above ☝🏻, highlights the different duration options available for Reflection. Shorter durations are great for memorizing short passages of Scripture. Longer durations give you more time to think through what you’re hearing, even incorporating times of prayer. Try them all out and see which one works best for you!

How to know Dwell Mode is activated
When you tap out of the Dwell Mode menu, you’ll know the feature is activated because the “head” icon will turn pink. 👇🏼

With that said, when you want to turn Repeat or Reflect off, you’ll need to tap on the Dwell Mode icon again and turn off each toggle.

Soaking in Scripture
We’re hoping Dwell Mode will make Scripture memorization and meditation easier than ever before for you. Like I said, our vision from the beginning has centered on helping people soak in Scripture—to truly dwell in it, wherever they are. With the release of Dwell Mode, we feel like we’re moving closer to realizing that vision. There’s a lot more to do. We have so much more in store for you! Thanks for your continued support of Dwell. Onward! 

Note: Dwell Mode is currently available for iOS only. It is coming to Android soon.

“God knits man in his mother’s womb, slowly and wisely. Art should be born in a similar way.”

– Arvo Pärt

That was the line I heard this week from Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer of classical and religious music. It could have easily been said by Steinway Artist & composer Chad Lawson, the man responsible for all the music you hear on Dwell. Lawson, like Pärt, is the kind of craftsman who knits his notes together slowly and wisely. And when you hear his compositions while listening to Scripture, it always has the effect of drawing you to the heart behind the text. How that happens is hard to articulate, but there’s a genuine spiritual quality to the music he writes. 

This month he’s composed four new tracks in our Piano & Cello genre. They’re soothing, quiet, and potent—and we’re releasing them inside Dwell today:

To include them in your listening experience, simply change the music genre inside the app by tapping on the music 🎵 icon in the bottom right corner of the Player. Then choose Piano & Cello. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do. But more than that, we hope they lead you into a greater wonder and deeper intimacy with the Life behind the Bible: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Mark is one of our incredible Dwell voices, we’re so blessed to have him. An actor and voice artist, Mark brings warmth and life to the Scripture-listening experience. We asked him a few questions so you can get to know him a little more.

1. Tell us about your audition with Dwell; how you heard about it and the process of becoming a voice.

My audition with Dwell was a very comfortable one indeed. I had heard about the casting through Craigslist believe it or not, and thought It would be a great fit if I booked it. The initial audition all the way through the final “Call-back” was a very laid back process, where Jon/Josh made me feel at home. Initially I declined their offer for different reasons, but God brought us back together again after many months.

2. Do you have something you do before you begin recording to get into a certain mindset?

Before each recording session I say a prayer, and try to get into my “Brother Andrew” character. He is a character that I envision to be sitting in a quiet cabin reading through a copy of the part of the Bible he finished copying. This character helps me to get into the right mode and pace of reading.

3. What is the biggest challenge of reading the entire Bible?

The biggest challenge in reading the Bible in its entirety, is staying in character with the same vocal tones, rythyms, etc.

4. What do you do aside from being one of the voices of Dwell?

My regular job is an actor/voice actor.

5. Have you ever done voice work before?

I have done voice work many times throughout my career. I’ve done everything from voice acting for an animated film, to voice acting for Japanese anime.

8. What drew you to join Dwell?

What drew me to join the Dwell team was the goal of showcasing the Scriptures vocally in a whole different light. Using original art/music etc. with the different styles of voices was incredible to me.

What is one thing you’ve learned since you started recording the Scriptures?

The one thing I’m learning since starting the recording sessions is to always be patient with myself. This is a huge deal for me. As an actor, I have a hard time with that, believe me!

9. Has being involved with this project changed your outlook of the Bible?

Being involved with this project has made me more attune to the Scriptures in general. There are some passages I’ve recorded that I never had heard before believe it or not.