Is this what your prayer life looks like?
1. Just do it.
2. Keep it up for a week.
3. Fail to pray as you ought to.
4. Confess your failure.
5. Get back at praying.
6. Rinse…Repeat.
Certainly, this process is a caricature. But caricatures work because they resemble the real thing.
So, here’s my question: is this what our prayer lives look like? Or worse yet, do we have prayer in our lives? And whatever our answers may be to these questions…Why?
Here are some common answers to the “why” question:
It doesn’t work.
I don’t think God listens to me.
God has never really answered any of my prayers.
I don’t know what to say to God.
I don’t know how to pray.
I just don’t feel like praying.
This post can’t address all these answers, but it’ll attempt to address the heart behind devoted prayer – which is what the NT models and exhorts (Col 4:2).
Most of us probably struggle at one time or another with the bare fact of praying at all or at least giving adequate time to it. The pressures of life squeeze out Bible reading and prayer. And in the rush to get things done, prayer gets dropped. But if you knew that you were going to die tomorrow and your doctor gave you a pill guaranteed to save you, would you take it? Of course you would!
That’s how we should view prayer. It is our lifeline because it plugs us into the source of all life, love, and light – to God Himself. We are to pray without ceasing not merely out of duty, though it is that, but out of desperation, because we are walking buckets of need. It’s hard to see that reality, let alone admit it because our money, our success, our comforts, and our general well-being falsely masks our real condition: we’re needy children.
If having the Spirit of Christ, the Bible, and the church were enough, why is prayer commanded? It’s commanded because that’s what God uses to work in and work out everything else that we’re called to be and do. Prayer works in that tension between our position in Christ and our progress in Christ.
Prayer is what drives Scripture into our hearts so that we don’t sin and love righteousness. Prayer makes truth come alive to our souls so that we savor Christ more and not the idols of this world. Through prayer, God grants more of His Spirit, deliverance from sin, open doors for evangelism, our daily sustenance, a greater heart-sense of His love for us, and so much more. And corporately, prayer is what binds the church together because you can’t pray for someone regularly that you don’t love.
Prayer is necessary. But when we realize how much blessing it yields, then our duty turns into delight because we see another dimension of prayer: it’s an open invitation from our loving Father to ask Him to do for us what we cannot do…to do for us all He’s promised in His binding Word.
