God wants people to pray. Jesus set the example we should be following. He himself prayed. He taught his followers to pray, and how not to pray. He brought His closest followers with Him to the garden of Gethsemane to keep watch and to pray, as He began His hardest day in earnest prayer.
The apostles called on believers to be in "unceasing prayer" (Romans 12:12;, Colossians 4:2; 1 Thessalonians 5:17; Ephesians 6:18; Jude 20; 1 Peter 4:7; Philippians 4:6.) Paul was a pray-er, too ( 2 Corinthians 13:7; Ephesians 1:16-23; Philippians 1:9; 2 Thessalonians 1:11). The early church urged its members to pray intercessions for all. The early church even prayed for their government's rulers, who were often trying to stop them and (rarely) even kill them. Their concerns were not just for their own.
The more your heart opens to God in prayer, the more that your prayers will bolster your daily life. Spiritual disciplines and practices assist us in learning to open ourselves to God through prayer.
Jesus gives a great lesson on what prayer is like. It's like the woman who keeps knocking at the door until the judge comes out and addresses her concern, if only just to get rid of those annoying knocks. (Picture Jesus smiling as he tells the story.) But how much more would you be heard by Someone who loves you? Many Christians today are not praying, not praying correctly and simply don’t trust this amazing avenue of power and privilege God has given to us... Prayer. God wants to hear from us, in our own words, any time any place.
Let’s review some things that may help you develop a more robust, trusting and confident prayer life.
Thinking is not Praying. There's a big difference between just thinking something and praying it to God. Prayer has a direction. You're not churning “issues and matters” in your brain or sharing it with friends or getting in touch with your inner self. Prayer is an intentional event, always directed to God. Through prayer you are acknowledging not only God's existence, but also a relationship and even a certain degree of trust. Through prayer, trust in God grows over time. Prayer is never a waste of time because God is always at work in this confused, ambiguous world, and through the avenue of prayer we can be drawn closer to God's good purposes.
Prayer is our response to God's work. There's an unspoken hope in each prayer, even if it hangs by a thread or is the size of a mustard seed, that somehow the mightiest being of all thinks you matter. God's response also has a direction: you will not be left adrift or be led nowhere (unless, like Israel in the wilderness, you have a lesson to be learned from the drifting).
Prayer is no place for illusions. Yet, each of us clings to illusions, and we will end up somehow bringing them into our prayers. This leads to what James called “asking amiss.” The Spirit is working to teach us the truth, and the growth of our prayer relationship with God depends on how well we take heed of God’s pure truth.
God controls the outcome of prayer. Not the Church, not the preacher, not elders, not the person who prays, only God has the power to control the outcomes. God cannot be manipulated through prayer, even though we see many such attempts. A preacher delivers a sermon where he is doing nothing more than playing the role of ventriloquist for 'God'. So it is also with the “health and wealth” pseudo-gospel where the church 'prays' with the attitude of a puppeteer: pull the strings, and God's hand stretches out to send forth a blessing. God is not a genie in a lamp; and our self-centered wishes are not commands to God. God is not a “wish and blessing” dispenser, where we say a prayer and shortly after comes the desired response.
Jesus taught us to pray that “God's will” be done. That means seeking God's purposes instead of seeking our own desires. So don’t expect prayer to bring forth the new car, new house, bigger bank account or a passing grade or a fast-track promotion or any miraculous sign. Jesus didn't promise earthly bliss, not even a pain free life. Jesus' promises are for those who abide in Him, and put themselves at His service. There is such a thing as the wrath of God, and one sure way to provoke it is to try to manipulate God for one's own advantage.
Prayer is not a laundry list. It is communication with someone you love and trust. Don't just pray when you want something. Prayer is as much listening ('meditation') as it is talking, as much a sharing as it is a plea for help. Yet, God has asked us to ask, to talk with Him about our desires and needs. Our conversation with Him through prayer is a major part of the way He transforms our thinking, the way He refocuses our self-centeredness towards giving, loving and responding to what He wants us to do and to be. Nothing's too small, too big, too hard, or for that matter too twisted by our selfishness or lack of perception, for God to hear in our prayers. God's active in the world in which we live, involved in what's going on. A lot of it flies in the face of divine will, but God's very good at finding ways to make the best of the bad situations created by the fallen creation we are a part of. Even our own worst foul-ups.
Ask, and you will receive... but often you receive something that's more in keeping with what God wants you to become. Transformation will come in God's time, not ours.
Prayer does not label or condemn others. Jesus shares the story about a fixture in the religious community who when praying thanked God that he was not like the traitorous tax collecting low-life scum that worked for the Romans. His story was not only an example of being prideful, it's an example of reducing a person to a category.
Categories are useful for understanding data, but they're dreadful for understanding a person. You may not be as out front about it as the proud religious man of the parable, but do you ever pray about people as if they have some pre-determined attitude or worth? It's not hard to find people who pray about a "godless liberal" or "heathen" or "hypocrite" or "snob", and so on. In fact, you’ve probably heard such references in audible prayers said in the assembly of the church. Maybe such prayers are innocently said, out of ignorance, but none-the-less they are hurtful on many levels to the one who prays such things and those who hear. Treating people according to a label can be almost as harmful when we mean good by it, because we're not treating that specific person as the person they actually are. It's bad enough that the world around us depersonalizes people. It's a serious sin for followers of Christ to do so, since we should know better. Christ died not just for all of us, but for each of us.
The religious leader of that same parable was doing something else which has no place in our prayers to God. He was comparing himself (favorably, of course) to someone else. God isn't weighing you against anyone else, no one of today and no one of the past. Like a good mother does with her children, God loves each of us completely for who we are. If you're someone who is prone to being depressed, among the most common of mental traps is to say, "I'm not as worthy as (someone else)", or "God, why did you make my life so miserable and that person’s life so happy"? That can be a real source of depression. That's not how God sees you. Your real worth is what God deems you to be, and how good or bad or happy or pathetic others are just doesn’t matter in His view of you. If that's so, then there's no reason to let comparison creep into your life, especially not in prayer. All it does is pervert what you pray for and dulls your sensitivity to God’s response.
Sometimes what you desire is not material at all. Sometimes you just want the sense of control that comes from having everything go according to plan. You believe that if everything follows your plan, it will work out best overall for yourself and those you care about, progressing as it should. Or so you think. So you pray to God, trying to convince Him that you have it right, that you know the way your life should go. Thusly, your prayers are designed to convince God to give your plan divine blessing. Once again, we’re forgetting who God is. Our plans are awfully puny when stacked next to God's, even though we want things to work as we envision our life journey. Yield and submit totally and completely to the will of God; let your prayers say to God that you are nothing more than clay in His hands... do with me as you will God. The Lord already has a plan under way, it’s called "the Kingdom of God". It's a plan that will continue to work with or without you. Pray incessantly that God will guide you into the part of His divine plan where you can be the most effective.
Pray for your enemies. When you pray the prayer Jesus taught His disciples, you ask God to forgive you as you forgive those who wrong you. It says nothing about those who wrong you forgiving you, or changing their mind about you. It says nothing about those who wrong you asking you -- or even God -- for forgiveness. What 'they' do or did to you is not in the picture. It has no part in your being forgiven by God. It does not affect your need and your duty before God to forgive others.
You can't change someone else, you can only change yourself. Whether your changes change others is between them and God, and is not set by you. Forgiveness does not cause reconciliation. If the other party has not forgiven, or if either party has not taken steps beyond forgiveness to cause change in the situation, there is no reconciliation. But “forgiveness” is the essential step. It is where you are being led as the Spirit transforms you to the likeness of Christ. Christ admonishes us to change our thinking toward others. The Lord's prayer isn't a call to pretend we are not being wronged, or to be silent or still as others are wronged. The wrong is still there, and the wrong is still every bit as wrong. But in forgiveness, we share the grace God gave to us for the wrongs we did. Jesus taught us to pray for God to give us what it takes to do so.
God hears our prayers, whomever we are. I believe that God even hears the heart-felt prayers of the non-Christian, whomever they may be. God heard the pleas of Cain for safety, and Cain didn't care about God. A God who is deaf to the cries of an animist mother whose son is dying is a very different sort of god than “God the Father” who sent His own son to die to save the human race.
The One we pray to sends rain and sunshine to the evil as well as the good, and calls on us to love our enemies because that's how God loves the entire world. The Lord will at least communicate, though the response would be different with those who don't believe. While God's reply may be different, the Lord cares about all sinners, whether we accept God's forgiveness and new life in Christ or not. Prayer's power comes from God's love and God's promises, not ours. The difference with the believing Christian is that God promised us full attention and a loving reply to our prayers, and we can live our lives in that promise.
When the Christian prays... it's to a Father who hears His Son's voice speaking for and with us.
