“The tendency nowadays is to worship prayer, stress is put on nights of prayer and the difficulty and cost of prayer. It is not prayer that is strenuous, but the overcoming of our own laziness. If we make the basis of prayer our effort and agony and nights of prayer, we mistake the basis of prayer. The basis of prayer is not what it costs us, but what it costs God to enable us to pray.” (Oswald Chambers)
When I started this post I had the title and that was about it. I think that praying is really hard to do. When I pray the only thing that makes it feel at all spiritual to me, compared to simply just talking to myself, is that I am aware that my focus is wanting to talk with God. This at least gives me comfort and I believe I get at least partial credit for that. However, that is about all the insight that I can offer on how to pray. I realize that there are many amazing Christians and others that have a gift and desire to pray relentlessly and I truly wish I could be like that, but I am not. I do okay with the other disciplines, but prayer has always been difficult for me. My mind wanders. I get bored. I put it off. I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to expand on this aspect of my spiritual journey so I decided that I would Google “quotes on prayer.” Below are a few of the quotes that came up from authors and theologians and authors that I admire.
There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful than that of a continual conversation with God. (Brother Lawrence)
If you want that splendid power in prayer, you must remain in loving, living, lasting, conscious, practical, abiding union with the Lord Jesus Christ. (Charles Spurgeon)
A true prayer is an inventory of needs, a catalog of necessities, an exposure of secret wounds, a revelation of hidden poverty. (Charles Spurgeon)
Why is it so important that you are with God and God alone on the mountain top? It's important because it's the place in which you can listen to the voice of the One who calls you the beloved. To pray is to listen to the One who calls you "my beloved daughter," "my beloved son," "my beloved child." To pray is to let that voice speak to the center of your being, to your guts, and let that voice resound in your whole being. (Henri Nouwen)
I have so much to do that I spend several hours in prayer before I am able to do it. (John Wesley)
Prayer continues in the desire of the heart, though the understanding be employed on outward things. (John Wesley)
Is the Son of God praying in me, or am I dictating to Him?....Prayer is not simply getting things from God, that is a most initial form of prayer; prayer is getting into perfect communion with God. If the Son of God is formed in us by regeneration, He will press forward in front of our common sense and change our attitude to the things about which we pray. (Oswald Chambers)
God speaks in the silence of the heart. Listening is the beginning of prayer. (Mother Teresa)
Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays. (Søren Kierkegaard)
These people are a few of the most influential authors in my life. They each have incredible wisdom, insight, and spiritual understanding. I highly suggest each of them as a read to anyone is interested in developing a deeper spiritual life. As one who struggles with prayer, I would never attempt to write something with greater insight than Spurgeon, Wesley, or Chambers. But despite how much I can learn about prayer from these people I don’t think any of them reflect the true struggles that come with prayer. Many of these people and others try to give insight into how dynamic prayer is by suggesting that all things are prayer, a submitted life is prayer, or silence is prayer, but for many Christians, as encouraging as that may be, it doesn’t diminish the frustration that we feel when we sit down to have a short time of prayer and all we can think about is that we need to remember to buy more Doritos. Prayer, like any discipline or act of intimacy, is important, takes time to learn, and is ultimately about how God “fills in the gaps” of our inadequacy. But the simple and short reality that I have to offer is that it’s hard to pray.
There are many things that contribute to my difficulty with prayer. But part of what needs to be addressed for me is that my spiritual training in the evangelical churh frustrated this developmental process. The contemporary church has historically approached faith development from the perspective of relationality, but its approach to discipleship continues to be rooted in modern forms of conquest and ritualism. This causes a conflict. But let me back up for a second. From a statistical perspective, faith development could be (but shouldn’t be) written this way: maturity= f(God – [theology, scripture, tradition] – [cultural anthropology, human psychology, individual experiences] - timing). To put in plain English, spiritual maturity is the function of how all these things work together with God being the primary independent influence on that development with the other variables making additional influences. When prayer is approached from a modern perspective with postmodern intentions (to keep in line with the statistical language) the variables becomes invalid making maturity difficult. To explore another component of the formula, developmentally we all go through a number of stages.
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