Blakeyblog

In our high school Bible study we’ve been talking about prayer. Last night Bobby’s lesson was “Why Pray?” I’ve thought a lot about this question. I used to think–”Everything God wants to happen will, so why even bother to pray?” I’ve tried journaling my prayers. I’ve tried acronyms like the classic ACTS one–Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. When I was in college I tried to pray every morning, but I ended up too rushed and would put it off. I also tried praying before I went to sleep, but I ended up falling asleep during my prayer. I even tried what one of my friends did. She would make a list of things she needed to pray about and then assign them each an hour in her day. So that during the nine o’ clock hours she would pray for her family sometime during that hour. During the ten o’ clock hours she was praying for her church, during the eleven o’ clock hours she prayed for the girls in her small group, etc. She told me that this was how she could discipline herself to pray “without ceasing.”

Honestly, I have struggled in prayer. I could never seem to get myself to be disciplined in it and when I did spend time praying, I often fumbled with my words, unsure of what to say. Something that contributed to my feeling so lost on prayer was that I was trying all kinds of methods with my mouth instead of having my heart in the right place.

Prayer is talking to God. I love how Cliff McManis said in his book, Christian Living Beyond Belief, “According to the Bible, prayer is talking to God. It is personal conversing and communing with the Creator of the universe. God talks to us through the Scriptures; we talk to God through prayer.” When I pray, I am talking to God. Wow! My words and thoughts are not just hitting the ceiling. As a believer my prayers are heard in the very throne room of heaven, by the very ear of God Himself. I was reading Isaiah 40 the other day and verse 26-28 say–

Lift your eyes and look to the heavens:
Who created all these?
He who brings the starry host out one by one,
and calls them each by name.
Because of His great power and mighty strength,
not one of them is missing.
Do you not know? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.

I can talk to the Creator, this is amazing. Sometimes we can focus so much on our end of prayer–how to pray, what to ask, which acronym to follow, how we think we don’t have time. But really, we should get the focus off of ourselves or the fact that we aren’t sure what to say. We need a bracing reality check. Prayer is talking to God, the Creator of the Universe. Either this will blow our minds, or we don’t know God very well.

I’ve always thought I had reasons for why I’m not very good at talking to God, but last night Bobby made a point that showed me they weren’t reasons, but excuses. His point was this: We don’t pray because of sin in our hearts. James 4:17 drives this point home. “Therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.”

In my small group we talked about this verse and what some of these sins are that keep us from prayer. Some things I thought of were: laziness, selfishness with my time, and procrastinating. I was encouraged to then read 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Confessing sin right off reminds us of our urgency to pray. We usually only pray when we have needs like an upcoming test, job interview, family problems, sickness, an empty bank account. But when we’re having a lovely spring day and don’t think we have any big needs, why pray? One thing that’s the same every day is my sin. Everyday I sin and must pray so that I can confess it and be forgiven.

The truth is that we need to pray, because whether we think we do or not, we need God at all times and for all things. It is He who makes the sun to rise each morning and set each night. He has given us our families, friends, homes and clothes. He is the one who continually provides the money to pay our bills, food in the refrigerator, hot water for a shower. We should never think so casually of God to think that we don’t need Him. We should never be so ungrateful as to think that there is anything that we have that He has not given us. He is giving us our next breath and we should use it to praise Him in prayer.

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