Personal Prayer

Many of us have developed horribly flawed ideas about prayer. I know because I’ve been one such person! Some of us see prayer as though it were an elaborate incantation requiring a specific formula for it to work. Just a few weeks ago I heard a Christian man suggest that for God to hear us we must observe the right posture and say the right words.

Others of us have treated God like a genie in a lamp. We come to him in prayer, “rub the lamp” and expect him to perform for us. Still others view prayer as a contractual agreement and that if we meet certain conditions God must meet our demands. Such thoughts demean and belittle our holy, awesome, sovereign God!

Let me describe a scene for you that epitomizes my struggle with prayer as a young man. When my wife and I got married I was in the Army stationed in Berlin, Germany. We lived in a tiny newly-wed nest in the finished half of an attic. The other half of the attic was an unheated, unfinished storage area. I had recently been reading biographies of great men and women of God and was especially moved by their exemplary prayer lives. By contrast, my prayer life looked pathetic. I set about to change all that.

My brilliant plan was to get up at 4 a.m. and quietly slip out of our apartment and into the unfinished, unheated portion of the attic. To complete my rigorous regimen, I would kneel on the cold stone pavers of the attic floor (yes, the attic floor was actually paved with stone bricks) and rested my elbows on a hard wooden apple crate. Even in my youth, this was terribly uncomfortable and unpleasant, but I actually supposed that such self-abasement and suffering would aid in my attempts to become a great man of prayer.

The first day or two of this pious regimen went reasonably well, but slid quickly downhill from there. The combination of the early morning rise and the cold, dark attic were the perfect recipe for sleep—albeit not a very restful sleep. I was tough on myself for falling asleep and felt increasingly less spiritual than my intentions that had led me there.

Though by rights I should have been becoming more holy than my slumbering wife, it irritated me to no end that she would rise hours later so cheerfully after a good night’s sleep. The final nail in the coffin of my prayer experiment drove home when my loving wife confronted me one day while I was throwing a fit. She accurately pointed out that my very early mornings, the severities of my prayer chamber and the guilt I laid on myself in my failure all collaborated to make me very grumpy and difficult to live with!

Unfortunately, I walked away from my failed prayer experience in Berlin resigned to a life of mediocre communication with God. “I must not have the knack for prayer,” I thought. In fairness to myself and others who may relate to my failure, I was young and inexperienced in my relationship with God. I also had some major paradigm shifts to make regarding a proper understanding and application of relational graces like prayer.

Prayer is personal conversation with God in which we align ourselves with him, his character and purposes. That statement may challenge our thinking, but look at how Jesus modeled prayer for his disciples, “This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’” (Matthew 6:9-13)

Look back over the words of this model prayer that Jesus gave us. The Lord invites us to a very personal interaction with him even though he is the high and exalted One: “Our Father in heaven.” We acknowledge God’s holiness and desire his rule in our lives just as surely as he reigns over all of heaven: “Hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

We continue by acknowledging that everything we need comes from him and that he wants to fulfill our needs, so we ask him freely for them: “Give us today our daily bread.” We then humble ourselves admitting and confessing to him our sins. And we do so with a clear conscience that we too have extended mercy and forgiveness toward others who have sinned against us: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

Finally, we own up to our weakness and propensity toward temptation and ask him to lead us out of temptation and to protect us from the evil one. In so praying, we knowingly set a course for our lives that shuns and avoids what would grieve and displease our Lord: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” This prayer is intensely personal and yearns for God to do his life-changing work in us.

Luke’s Gospel reveals a very freeing truth about prayer in the context of this prayer that we just looked at. In Luke 11:1 we read, “One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.’” (emphasis mine) I personally found tremendous relief in the truth that prayer is a learned skill: “Lord, teach us to pray.” Do you feel inadequate when you pray? Do the words fail you? You’re in good company! Relax and let Jesus teach you.

Just recently I saw something else in the Luke 11 passage that I also found extremely liberating. When Jesus’ disciple asked him to teach them to pray, he eagerly said to them, “pray like this,” and then he modeled a prayer for them. I must confess that until recently I didn’t know that it is okay to model or demonstrate for someone how to pray! But that’s exactly what Jesus did. By doing so, Jesus stripped prayer of religious mystery and complexity and made it simple and practical. Prayer is conversation with God and he wants to teach us how to do it.

Understanding prayer as conversation with the Lord also helps us eliminate some other pitiful prayer practices! Early in my walk with Jesus, I thought it would be spiritual to bring an agenda or list with me to prayer every day. So I kept a notebook with a list, which morphed into numerous lists. I would come to prayer thinking I had to get through my list with God or I hadn’t prayed.
 
Reflecting back on those days I’ll make at least two observations. First, with that pattern for prayer I rarely heard from God, because I was doing all the talking. Second, I must confess that my lists bored me to no end—not the people or items on the list—but the repetition of going through the lists. And my boredom often put me to sleep. My prayers seemed lifeless, dry and without power.

Another pattern I can remember from those early days is that my mind would wander. I’d be praying along and all of a sudden I was thinking about a hike, or a movie, or someone I’d met, or a totally unrelated event. And I remember thinking, “Where did that come from? Why am I thinking about that?” This tendency would frustrate me and caused me to feel guilty about losing my concentration with God.

During that time I also viewed prayer in a very compartmentalized fashion. I had my “quiet time” in the morning in which I prayed and read the Scripture. I was disciplined to keep that time, but I held it more from a sense of obligation to God or with a view to pleasing him. It wasn’t that I couldn’t pray at any other time during the day—because I did—but I almost had a superstition about what would happen if I didn’t have my quiet time in the morning.

I trust by now that you’ve noticed a pattern in what I’ve described from my early attempts at praying. I was preoccupied with myself and trying to impress God. But God isn’t interested in our trying to impress him, he wants us to love him and spend time with him. Prayer is conversation with him.

Today, prayer is very different for me. It’s not an end in itself like it used to be, but a means to enjoying God and conversing with him often throughout the day. At the risk of setting some kind of standard for prayer I’ll share with you how I pray today. But you must meet with Jesus in a manner consistent with how he made you and in the season of life in which you find yourself.

I still maintain a morning time of prayer, but it looks very different than it used to. I’m usually the first one up in my household, so I get up and make coffee and then curl up on the couch and converse with the Lord as I drink my coffee. I come to him each day eager to meet with him and desirous of his company. I find myself listening more than talking. There are times in which I feel compelled to kneel humbly before him or stand and lift my hands to him in praise. I often pray-walk or pray-hike in a place of solitude.

I now realize that my wandering mind is often due to the leading of his Holy Spirit. So rather than resist that tendency, I pray for that individual or situation that just came to mind. I go over my day with the Lord, asking for his help, wisdom and love as I deal with people and situations. I worship him and reflect on all he’s done for us and is currently doing in my life. I daily invite him to change me and I confess my sins. He often reveals to me where I need to guard myself in temptation so I can take preventative action. When my mind does wander to places God is not leading me, I confess it and come right back to him.

When I pray for someone, I often use my imagination—a skill which Richard Foster helped me cultivate.  Our imagination—the creative faculty of our minds—must be transformed by Jesus just like the rest of us (see Romans 12:1-2). Without the imagination we cannot think creatively, problem-solve or even read a book. When we apply the imagination to prayer we don’t do so in the sense that we pretend or fanaticize. Rather, we ask God to help us envision what he wants to accomplish and then pray in faith accordingly.

Read some of the prayers recorded for us in the Bible and notice how those praying enlisted the aid of their imaginations in framing their prayers. See Nehemiah 1:4-11; Psalms 130 and 139; Acts 4:23-30; Ephesians 1:15-23; 3:14-21.

A significant difference in my praying today is that my morning prayer serves as more of an opening conversation with God that will go one throughout the day. We can talk with him anywhere, anytime. Prayer is communication with God and therefore highly relational. And as we saw earlier, relationship is not possible apart from communication. In this way, prayer plays a key role in our relationship with God. So I urge you to never make the mistake that I did thinking you don’t have a knack for prayer. Let Jesus teach you!

Humble dependence is a primary characteristic of God-directed prayer. This is true both because we desperately need fellowship with him and because we are totally dependent on him for life itself. “For in him we live and  move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28) Our heavenly Father delights in our conversation with him and wants us to come to him for everything.

Listen to Jesus’ urgings to us on this matter: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:7-11)

Why is it then, that we ask for things sometimes and don’t receive them—especially really good things—like someone’s healing? It’s precisely on this subject that prayer must be so relational and so personal. Prayer does not attempt to convince God to do something he does not want to do. Rather, through prayer we seek to understand God’s desire or plan in a situation and join with him, asking him to bring it about. “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10)

In the Garden of Gethsemane in anticipation of his arrest, humiliation and crucifixion, Jesus prayed in agony, “I want your will to be done, not mine.” (Matthew 26:39 NLT) In prayer he set his will to do the will of the Father and in that will he endured the cross “for the joy set before him.” (Hebrews 12:2) You and I must take the same attitude as Jesus did with regard to the Father’s will in prayer. Prayer is so much more than merely asking for things.

When my wife and I corresponded with each other for nine months across an ocean we treasured every letter we received from each other. We read them over and over again cherishing each other’s company through those letters. Three times in Revelation our prayers are compared with sweet incense rising up as a pleasant aroma before God! (Revelation 5:8; 8:3, 4) Our heavenly Father loves to talk with his children! He treasures our prayers because he cherishes us!

© Rob Fischer 2008