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For many of us, prayer is a struggle.
And I really mean “us” there. My desire to be a person of prayer nearly always outstrips my actual practice of prayer. If what Jesus said is true, prayer is supposed to be as natural to us as breathing. Most of us would have to admit, then, that our spiritual lives are severely oxygen-deprived.
There are plenty of reasons for this struggle, but in my experience, both personally and as a pastor, two reasons crop up again and again.
First, we aren’t convinced it actually works. Sometimes we pray for something, and the opposite happens. Sometimes we forget to pray for something, and it does happen. Sometimes we pray for something, and it happens, but we wonder if it would have happened anyway.
I know you’ve thought it. I’m just saying it.
The bigger reason for our struggle, though, is our actual experience with prayer. We’ve tried it and it’s been underwhelming. We begin with high aspirations of praying for our family, our neighbors, our jobs. But in less than a minute, we are replaying an argument from the day before or stressing out about the upcoming day’s to-do list. Paul Miller, in his excellent book A Praying Life, calls this “a confused mix of wandering and worrying.” I can relate.
It’s best if we admit it: We don’t know how to pray.
Thankfully, we aren’t left to simply struggle along forever. When Jesus’ disciples came to him feeling as lost about their prayer lives as we do about ours, saying, “Teach us to pray,” he provided them a way out of the woods.
When you don’t know how to pray, use these four truths to guide you back home.
1. A lack of prayer isn’t a prayer problem; it’s an idolatry problem.
Prayerlessness is the inevitable result of pride or a lack of faith. Usually both. You fail to pray, instinctively, either because you are too proud to realize you need God or too unbelieving to grasp his willingness to help.
Most approaches to correct prayerlessness skip over this heart issue. They’re law-based and end up sounding something like, “You only pray six minutes a week. And you call yourself a Christian. Stop being so terrible, and do better.” This works for a little while — or maybe a long while, if you have a disciplined temperament. But it’s bound to fail, because it’s trying to fix an idolatry problem with a law-based solution. The law can’t overcome our idolatrous hearts; only the Gospel can.
The answer is not simply to “get more disciplined” or to start prayer journaling (both of which may be useful). Prayer is, in essence, a natural result of desperation and faith. When the gospel has cultivated humility and faith in us, we will obey the Apostle Paul’s command to “pray continuously,” not because we’re told to, but because we are so in touch with our poverty of spirit that we can’t help asking for help.
2. Pray like a kid. Which is to say, stop self-analyzing and just talk with your dad.
Jesus tells us to pray like children. The stories he commends about adults praying actually make them sound like children. Think about the parable of the friend who comes banging on your door at midnight and won’t leave you alone. Or the persistent widow, who keeps badgering the unjust judge until he grants her request (just to get her off his back). The heroes in these prayer stories are people who just come and talk and ask for whatever they need, just like our kids do.
This kind of brazenness would be disrespectful, even blasphemous, if it hadn’t been for the first phrase Jesus taught us to pray: “Our Father” (Matthew 6:9). Imagine: We can approach the God of the universe as a beloved child and say to him, “Dad, I’ve got a need, and I need your help.” And the God of heaven who made every star and who sustains every atom not only stands ready to help, but also delights to listen. Why? Because God is our father.
Kids have unique access to their parents. When my kids were little, if they wanted to talk to me, they would barge right on in, no matter what I was doing or whom I was with. They always assumed that I had time for them.
I remember years ago, when one of my daughters was 3, we were doing an open-air baptism service. There were about 65 people lined up and another 200 watching. It was mid-July in North Carolina, so it was baking hot.
Then my daughter burst through the crowd like they weren’t there, skipped the line, and ran up to me. She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t hang back. She didn’t ask herself if maybe I was busy or pause to wonder what all those people were doing there. She had drawn a picture in her Sunday School class, and she wanted to show it to me. So she did. She assumed I’d want to see it.
And you know what? She was right.
My daughter did not feel she needed to impress me before she could approach me. She knew she could approach me because I loved her. So she came to talk to me in a way that for anyone else would have been rude.
Jesus says, “Start praying to God like that.”
3. Prayer’s primary goal is being with God.
Can we park on that idea of God as Father for a minute? Because I’m not sure you actually believe that. Or that you actually act like you believe it.
I know I often don’t. I start my prayers with “Heavenly Father,” but I find it much harder to pause there long enough to realize the glory of what I’ve just said. Of all the titles that our sovereign, heavenly, holy God could command us to call him, it is not “Almighty One” or “Lord Conqueror” or “Exalted King.” He says, “Call me Dad.”
Other religions find this bizarre, even irreverent. But that’s kind of the point. It is so intimate, it does seem irreverent. And it would be, had God not offered this relationship to us himself.
When you truly realize what God the Father has done for you, your perspective on prayer begins to transform. The Father already knows you, loves you, and is aware of what you need. Your main driver in prayer, then, is not to inform God about needs in your life he’s forgotten, or to curry favor with him, but to spend time with him.
Recognizing and reveling in the fatherhood of God is the strongest fuel for prayer out there.
Does God use our prayers to change things in the world? Absolutely. But the right prayers come just from being with him. One prayer rightly prayed is worth far more than millions of words that don’t come from fellowship with him.
4. Don’t look for a spiritual solution to a practical problem.
The root of most of our prayer problems is spiritual. We are idolaters, worshiping the wrong things. Unless God changes our hearts, we’ll never be able to fruitfully change our habits.
But we aren’t just souls; we’re embodied creatures, which means that as much as we desire to pray, without a plan, it’s not likely to happen.
In this way, praying is a lot like spending time with my wife and kids or going to the gym. I legitimately want to do these things. And I enjoy them more than most other activities. But without a plan, the time in my day gets eaten up really quickly. So I carve out time to be home with my family, not because I need the discipline to overcome some lack of desire. Quite the opposite, the desire fuels the discipline.
The same is true of our prayer habits. If you find yourself legitimately wanting to pray but can never find the time, it can’t hurt to try a few of these practical tips:
Start small. Don’t get overwhelmed by stories of great saints like Martin Luther praying for four hours before breakfast. Just get up and spend five minutes with God. Realize that God is more excited about meeting with you for those five minutes than you are.
Then grow. Consistency is more important than length. Praying five minutes a day, every day will have more of an impact than praying for an hour today and then not coming back to it for another three months. And, most likely, if you’re praying every day for five minutes, it’ll be much easier to expand that into ten minutes, 20 minutes, or more.
Set aside consistent times for prayer. I have a designated time every morning and every evening in which I meet with God. And while I pray at many other times throughout the day, I find the rhythm of my morning and evening prayer times incredibly helpful in cultivating a heart of prayer.
Get some rest. What you do in the evening shapes what you do in the morning. Morning J.D. is focused. He gets things done. He can pray for nearly 30 seconds without distraction. Evening J.D. is nearly worthless. Often, the best thing Evening J.D. can do is set up Morning J.D. for success by going to bed earlier.
Read the Bible with an eye toward prayer. As you read spiritual texts, take special note of promises or instructions. These help provide direction for you as you pray: The promises can ground your requests and the instructions can become your requests.
Riff on the Lord’s Prayer. This is a practice I learned first from Tim Keller, though it has much older roots (Martin Luther was one of the most famous advocates of this). While it is good to recite the Lord’s Prayer, riffing on it means we take each phrase, personalize it, and apply it to our circumstances.
Prayer is a muscle that grows as you use it. The more you do it, the more you know how to do it. And the more you know how to do it, the more you’ll want to.
Just ask.
J.D. Greear is the pastor of The Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and an author. His latest book is Just Ask: The Joy of Confident, Bold, Patient, Relentless, Shameless, Dependent, Grateful, Powerful, Expectant Prayer. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.
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