Compelled By Reality

The Difficulty of Prayer

Filed under: Blogging, Christianity, Prayer

Now you may look at this title and think to yourself, “prayer isn’t hard” or “if you think prayer is hard try this…” or you may agree with me. But my goal here isn’t to convince you that prayer is hard, but to share some of my own experiences, struggles and successes with prayer and hopefully some of them may seem somewhat familiar and helpful.

Prayer isn’t hard, unless you actually attempt it.
Not just say you do it. Not just sit down for 5 minutes and think about praying. Also, not just sit in a prayer room for 1-2 hours checking your email, reading a book or reading your Bible. When you actually open up your mouth and start to speak and words start to come out that are directed toward God, then it becomes hard.

I believe the reason this becomes difficult is because your “flesh” (human nature) does not want to do this. Our humanity has innate desires that are contrary to God’s desires. Even if you are Christian and have Christ living on the inside of you, you still have your humanity to deal with. As believers our flesh is CONSTANTLY warring with our spirit. Our flesh is fighting to be satisfied with desires and pleasures that it wants; things that please the physical senses. So when you lift up your voice and speak to Jesus (or even through silent prayer, setting your mind on Him) you begin to deny your flesh it’s desires and feed the desires of your spirit.

When you start to pray you actually are saying that I am weak, God I need help. The more you pray the more you are declaring your weakness. And the more you realize how weak you are, the more you will pray. Our flesh does not want us to do this, because it wants to be strong, not weak. When we begin to exercise our spirit through prayer, our flesh begins to war against our spirit because it is refusing to be weak. Yet we need this weakness, because if we do not enter into voluntary weakness, Jesus cannot be strong in us. And if we do not allow Jesus to be strong in us we cannot defeat temptation. We cannot trust our flesh to do good, to fight temptation, we will fail every time.

We make prayer harder than it actually is.
When we think of prayer we as humans think that it should be some variation of the following: this holy thing that is done in reverence, or done in silence when no one else is around, or done when my mind is completely clear so that I can concentrate on Jesus.

I’ve learned some very easy ways to enter into prayer, that makes it enjoyable to start and continue in prayer.

1. Worship Music. We often look at music as entertainment, or enjoyment time-passing. But when we actually SING the words TO GOD, that is prayer. Music engages our hearts and makes it easy to enter in to a time of prayer. This is most easily done to worship music whose words are God focused (singing to God), not just about Him, or about us as Christians, or about life.
2. Singing. I don’t always have an iPod handy, or headphones. So in those cases I sing. Sing a song to God, start out singing… or sing the entire time you are praying. Even if you don’t sing well, I’m sure you still love to sing. And singing your prayers to God is just as much praying as speaking them to God. You can switch between singing your prayers, and speaking them. Then switch between singing worship songs to Him and then back to singing individual prayers to Him.
3. Praying the Bible. I use this A LOT. I’ll use the Bible as my launching pad for starting prayer. I’ll start reading a passage, or just one verse and then I’ll talk to Jesus about that verse. Ask Him questions about it. Tell Him my thoughts about it… and then wait and listen to see if He says anything. This is actually when the actual “conversation” in prayer begins for me. Many times I’ll be reading the Bible and turn what I’m reading into prayer and I’ll hear Him speak to me through what I am reading. Also another thing you can throw into the mix here is singing. Try singing the Bible and praying the Bible and you’ll find its so much easier to pray.
4. Singing/Praying in the Spirit. (1 Cor. 14:15) Many times I will have NO IDEA what to pray about. Or I’ll start praying and pray for everything on my list, I look at the clock and its only been 5 minutes, and I’m like AAAGGHHH!!! Now What? When we pray in the spirit or sing in the spirit we don’t actually know what we are praying/singing but God does. I can do this for a while, and usually what happens after I start this is I switch back and forth between praying/singing for things on my mind and praying/singing in the spirit.

So from my experience prayer is difficult because our flesh hates it and we make it harder than it actually is. Yet when I do the things above, I can pray for hours. Some days my flesh fights a little harder than other days. And I would say its usually days when I haven’t been feeding my spirit, or I’ve been overfeeding my flesh.