What's Happened to My Prayer Life

Someone once asked me, "What is one word you would use to describe the life of a Christian?"

It didn't take me long to come up with my answer: Change.

Change is the essence of the Christian life. It begins with a change in our relationship with God. Once we stood aloof from God. But when we open the doors of our wills and lives to Christ, we're changed from enemies of God to God's friends.

In fact, the New Testament says that we actually become new creatures. As John Schroeder puts it in this post, God "deconstructs" us and then refashions us. (This is what Martin Luther meant when he said that believers in Christ are "the Holy Spirit's workshop.")

That in turn, is a process that continues for as long as we keep turning back to Christ in a way of life that Luther called "daily repentance and renewal."

Personally, I've found that I've changed in another way since I first came to faith nearly thirty years ago. I used to sit for long prayer sessions of an hour-and-a-half at a pop. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, and I believe that was something that I actually needed to do back in those days.

And some spiritual giants of hisotry have spent a lot more time praying than that each day. Luther once said that he had far too much to accomplish to be able to spend less than three hours in prayer every day. In prayer, God empowers us to live and to fulfill our responsibilities.

But I've learned that I'm not a spiritual giant and that for me, longer praying doesn't necessarily equal better praying. So today, my prayers are shorter than they used to be. I also pray more often. In this way, I'm able to avoid the spiritual pitfall of praying for a long time just to say that I prayed a long time--meaning that I egotistically yammered rather than prayed-- and because I check in with God more often each day, also do as Paul recommends: Pray without ceasing.

A few weeks ago, David Wayne (alias Jollyblogger), inspired by several things he'd read (see here and here), talked about short prayers:

The bible neither comands nor exemplifies long prayers. This is not to say that there is anything wrong per se with long prayers. Matthew 6:5ff [where Jesus excoriates the long prayers of some] deals with our understanding of the nature of prayer and motivation for it. We are not to pray with a desire to be seen or known for our prayer lives, and we are not to pray under the assumption that the efficacy of prayer is in any way correlated with the length of prayer. [Italics added by me.]

That set me to thinking and to sharing these comments with David [I've made one editorial revision, which is bracketed]:

Increasingly, I find my prayer life consiststs of a single word, uterred repeatedly in many different circumstances: "Help!"

I actually feel good about the more limited vocabulary that's taken hold of my praying in recent years. If prayer without ceasing is constant communion with God then, as situations present themselves, simply [bringing] them to God seems absolutely appropriate. Too often in my life, I've had ideas about how God should answer my prayers. This is presumptuous for the person taught to pray, "Your will be done."

Besides, as the years roll by, I learn that my perceptions of issues, problems, or challenges are often wrong. God knows best what help is needed, as well as where and when and how and why it's to be applied.

Prayer to me, is in part anyway, inviting God into the lives and situations for which we pray. (I love Yonggi Cho's statement that the Holy Spirit is a gentleman and will not go where uninvited.) In offering up my little bursts of prayer throughout my day, I'm trying to invite Him everywhere. Most of the time, that doesn't require wordiness.

Many regular readers here know that one of my favorite books is Prayer, written by the Norwegian theologian, Ole Hallesby. Hallesby says, with good Biblical and experiential warrant, I think, that for the things we offer to God to actually be prayer, two ingredients must be present:

• Faith in God
• Helplessness

Of the two, I think, helplessness is the more critical requirement. Absent helplessness, we may regard our prayers and the God to Whom we pray as a holy back-up system. Without helplessness, our prayers don't include the central Christian component of surrender to God's will implicit in the petition taught by Jesus, "Your will be done."

My favorite example of helpless Christian prayer, one mentioned here often, is of the man who brought a desperate request for Jesus to help his child. "If you can," the man tells Jesus. "If?" Jesus asks him, explaining that the man needs faith. "I do believe," the man replies, "Please help my unbelief."

Jesus doesn't ask us to have giant faith. He calls us to trust Him as much as we can. Even if our faith is as small as a mustard seed, that's good enough. That's because our small faith is reposed in a big God!

When, like that desperate father, we admit our deficiencies of faith and the largeness of our helplessness, I believe God will respond. God likes honesty. That doesn't require wordiness. God, after all, knows what's going on inside of us before we even speak. In fact, even when we don't know what to pray for, God can take our helpless calling out to Him and turn it into prayer.

I wonder how many of the situations that daunt us would be improved upon or how our perspectives on them would change if, rather than waiting for a good time to pray or trying to find the right words to pray, we simply said to God, "Help!" Increasingly, that's the prayer I'm offering. I'm learning that, usually in ways I never would have imagined, God answers that prayer.