What Keeps Me From Asking God? Part 1

You may have seen my name popping up around the email Prayer Bulletin at Cities, and I wanted to use this article to discuss why I have been so passionate about helping our church pray. 

The reality is, I am pressing hard into pursuing prayer because prayer is so hard for me. I desperately need the continual encouragement to pray.

I love to dance in the realm of ideas. I can engage a flurry of ideas around the idea of who God is and still struggle to stop and be with my God. I can carry a weight of concerns and cares and feel I have stopped to pray over them and suddenly realize I have never actually gotten around to praying... maybe you can relate?

I want to focus here on the things we ask for in prayer. The prayer bulletin is mainly centered on the act of interceding for one another. And I want to take a look and see what keeps me from asking of God in prayer?

I don’t like Messy Work

Pastor Jonathan, in his book Mercy For Today, says, “Prayer is the exercise of connecting God’s truth to our experience. And I don’t just mean the specific things we say in prayer, but the very act of prayer itself.” 

Prayer is truly active, not passive. 

I am coming to the Whirlwind in the cloud, the Fire in the bush, to the Father that will lovingly not leave me basking in my sin but saves me by the blood of Jesus. A blood so powerful that it tore the curtain in two so God might come down to our dwelling places filled with filthy dishes and filthy laundry and filthy hearts. God is working out his word in us and one of the primary means he uses is prayer.

The enemy of our souls is keen on keeping our faith theoretical. Redemption on the ground gets messy, so it is easy to want to avoid taking what we know from the word and going the next step of kneading it into the corners of our lives. You and I need to step into prayer as the conduit through which God’s eternal word meets us in our particular places and situations.

I don’t feel praying will “Really Do Anything”

I often feel like the father in Mark 9 who cries to Jesus, “I believe! Help my unbelief!” Yet, I know (even when I don’t feel) that prayer is how God has chosen to work his will in and through us. I love this passage from Paul:

“For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many” (2 Corinthians 1:8–11).

“You also must help us by prayer” is not something we should gloss over. In his book Prayer, John Onwuchekwa writes, “I’ve learned to see churches as those that pray and those that don’t.... A church’s commitment to prayer is one of the greatest determiners of its effectiveness in ministry.” Bonhoeffer, in Life Together, says even more strongly that, “A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses.”

Sometimes I am like the soldiers under Joshua that sauntered confidently to Ai without seeking the Lord after their victory at Jericho. We dare not move forward without our God because no matter how strong we are, we will not win if he does not go with us. The Christian life is not like a gas tank we can fill up and then manage on our own for a while. As individuals, households, and as a church we daily and in each moment need Jesus. Prayer is the means of expressing our absolute dependence.

I think as I pray for my children, of the mystery of answered prayer that is displayed every time a testimony starts with “Well I grew up in a Christian home....” And I think of the thousands of quiet ways God has kept me in Christ.

I think of my grandparents and parents and the mystery of all the answered prayers that surround our little family. I think, by extension, of our church and the many people that prayed for many of us and, however winding our journey, their prayers rise up for us as we grow and have come thus far. 

When I don’t think prayer is “doing anything” I am not looking properly. We are intended to lean in and see the help that has come by prayer. 

I fall into thinking of my prayers as Moralistic Flag Planting

Our culture encourages us to work hard to identify ourselves as on the “right side” of issues and concerns. We plant our little flags to show everyone, including ourselves, that we are the right sorts of people. Out of this need to believe we are ‘good people,’ our culture is also eager to spin everything into the idol of a self-improvement project. I think this kind of attitude, when it sneaks into my prayers, is walking hand in hand with my thinking that my prayers are “not doing anything.”

Do we look at what we are asking for in prayer as a part of the flurry of inactivity of the things we “like” and “share” on the internet to indicate we are caring about the “right things”?

Does our telling our grieving friend “I will pray” mean anything different to us from the neighbor who says “sending positive thoughts and energy?”

Is prayer a nice tag along (that you can switch out with some kind of other spiritual practice with possibly good statistical results) on the list of things practiced by the “balanced” Instagram people we follow? Is this about self-improvement with a side of Jesus?

The idolatry in my heart and yours will get ugly. Keep your eyes open with me so that our modern idols will not steal our joy among God’s gifts of prayer. 

Our prayers as a church will weave us into the unseen and unstoppable reality of the Body of Christ. It will make holy our mundane as we are swept out of our navel-gazing and into the tapestry made by the God who was and who is and who is to come.