Why Do We Struggle to Pray? | Theocast U

Why We Struggle with Prayer and the “Prayer Killers”

Why we struggle with prayer. I've been pastoring now for 20 years, been a Christian, and learning about the Bible for as long as I can remember. Came to faith around the age of 12, and prayer has been a very interesting conversation for myself and for anyone that I really talk to.

And so what I want to begin this class with is really what I call prayer killers. My own personal experience with some of this, and then as I talk with other people, Theocast listeners, my own church members, different churches I've been a part of, I find that these are the areas at which kind of kill our understanding of prayer, our desire of prayer.

And really it's just three areas, I think, that affect the modern American Christian and prayer. I'm sure this could be different for certain people in other countries. But one that you guys are very familiar with, which is pietism, we're going to cover that first.

Then there's revivalism, and then I would say emotionalism, and even connected to a little bit of charismatic theology with that. I know there are some people who would still hold to continuationism, and that's, we can talk about that at a whole nother time.

But more of the charismatic movement as it relates to some of the emotionalism that is connected to that. When we're thinking about pietism and prayer, pietism is so, it infiltrates into the depths of our hearts and our mind, to the very core of our being, to where when you're thinking about communicating with God and talking with God, it's hard to separate the way in which you view God in this relationship as far as your standing before Him in your performance and praying to Him.

I can remember early on in my college years where I would try to spend hours in the mornings either journaling or even preparing or even just confessing my sins first to almost get things right with God before I would ever move into making a request.

I've been even in this type of relationships with my wife where I need to have an important conversation with her, but we've been in an argument, I need to deal with that argument first before we can deal with this conversation.

So there's this repentance moment, making the relationship right, and then we can deal with it and go forward. And pietism creates this constant need and focus to be looking at God in such a way that He would never be interested in the conversation with us or taking a request from us, or most of our questions have been turned down because, or requests have been turned down because of our performance, whether it is good or bad.

And I think the confusing part for even many who would feel good about their performance, they've done well, yet when they look at their prayer life, there's a disconnect there. And so either you pretend like your prayer life is going well, but what it really ends up happening, and we'll get into this later, but in pietism, prayer really just becomes introspective, it becomes about you as the individual, and it's more about you overcoming your sin, your struggles, your righteousness, and prayer becomes more about the amount of time that you put into it, the time of day, or how you do it, than it is the point of prayer or the purpose of prayer.

It becomes more about the event than the results, the effects, because a prayer is designed to produce a result, it's designed to produce an effect, a real effect upon you, but we become more engulfed with how we're praying or why we're praying than the actual results of our prayer.

And so we're going to talk about this really early on, about the effects of pietism. And revivalism is very close to the charismatic theology and emotionalism, but revivalism is more about the nature of prayer as it relates to the outflow.

Let me put it to you this way. There was a concern with dead orthodoxy, and there was a concern with right doctrine, but no preaching on hell, no one was getting saved, no evangelism, and so prayer meetings and revival meetings really were to kind of garner up and start producing more of an emotional charge and emotional holiness as it relates to our Christian life.

I remember I grew up in a revivalistic culture, I grew up in a revivalistic school and college, and when I was in college, we would have these all-night prayer meetings where guys would be crying out and calling out and pleading out to God for there to be a revival in our.

City.

And I can remember the first few weeks I was in school as a freshman, it was exciting to be around. It was like no one wanted to go to bed and the adrenaline was rushing, it was like three o 'clock in the morning, and we knew we needed to go to bed because we had class the next.

Morning.

And then that lasted for about two weeks, where by the second week, I couldn't function. I'm falling asleep in class, guys are falling asleep in class, but yet they're like, hey man, I'm going to prayer meetings, and are you going?

Well, I'm like, no, I can't survive off of three hours of sleep. I can't survive off of four hours of sleep, work, get my homework done. And so then there was this guilt and shame that like, wow, you don't really care about the school, you don't really care about the city, you want to see revivalism.

And so there's this pressure to see things perform and happen based upon me not sleeping and based upon me spending hours and hours and hours. And so there would be no revival if I wouldn't have prayed in this way, which I could feel.

That pressure.

I think some of you have probably been around that as well. And then there's the emotional side of it, where we get into these quiet rooms, we get into these quiet places, or even with each other, and we're trying to work ourselves up to the emotional experience.

Now, we're not going to word it that way, but the way in which it's sound is we want there to be the presence of the Holy Spirit. We want there to be this emotional connection. We want there to be this rush of emotions where we can feel the presence of God among us because of our prayers or with our prayers and our time of loan.

And again, I remember training in Bible college where I would wake up early in the morning and I would get on my hands and my face and my knees and just cry out to God for His presence to be there with me.

And I wanted there to be this special relationship and be able to worship and know that I'm worshiping.

Him.

And the first few times I did it, it worked. There was this overwhelmingness to my experience with prayer. And again, I'd get up, do this before work, well, four or five days in. It just wasn't the same.

It was like eating $150 steak the first time was amazing, third and fourth time, but by the seventh time I'd eaten it, I'm like, I've kind of already experienced this before. Why is it feeling mundane now?

And that's because I had worked myself up into an emotion and I don't believe I necessarily was receiving any kind of spiritual benefit as much as I was convincing myself I wanted to feel. And that's what's so hard about prayer is that we want to feel something.

We want to know that this conversation is real. And when you feel like your words are bouncing off the ceiling and you almost feel embarrassed by the fact that you were the one to kind of work this emotion up, or it was the music that worked you up, or it was the event at church that kind of worked you up into this emotion and it really had nothing to do with God's Word, there's this embarrassing factor about that.

But we can back all of these statements up when it comes to Scripture, especially pietism, revivalism, and emotionalism. We've all read these verses and we've heard them read and preached and taught to us and read them in books.

Prayer, Faith, and Misused Scripture

John 14, 13, when it says, whatever you ask in my name, this I will do that the Father may be glorified in the Son. I mean, I remember this, like we're praying for souls to be saved and for revivalism, or you were praying for someone to be healed, or for abortion to stop, or whatever it is, and we're convinced because of this Scripture that we're going to be able to see, like God's going to hear us and God's going to answer, we just got to keep knocking, we got to keep knocking, we got to keep pursuing, keep praying.

And or Mark 11, 24, therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe you have received it and it will be yours, you know? So I can remember thinking, well, I guess I didn't believe enough, that's why he didn't answer, this person wasn't healed, or that money didn't come, or the revival, or whatever, because I didn't believe enough.

And so Jesus says, if I would have had enough faith, then it would have happened. And this crushed me, because I believed when I was 21 years old, I was on the top of a mountain, out in the middle of a desert, my dad was about to die, I was crying out and weeping before God with my friend Jed, and I just believed that God was going to heal him, and obviously he didn't.

And that was a crushing blow to my faith, thinking about this particular verse, and I thought, is Jesus wrong? Am I wrong? Am I that far off in my understanding? Do I really not have any faith? I mean, he says the faith of a mustard seed, why is this not real?

How come I cannot experience this myself? And then I remember thinking, well, James 5, 16 says the prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. It's all the sin in my life. That's why God, that's why my dad ended up dying.

If I wouldn't have had the sin, if I would have been more of a righteous man, then God would have heard this prayer and he would have answered it. I think we've all experienced this part of prayer, whether it's hyper introspection, it's all about you, or there's this sense of revivalism, put in enough time and enough faith, or you're looking for that emotional high, you want to feel the closeness of God, and so you're using prayer in that manner.

So what I want to do, and there's probably not a lot of, if I were to open it up for you to come in and engage with this, I'm sure that many of you would have your own experiences or could add to that, right?

And I've had conversations with many of you about that. So this conversation, I want to help you and guide you as we go through this. This is an introduction conversation. I want to do more work here.

But I thought I would start this conversation with introducing you to what I have found to be extremely helpful as the Bible explains to us our perspective on prayer and why it is that we struggle with prayer, because I think these four areas have either been muddied or confused or forgotten altogether, and so I want to spend some time.

Four Biblical Areas That Shape a Healthy Prayer Life

So here are the four areas that we're going to cover this evening in the class, and I could do a class on each one of these by themselves, so I'm only going to be taking about 10 to 15 minutes on each one of these and unpack them, kind of introduce them to you now, and then I have some resources that I can recommend to you at the end that'll help you.

So we're going to begin, obviously, by talking about our relationship, so our relationship to God and prayer, which is why pietism reigns supreme so much in this arena and in American Christianity today.

So it'll be our relationship to God and prayer, God's purpose for our prayers. This has been so helpful for me recently. I am so excited to get to that section of it. The Spirit's power in prayer. Oh man, that has been misconscued.

It's so confusing to understand what is and what is not the Spirit's power in prayer. And then lastly, I know this word is kind of a touchy word, but I think it's helpful, missional versus personal prayer.

All right, so those are the four areas that we're going to cover. So our relationship to God and prayer, God's purpose for our prayers, the Spirit's power in prayer, and missional versus personal prayer.

Again, as you're hearing things, you want to have a question, please feel free to throw those in now, and we'll start preparing a queue for those. If you've just joined us at the very end of our lecture, around eight o 'clock, since we're standard time, so in about an hour, or I guess 45 minutes, we'll stop and have some time for Q &A.

So that's the introduction. Let's go ahead and jump into this.