Prayer and the Christian Life | Rapp Report Daily Wrap-up 0023 | Striving for Eternity

The Struggle Christians Have With Prayer

Welcome to The Rapid Pull, daily edition, where we provide a quick biblical interpretations and applications. This is a ministry of striving for eternity.

This week we are dealing with the dreaded topic of prayer. One of the things that for many Christians, especially in today's day and age in our culture, is one of the things that many Christians struggle with more than any other Christian discipline.

It is so important for us to spend time with God, not only in reading His Word, but also in prayer. And for many Christians, the only prayers they do is before a meal. Oh, they don't miss a meal without praying.

There's many who may be even legalistic about praying before a meal, but don't pray about much else throughout the day. It is a discipline that many struggle with. And this week, what we dealt with was the topic of prayer.

We gave some reasons why people struggle, why it's so important throughout the scriptures, but also dealt with the issue of ways that we can improve our prayer life. I hope that this was helpful, and I pray, pun intended, that you benefit from this, that your prayer life is increased, and that you find more value in the time you spend alone with God.

Why Prayer Is Hard in a Fast-Paced Culture

Let's talk about prayer. You know, prayer is the one thing that if you were to have a conference on almost any subject you could probably get people to attend, but prayer, not so much. That's right. Prayer is one of those things, unfortunately, most Christians just don't really want to talk about.

Reason being is most of us struggle with it. And I'd like to address some of the things that are reasons why we struggle, and some things we could do to improve our prayer life. I think one of the things is we find that studying the Bible, just sitting and reading and trying to understand more of scripture is easier for many of us than it is to sit quietly and pray.

Now one of the reasons is because when we sit and read the Bible we're learning things. When we pray there's two things that I think makes prayer difficult for many Christians, especially in our day and age.

One is the fact that prayer is being fully dependent upon God. It is speaking to God and trying to be dependent upon Him. However, the other thing is it really goes to kind of the culture. Our culture is this fast paced, never stop type of culture.

So the idea of sitting still and meditating upon the Lord is just something that we're not used to doing. And yet it is so important for us to do. In fact, Martin Luther used to say that he'd pray for two hours every day unless it was a busy day, and if he was really busy he'd pray for three hours for the day.

We should be like that. When we look through scripture we see that there would be times where people would pray for long periods of time. If you think about the life of Christ, before he chose his disciples, it says he prayed all night.

The night before he was crucified we see him praying all night, and we do see even then the disciples were struggling. What were they struggling with? Well they were struggling with sleep. It is amazing, and I think it was John Owens that said this when dealing with the issue of indwelling sin and the mortification of sin, said that it's amazing how five minutes into prayer people will fall asleep when there's other things that could be done.

In the book The Enemy Within, Chris Lungard, who was doing a kind of a Cliff Notes version of John Owens' work, put it this way, why is it that people can watch an hour and a half movie with Tom Cruise, but five minutes into prayer they're sound asleep?

The thing is that we keep ourselves so busy that one of the things, just like the disciples, when we get a moment of quiet, of sitting still where we close our eyes, often we fall asleep. So one suggestion is to plan times of prayer when you would be less likely to fall asleep.

Biblical Examples of Long and Fervent Prayer

It's one of the reasons why first thing in the morning is a good time. I try to have my prayer time after my devotions at 10 o 'clock in the morning. I try to have it then. I have a time of coffee. I've gotten my coffee.

Now is a time of prayer. But I don't do all my prayer at one point in time, and that's important. We'll get to that later. When we think about prayer, it is a vital aspect of the Christian life. It is something we not only see Christ doing.

We know that John the Baptist taught his disciples just like Christ taught his disciples how to pray. But we also can look in the Old Testament and see that in great times of distress you see people praying for long periods of time.

Think about Nehemiah. Now when you look at Nehemiah chapter 1 and chapter 2, you see Nehemiah, and at the beginning he hears about what's happening in Israel. He is concerned about it. You then see him next going before the king and asking about getting, being allowed to go back to Israel.

Now one of the things is that there's four months in between those chapters. I believe that Nehemiah was praying much longer than just that moment when the king asks him why he's distressed and he says a quick prayer.

I think that was a quick prayer followed by months of prayer. We see Daniel. Daniel was praying fervently in Daniel chapter 9 before he gets that 70 weeks prophecy, but before that he was praying. We see throughout the Old and New Testament people spent much time in prayer.

The fact that Christ spent so much time praying and he's God should tell us that prayer is important. If it's important enough for Christ, it should be important enough for us. It is important because it forces us to be dependent upon God.

If Christ could be dependent on the Father, then so should we. One of the things about prayer that we must understand before getting into helpful ways of praying that we'll get into next, but we must understand that prayer is not about us coming to God with a laundry list of things that we want him to do for us.

That is how most people view prayer and that is partially why so many struggle because they don't understand what prayer is really about. Prayer is about sitting at the feet of our Savior and speaking to him the way a child would their father.

Yes, asking for requests, but more so trying to understand him, trying to know him. Much of what prayer should be is us being dependent upon God, seeking his will, bringing issues up and seeing what he has for us.

Praying Through the Attributes of God and Using Prayer Lists

One of the ways that I try to do that and it's been very helpful for me is to pray through the attributes of God. At Striving for Eternity in our store, we have a card that is the attributes of God. That actually was my prayer list.

That's how that started. I would every day pray back to God the attributes of his own nature. I would talk about God to God about the fact he's omniscient. He knows all things and there's no sins I ever do that he did not know would happen.

There's nothing that's been done to me when people slander me that he did not know would happen. He knew all things. I pray things back to him. Can it be repetitive? Well, maybe if you make it that way, but there's so much when we dig into the attributes of who God is that we can look at that it just opens up much that we can pray back to God about.

So, let's look at some helpful ways you can pray. One of the things I do is I do not pray at one time during the day as if that's the only time to pray first thing in the morning. I may have a larger period of time that I set aside in the morning, but I actually have a prayer list on my app that I use throughout the day.

Because of that, the app that I happen to use, it's called Prayer Journal, and Pocket Prayer is the one that I use. You can get different ones, and what you find when you have these different prayer journals or pocket prayer is the fact that it allows you to put your prayer list in and check it off.

Now, I have different things. Some things I pray every day. I pray God's attributes back to him every day. I pray back to God the things he does for us, some daily things. But then I have certain days of the week that I pray for the unsaved people that I meet.

A different day for ministries. A different day for my church. And so I will have people that I pray for every day. I'll have people I pray for every other day. I have people I pray for once a week, different ministries, things like that.

And so it isn't just the same list all the time. The nice thing about using an app like that is when I pray, I can pray and check it off and know that it's prayed. I can also not only do that, but I can pray throughout the day.

So there's times where I'm praying while I'm walking somewhere. I just take a walk, get out and get exercise, and I'm praying, and I can check off, and I know right where I've left off my prayer list.

That's a helpful thing for your prayer life, maybe.