Many Christians in this country have given up on prayer. They complain that it doesn't "work" and God isn't answering them. Let's talk about prayer, why it's so crucial to the Christian life, and why our prayers may not be getting the answers we expect. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| So I often hear Christians say that they pray and their prayers don't work. | |
| They're not getting results. | |
| It's like a diet plan or something. | |
| I've been doing it. I'm just not shedding the pounds. | |
| I don't know what's wrong. I have no doubt complained about this in the past myself, and the problem is that people become discouraged from prayer because they perceive that it's not having the desired effect, and then they stop doing it. | |
| And that's how you end up with a body of believers in America who don't pray. | |
| We have an unpraying Christianity in America, and it shows. | |
| The statistics that I've read, I don't know if they're true or not, but they sound true. | |
| It's probably true. I've read that the average Christian spends significantly less than 10 minutes a day praying. | |
| I've also read that the number is actually about one minute a day that the average Christian spends in prayer. | |
| And that's pretty bad, especially when you consider that the average person spends five hours a day watching TV. Which, I don't know. | |
| I mean, that's mind-boggling. | |
| I don't know. How do you find five hours in the day to sit on a couch and just stare at a screen? | |
| How could you possibly carve out that much time? | |
| And how do you not get bored? | |
| But anyway, five hours a day watching TV. Several more hours a day staring at computer screens and phones. | |
| So we're wasting a lot of time. | |
| And yet we say, I don't know, I just can't find the time to pray. | |
| I can't find it in my schedule. | |
| I've got my schedule right here from about 7 p.m. | |
| till 1 a.m. I'm going to be watching TV. Can't do anything about that. | |
| I mean, I've had that scheduled for weeks now. | |
| So I thought it would be a good thing maybe to talk about prayer and to talk about why our prayers may not be working, why they may not be answered from our perspective. | |
| And here are just a few points about it, a few points about prayer. | |
| The first thing that I think we should understand is that God does answer every prayer said to Him. | |
| But the crucial thing there is that qualifier, said to Him. | |
| If we pray to somebody else that's not Him, then He's not necessarily going to answer that prayer. | |
| And if we're praying for fame and fortune and materialistic, selfish, greedy, prideful things, if we are praying to satisfy our gluttony and pride and ego and materialism, that's how we're praying, then we're not praying to God. | |
| We may be attaching His name to it, but we're praying to Some kind of genie that grants wishes. | |
| That's what we're praying to. We're basically praying to the genie from Aladdin. | |
| That's who we're praying to. And that's not God. | |
| In other words, we are praying to an idol. | |
| We are idol worshiping. The person who says a selfish, materialistic, greedy prayer is an idol worshiper. | |
| And if God responds to that prayer at all, we're probably not going to like the response. | |
| Let's put it that way. So just a quick story about that. | |
| And I'm embarrassed to say that a long time ago when I was, I don't know, 20 or 21 years old, I actually literally did pray for a winning lottery ticket. | |
| Maybe twice in my life, I've purchased one of those jackpot lotteries tickets. | |
| And so this was one of those times, I think it was a, I don't know, it was a $300 million, $400 million jackpot. | |
| And so before they drew the numbers, That night, I said a prayer to God. | |
| Dear Lord, let me win this $300 million. | |
| Lord, please. I don't ask for much, just please, $300 million, it's all I need. | |
| Okay, then I'll be happy. | |
| I did pray for that. | |
| And it's a shameful, blasphemous prayer, especially when you consider that Christ in the gospel repeatedly warns us about wealth. | |
| And he says famously, it's very difficult for a rich man to get to heaven, like passing through the eye of a needle. | |
| And why is that? Because the more wealth we have, the more things we have, the more attached we become to those things, and the less attached we are to God. | |
| And the more that our kind of vision, our view of the divine, of holy, sacred things, the more that view is cluttered and blocked by all of this stuff. | |
| And that's why he tells us, give up everything. | |
| Give up all this stuff and just follow me. | |
| So when I prayed for $300 million, what I was really praying for was, God, please make it hard for me to get to heaven. | |
| Fortunately, thank God, he did not grant that prayer. | |
| I did not win the money. And in fact, not only did I not win it, but for the next year, Five years of my life, I had pretty serious financial difficulty and I was pretty poor. | |
| And I had a lot of trouble just keeping the lights on and putting food in the fridge. | |
| And that's how I lived in my dumpy little apartment for about five years. | |
| Now, I'm not saying that that was all a direct result of the Prayer that I said for $300 million. | |
| But I don't think it's entirely unrelated. | |
| I think God in his wisdom may choose to withhold blessings from greedy, selfish, childish people like I was at the time, people who treat him like a genie. | |
| He may say, you know what, I'm going to withhold. | |
| Now you're going to go without for a while. | |
| And that withholding of a blessing That thing where we pray for something and then God gives us the opposite of what we prayed for, which is kind of what happened to me more than once in my life. | |
| But that itself is a huge blessing. | |
| And I realize now, looking back, how good it was that I was poor during that time. | |
| Because if I had money and means, I would have probably used it in selfish ways because I was a selfish person and I would have destroyed myself. | |
| And so, praise God, He did not He didn't go with my plan. | |
| He went with his. Now, I know that most Christians hopefully aren't praying for hundreds of millions of dollars. | |
| You know, most Christians hopefully aren't as stupid as I was at the time. | |
| But there are many other forms of materialistic, selfish prayers. | |
| Prayer that is essentially just gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme. | |
| And if such prayers are answered at all, they're more likely to be answered with a rebuke. | |
| And what I will say is, if we do pray selfishly and materialistically and greedily, and suddenly we look around and we see that all of our selfish desires are actually coming true, well, then we should shudder in fear because those blessings are not coming from God. | |
| God is not going to indulge our sinful desires. | |
| God's not going to do that. | |
| If we want something sinful, God is not going to say, okay, here you go. | |
| So if those blessings aren't coming from God above, then they're coming from below. | |
| And that's not to say that everyone who's ever got wealthy, you know, that those were gifts from Satan. | |
| I'm not saying that. I'm saying someone who is intensely focused selfishly on materialistic things and someone who is greedy, when they look around and see that things are starting to go their way, well, I think it's much more likely that that's Satan kind of walking in front of them and paving the path and making things very comfortable for them so that they'll just walk very nicely and very easily right into hell. | |
| Second thing, kind of related to the first point, Scripture tells us to pray unceasingly, persistently. | |
| And if we're only praying briefly in this kind of scattershot way, and only when we want something, even if what we want is not selfish or materialistic, even if it's a good thing, Well, then that prayer isn't going to necessarily work. | |
| And that's because God desires an intimate bond with us. | |
| He doesn't want to stand off at a distance and just toss crumbs to us. | |
| He wants to be our eternal bread. | |
| He wants us to be sustained by Him through His grace. | |
| And He wants us to establish a real connection with Him. | |
| A real relationship. So if we pray just every once in a while, and only when we want something, it again could be a great blessing, I think, that He doesn't give us what we want. | |
| He'll answer the prayer, but He may answer it by saying no. | |
| Or He may say, you want that, but I'm going to give you this instead. | |
| And we may get that answer kind of frequently if we're not praying habitually and unceasingly. | |
| You know, if we just pray every once in a while when we want something and nothing more, then we may get turned down quite a bit. | |
| Because he's withholding the fullness of his blessings in order to spur us to greater hunger and a greater desperation for his presence. | |
| And that is what God wants. | |
| He wants desperation. | |
| I think God really wants us to be desperate people. | |
| He wants us to be desperate, like a man in the desert who hasn't had a drink of water in two days. | |
| That's what he wants. And that's why in Scripture, you'll notice he never made it particularly easy for those who came to him People that came to him asking for healing and asking for miracles, he didn't often make it easy for them. | |
| They had to fight through a crowd, right? | |
| Like the woman who grabbed on Christ's robe. | |
| There's throngs of people. | |
| She had to fight and she's probably crawling and she just grabs at his robes. | |
| And that's what was necessary. | |
| To demonstrate her faith. | |
| And that's how she was healed. Or they had to tear the roof off of a house. | |
| Remember the paralytic in the Gospels. | |
| And they had to. They couldn't get in. | |
| Christ was inside a house. | |
| They couldn't get in through the doors. | |
| Too many people. So they had to climb up on the roof and tear a hole on the roof to get to Jesus. | |
| Or they had to travel great distances. | |
| Or you have in Matthew chapter 9, we read about the two blind men who are following Jesus and shouting, have mercy on me, have mercy on me. | |
| And eventually, when Jesus makes it to the place where he was going, and they followed him all the way there, then he turns around and heals them. | |
| But they had to follow that whole time. | |
| He could have healed them at any moment. | |
| He could have taken two steps and then turned around and said, yeah, you're healed. | |
| But instead, he had these men who were blind. | |
| He had these literally blind men follow him over. | |
| We don't know how long it was, but we can assume it was a bit of a distance. | |
| And to keep following, keep shouting, have mercy on me, have mercy on me. | |
| And then he healed them. | |
| So Jesus didn't go door to door handing out blessings. | |
| Instead, he walked his path. | |
| He journeyed where he needed to go, where his mission meant that he had to go. | |
| And it was up to the people to seek him and humble themselves before him and ask for his blessings in faith. | |
| You know, Jesus says, knock and the door will be opened. | |
| And I know Christians will cite that verse a lot. | |
| And they'll say, ah, just whatever you pray for, you'll get. | |
| Yeah, knock and the door's open. | |
| He never said knock once. | |
| He didn't say how many times you might have to knock. | |
| You might have to knock 10 times. You might have to knock 100 times. | |
| You might have to knock 10,000 times before he finally answers it. | |
| He says, seek and you will find. | |
| He never said that you're going to find it the first place you look. | |
| He never said this process of seeking will take five seconds. | |
| Could take five days, could take five years, could take 50 years, whatever it is. | |
| So we have to be persistent and unceasing and keep coming back to God, keep coming back, keep coming back, keep crying out to Him. | |
| And that's really what demonstrates our faith, because anyone can cry out to God in a moment of desperation, in a fleeting moment of desperation, or a fleeting moment of need. | |
| Anyone can cry out, oh God, help me, save me. | |
| But to continue, to continue following God, grasping at His robes, crying out, have mercy on me, to continue along that path. | |
| Well, that's persistence. | |
| That's unceasing prayer, I think. | |
| The third thing, I think a lot of us need to expand Our prayer arsenal a little bit. | |
| Because there are different kinds of prayer, not just one kind. | |
| And I think this is a big problem in Christianity today in the West, is that people aren't really taught about prayer. | |
| We kind of assume that it's, oh yeah, you'll figure it out, you'll pick it up on your own. | |
| But it's something people need to be taught and trained in. | |
| And we need to learn that there are different kinds of prayers. | |
| There are prayers of petitions where we ask for something, and we've discussed that. | |
| And I think for a lot of us, that's the only kind of prayer we ever say. | |
| It's just petition. | |
| God, give me this, give me this, give me this. | |
| And we may ask for petitions. | |
| We may petition on behalf of other people, which is great. | |
| We may petition on behalf of our children, our family, our spouse, the poor, the disadvantaged, our friends. | |
| And those are great prayers to say, but those are also petition prayers. | |
| And then you also have prayers of thanksgiving, where we give thanks and praise to God. | |
| And I think if we're getting shot down on our petition prayers a lot, we may have to ask ourselves, how often do we do the thanksgiving prayers? | |
| Because if it's all petition and it's no thanksgiving, Except for maybe on Thanksgiving. | |
| That's the only time when we thank God that might be part of the problem. | |
| It seems to me it should be at least even. | |
| For all the time we spend asking God for things, we should spend time thanking Him. | |
| Thanking Him even when He says no. | |
| If He says yes to a prayer, and I know I've done this so many times, where I'm praying for something, I'm praying for it, and then I get it. | |
| And then I forget to go back to God and say, thank you for this. | |
| And I know I don't tolerate that for my own kids. | |
| If I go out and get them some ice cream and I hand them the ice cream, they better say thank you. | |
| But how often have I done that to our Heavenly Father? | |
| Or He gives me something and I'm just like a brat. | |
| I don't even say thank you for it. | |
| But I think even more common, even if we remember to say thank you for the yeses, how often do we forget to say thank you for the noes? | |
| Because even if God says no, We should still go back and thank Him. | |
| Because we know that the no was what was best for us. | |
| And so it was a blessing, even still. | |
| So prayers of thanksgiving, prayers of petition. | |
| Then we have prayers of contrition, where we ask forgiveness for our sins. | |
| That's another one that I think Christians tend to neglect. | |
| In their one minute of daily prayer. | |
| And then there are prayers of adoration. | |
| And a prayer of adoration is a prayer where we simply worship and praise God. | |
| Now you look at the Lord's Prayer, which Christ gave to us, we see that it has all of these elements in it. | |
| So think about it. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. | |
| That's adoration. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. | |
| That's more adoration. | |
| Give us this day our daily bread. | |
| That's petition. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. | |
| That's contrition. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. | |
| That's also petition. So this is the model prayer. | |
| Jesus says, pray like this. | |
| And he's not saying that every prayer you say should be this specific prayer, these words exactly, although we should pray that specific prayer a lot. | |
| But what he's saying is every prayer you say should reflect this prayer. | |
| It should reflect some element of this prayer. | |
| So it leads with adoration, praise, worship, dwelling in God's holiness. | |
| Then it petitions God, but the petition is humble. | |
| The petition is submissive. | |
| It's saying, just give me my daily bread, Lord. | |
| Then there's asking for forgiveness. | |
| And it's kind of a dangerous... | |
| A request for forgiveness. | |
| Because we're saying, forgive us as we forgive others. | |
| And a lot of us, we don't forgive others that well. | |
| And then there's the final petition, which is a petition for holiness and for sanctification. | |
| And I think when we're asking God for things, that should really be the main thing we ask for, is for our sanctification, for our holiness. | |
| We should be saying, you know, make me holy, Lord. | |
| Fourth thing, I wanted to focus on adoration prayers for a moment because I think this is the kind of prayer that is most lacking for a lot of Christians, and it was lacking for me until recently. | |
| Not every prayer that we say should involve us saying anything. | |
| Not every prayer should be said. | |
| If we really desire a connection, a relationship with Him, Then the conversation with God has to be a two-way conversation. | |
| And I think a mistake that we often make is this is a conversation. | |
| We are really bad conversationalists. | |
| We're like the conversationalist in the conversation who just dominates the conversation and makes everything about themselves and never listens to anybody else. | |
| And it's just horrible talking to them. | |
| I think with God, it's got to be a two-way conversation. | |
| All the time we spend talking to Him, explaining ourselves and everything, there also have to be times of silence, times of listening. | |
| Prayers, you know, we should be saying prayers where we say nothing, actually, where we ask for nothing, but we simply put ourselves in His presence. | |
| We meditate upon His majesty and lordship and beauty. | |
| And we open ourselves up to Him. | |
| And then we just sit there in His presence, thinking about Him. | |
| That's a contemplative, meditative prayer. | |
| People have different sorts of strategies for contemplative prayer. | |
| I'm certainly no expert myself. | |
| What I try to do now, try being the operative word, working on it, but what I try to do is, I try to do this every morning, the contemplative prayer. | |
| And I begin by reading a little bit of scripture, just a short passage, so as to put myself in the right frame of mind. | |
| And then the next step for me is I get on my knees, and I do think that the physical posture is important because we are physical beings, and to be on our knees is to physically communicate our submission to God. | |
| And the whole point of contemplative prayer is to meditate upon the presence of God. | |
| So we have to think, if Christ were to appear in the flesh right in front of us, if Christ walked into our living room in the flesh, what would we do? | |
| Unless we are arrogant beyond all comprehension, we would fall to our knees. | |
| We'd probably fall all the way prostrate on our faces, is what we would do. | |
| Remember, in Revelation, John talks about his vision of the Lord, and he says, When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. | |
| And that is what a person ought to do when confronted with the blinding, heavenly... | |
| Light of perfection. | |
| So if we're praying whenever possible, I think it's important to put our minds where our minds need to be by putting our bodies how our bodies need to be. | |
| And I'm not saying that every time we pray we have to be on our knees because I know I'll pray sometimes when I'm driving, when I'm walking, when I'm doing chores. | |
| So we could pray in any physical position whatsoever. | |
| But we should also be carving out specific time in the day for prayer, not just when we can fit it in when we're doing something else, which is fine as long as we also have that time that is just for prayer, nothing else, put aside all the distractions. | |
| And in those moments, I think it's so important for us to get on our knees in this act of submission and reverence. | |
| And this is something that I think is really lacking, not just prayer, but something really lacking among Christians in America is reverence, is this sense of total reverence, this sense of the sacred, you know, that we are in front of something truly sacred. | |
| So anyway, then on my knees, I ask the Holy Spirit to come into my heart, and then I spend some time saying nothing, trying not to say anything even in my head, trying to cancel out any thoughts of things that I need or things I need to do, and I just imagine myself before Christ. | |
| And that's the prayer. I know some people in contemplative prayer, they'll meditate on a passage of scripture or they'll meditate on the cross. | |
| I think over time you figure out what works best for you. | |
| What's the best way that God speaks to you personally? | |
| But I think this should really be the bedrock of our prayer life, that private, quiet contemplation, that passive kind of receiving Of God and receiving of Him speaking to us. | |
| But if we really want to hear what He's saying to us, we need to just shut up and listen, which I know we all struggle with. | |
| I certainly do. But I think when we incorporate all of these forms of prayer and we pray unceasingly and we really start to take our prayer life seriously, I think that's when We see that our prayers really start to work. | |
| They really work. | |
| And they work in many ways. | |
| But here's the primary way that I think a really well-grounded prayer life works. | |
| Or here's the place, if you're really praying a lot, And you're praying well. | |
| Here's the place where you're really going to see a change. | |
| You may not see a change in anything else. | |
| Your financial situation may stay the same. | |
| Your health may stay the same. | |
| Everything in your life may stay exactly the same. | |
| Or they may not. | |
| But it may all stay exactly the same. | |
| But the one place where you absolutely 100% guaranteed see a change is in your appetites. | |
| I don't mean physical appetites. | |
| I mean that when we really have a prayer life, that's when we start to feel a deeper desire for holy things. | |
| The more we pursue God, the more of a desire we have for Him. | |
| And we start to crave holiness, and so we feel less desire for the hollow things. | |
| We want holy things, not hollow things, not superficial things, not unholy things. | |
| Our spiritual and intellectual appetites grow deeper, they grow more mature. | |
| We may find that a lot of the music we like to listen to, a lot of the shows we watch, a lot of the movies we watch, just a lot of the stuff we used to do no longer has any appeal to us whatsoever. | |
| And we'll even find that certain sins and certain temptations that we've struggled with that have just had a hold on us for so long, suddenly they don't have a hold on us anymore. | |
| Suddenly, and you might not even notice it when it happens, it's not that you'll become a perfect person who never sins, but if there are certain sins that have just had you in their grasp for so long, and then you really start praying unceasingly every day, constantly, That's when you find that, and you almost don't even notice the transition, but one day you look and that sin is just kind of over there. | |
| And you can look at it and you can say, you've got no power on me. | |
| You've got no power. | |
| And you'll just want more of the sacred in your life. | |
| And you'll find that certain things that you found appealing before aren't appealing anymore. | |
| Certain things you didn't find appealing are appealing. | |
| You'll love people more. | |
| You'll hate sin more. You'll want to read the Bible more. | |
| You'll want to think about God more and talk about Him more. | |
| I think when you look at Christians, it would seem that their appetites are exactly like everyone else's. | |
| In other words, they're listening to trashy music, and they're just watching all this trash on TV, and they're just living and consuming in exactly the same way as people without faith. | |
| And they seem to have no appetite whatsoever for God, prayer, church, scripture. | |
| Well, the reason why they're like that is that they don't pray. | |
| That's the problem, is they don't pray. | |
| And I think then the more we change from prayer, the less we look at prayer as a thing that brings results or a thing that works or doesn't work. | |
| We just see prayer as an opportunity to spend time with God and to think about Him and worship Him and not always to be asking for things, but just to have our bond with Him grow stronger and stronger and to be in His presence and to listen to Him. | |
| I don't say this as someone who's mastered the art of praying, not by a long shot, but I know that this is what prayer is. | |
| And we could all certainly benefit from praying significantly more than we are now. | |
| So maybe we should all make that resolution right now. | |
| All right, I'll leave it there. |