Where Is Prayer? Part Two: Mending Prayer

Where is prayer in the Church today?

We see it in the gathering of Church itself, of course. Unfortunately, passionate prayer is often lacking in the personal and private lives of Christians. Now, we usually don’t see or know about others’ personal prayer time, because it’s supposed to be private, between them and God. But many people go days or weeks or months without dedicating time to prayer. I know because that’s been true for me and even still is to an extent.

Please believe me when I say, none of what I’ve said up to this point comes from a place of pride or judgment. I’m writing this because each of these convoluted sentiments, doubts, and dots of discouragement have been true of me for most of my life, like many other Christians. This blog post is a confession of my own prayer weakness and an explanation of the imperfection I’ve found within myself, as revealed by the Holy Spirit.

I’m not proud of how poor my prayer life has been. I grew up in the church, so from a young age I was taught to pray for my and others’ needs and to offer up praise. But most of my personal and private prayers over the course of my life have been weak, selfish, and sparse up to about a year or two ago.

Even now, they aren’t what they need to be, but at my restless request the Lord is working from the ground floor to build a mansion and a throne (Psalm 22:3) out of my prayers. And no matter what I think of them, every word I speak to Him—every word you speak to Him—is precious.

So, what does it even mean to “pray more” or to “devote oneself to prayer”?

Countless books have been written on this topic, but I believe what it comes down to is relatively simple: prayer is the act of wholeheartedly, resolutely, and intentionally seeking a selfless, humble, and worshipful relationship with God. It’s the act through which we build faith, and it requires His intervention and transformation. We entirely surrender our whole lives to His care and control.

We have a choice to make, and that choice is to love God or love ourselves. If we choose Him and seek His will, He can amplify that decision, giving us power to overcome our selfish and unlovely ideas of love. He can help us learn to communicate freely with Him.

This is radical stuff. Scary stuff. Stuff a lot of people don’t want to do. Who can blame them? Christianity is the religion of dead people who’ve been brought back to life, reborn in faith through the shed blood of Jesus the Messiah. Christians are the supposed crazies of the world, because “the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18)

We talk of being “crucified with Christ” and “born again” and having hearts that are “deceitful above all things”—the antithesis to a world that tells us to seek truth within ourselves and to live for whatever makes us happy in a given moment. Not only that, we proclaim to have the Spirit of God living within us, yet so often live like people who don’t follow Jesus.

Nobody truly wants to die to themselves and deny their worldly wants in order to live an eternal and fulfilled life—not even Christians. There’s a whole ancient text made up of 66 books that tells countless stories of people just like us who’ve failed God. Despite their failure, He then rescued them from themselves as many times as it took, as many times as they cried out for help. It takes the grace-filled work of the Holy Spirit to convince and convict us of sin. It takes His unfailing love to bring us to a repentance that changes the very desires of our souls.

It takes that same holy work to grow a life of prayer like a tender green shoot in a pot of moist soil. After all, prayer is merely the outgrowth of our faith and allegiance to Him, which Jesus said starts as the smallest possible inkling of a plant, a miniscule mustard seed that He waters and waits on patiently. He’s like a gardener tending a brand-new orchard that won’t bear fruit for years at first. But if we want more faith, all we have to do is ask and believe He will provide in His time.

Oswald Chambers once wrote, “Prayer does not fit us for the greater works; prayer is the greater work.”

So where is prayer?

It’s in the very heart of God. If we want to be obedient and grow in grace, we’ll enter that heart humbly and consistently with a hunger for a new way of life. We’ll ask the Source of all perfect and holy love for the ability to love well and a fresh desire to pray in His Name. We’ll approach the throne of grace with reverence and an acknowledgment both of our weakness and our status as His adopted children. We’ll decide, with the help of the Holy Spirit, that prayer is the greatest work that we can possibly take part in.

When we begin to ask and seek and knock at the door, we’ll see Him answer and do miraculous things.