Why We Don't Pray As We Should

By Brian Colmery @ http://colmery.blogspot.com/2006/11/why-we-dont-pray-as-we-should.html

Ask any pastor about the church’s weekly prayer meetings and you’ll get one of the following answers:

1. “Oh, I remember those. Good times, good times.”
2. “I hear that they’re going well.”
3. “They’re not great. We pretty much pray for old ladies bunions and stuff.”

It’s rare that you find a church today that has a prayer meeting that could be described as “vibrant” with a straight face. And when, like I’m doing now, the pastor tries to ascertain why prayer meetings, though well and good, aren’t what they could be, answers are hard to come by.

There’s a cycle of thoughts you go through, as a pastor in that situation, when you try to figure out what needs to be done. First, you think about the prayers in the bible, and the prayers in history, and all those crazy stories you hear in seminary about answered prayer and how Spurgeon had roughly 1.2 million people in the church basement praying for every service. Then you think about your own prayer life, how it needs work, and struggle for a while between the ease of thinking “well, I pray more than most people I know” and the difficulty of recognizing that God didn’t make “everyone you know” the standard. After hacking your way through that one, you start thinking about how you’re probably going to eat a peanut butter sandwich for dinner. And how maybe the whole “online dating” thing isn’t such a bad idea if it might eventually lead to dinners that involve more than a bag of bread, two jars, and a knife. Or that might be just me.

Then you shake that off and start to think of how, while the prayer meetings aren’t up to the legendary standard of Mueller or the like, it’s not like they’re bad. I mean, people are getting prayed for, and that’s good. Right? A mini debate takes place somewhere in your head, and then you think: well, maybe we just need improvement. A little tweaking. And so, like the good seminary graduate, you think: I’ll just teach it. Pre-prayer meeting devotionals, pushing the effectiveness of prayer. A few extreme stories about God’s faithfulness.

Then you remember the last six times you tried that, and the blank stares you received. And so you resign yourself to having “okay” prayer meetings for a while, consoling yourself with a hastily made (but liberally slathered with jelly) sandwich. A few months later, you start the process all over again.

This time around, though, it’s not dinner time and I’m not near my kitchen, so my “distract-via-sandwich” option isn’t on the table. No pun intended. And what’s donned on my is this little doozy:

We don’t pray the way we should because we don’t really want our prayers to be answered.

You look around a prayer meeting, and it’s not so much that people don’t cognitively believe that prayer works. Or at least that it should, in theory, with all the qualifying, apologizing, and caveats we’ve made to get God off the hook for all that “you ask, you get” talk in the Bible. Everyone’s pretty much on board with that (again, in theory). The problem is that, if we actually start to access this belief and stand on it in any legitimate way (not as supplementary to our own efforts or concerning things peripheral to our real concerns), then God might just actually make good on those promises that He gave. And if God actually makes good on those promises that He made, we’re actually going to have to change the way we live.

It’s the reason why Jesus asked the paralytic in John 5 if he wanted to be healed. It seems like a dumb question, on the face of it – who wouldn’t want to walk around? But after 38 years of living without legs, being healed meant more than just a change in circumstances. It meant he’d have to change too—getting a job instead of accepting people’s charity, not just laying around all day, becoming a productive member of society. Healing (both physical and spiritual) brings with it responsibility and expectation. And what we really want, deep down, is for our circumstances to change without us having to change along with them.

We don’t pray as we should because, deep down, we know that if God answers our prayers we’re going to have to change the way we live. If God really answers my prayer to bring a lot of new converts into the church, I’m going to have to deal with a lot of baby Christians in need of discipleship. If God really answers a prayer for a new job, then I have to show up on time to work. If God really answers my prayer for more mature Christian friends, then I’m going to have to deal with them challenging some of the things I do or say. If God really answers my prayer for humility, I’m going to have to go through some very challenging circumstances. If God really answers prayer, I’m going to be accountable for the things that I neglect to pray for, I’m going to find that the reason I don’t have what I want is that I don’t ask, and I’m going to find that I’d really rather watch television than deal with God showering down blessings if having those blessings mean I have increased responsibility.

So, instead of facing that reality, we fill our heads and our prayers with thoughts of mild physical discomfort, healing for people we hardly know (and thus don’t have to invest in), and things that, when it all comes down, don’t really matter that much to us. And when we do pray for what really matters, we do it so half-heartedly that any other person in the room would be impressed with our theology but not convinced that we actually care one way or the other. Because, deep down, we know that we might not really want God to work that way. Because, if we pray with conviction and fervency, God might actually answer our prayers.

There are plenty of other reasons we don't pray as we should, but I believe that this one is near the top. And so the question we have to ask ourselves is this: we’re not anti-God, nor anti-spiritual growth. But are we actually willing to be close to God if being close to God means our lives will change? Or are we so concerned with not crossing our lines of comfort that our prayer life has been neutered, all the while wondering why our prayers go unanswered by a God who knows our hearts?