four steps to the praying life
by Robert Krumrey
You are probably familiar with the concept of going “from couch to 5K”. It’s a 9 week training plan that’s supposed to help you go from 24/7 naps and screen time on the couch to actually running 3.1 miles in the real world. The secret to this program is lots of incremental steps - couch to refrigerator, couch to mailbox, couch to end of the street . . . You get the picture. While some of us may need a training program to get us off the couch and running, most of us need even more a program to get us off the couch and praying. Or at least praying while sitting on the couch! Here are four simple steps for doing just that:
#1 Learn From the Master
Last Sunday (5/3/20) I preached on Luke 11:1-13 which is one of Jesus’ most important teachings on prayer. If you haven’t listened to or watched this sermon, I would encourage you to do so. Before we start praying, we should know a little bit about how to do it. Just like when you start to run, you ought to do a little research on how to run in a way that is actually going to contribute to your health - what shoes should I wear? how should I stretch? and what’s a warm down? The best place to go for learning how to pray is the teachings of Jesus. He had a perfect prayer life and anything he says about prayer should be adopted by us 100 percent. I shared in the sermon that the Lord’s Prayer or model prayer that we find in both Luke 11 and Matthew 6 is a great place to start. This prayer gives you some structure for making sure your prayer time is filled with not only requests for yourself but also an acknowledgement of God and requests for one’s relationship to others and the world. See this video of Pastor John Piper modeling with this might look like.
#2 Confess the Sin Under the Sin
One of the biggest breakthroughs for me in the area of prayer was realizing that prayerlessness is a sin. Praying (for the Christian) is not an option. It’s a command in Scripture. It’s all over the New Testament: “Devote yourselves to prayer” (Colossians 4:2); “Pray in the Spirit on all occasions” (Ephesians 6:18); “When you pray” (Matthew 6:5); to name just a few. We cannot get around the fact that praying is a command from God and if it is a command, then not doing it is a sin. All sins, including the sin of prayerlessness, should be confessed and repented from.
An even bigger breakthrough for me was realizing what Pastor Tim Keller often calls the “sin under the sin”. The commands we break certainly count as sin, but there is often something lying under the surface which is much more insidious. In the case of prayerlessness, one of the sins under that sin is self-sufficiency. A lack of prayer in one’s life is a symptom of a heart that is not aware of its need for God. This includes not only the resources we need (temporal and spiritual), but for God in general. By not praying, we are saying that we don’t need or want God.
“Now wait a minute, that’s not what I am saying! I’m busy. I’m tired. I’m . . . “ It’s so easy to make excuses for why we don’t get around to praying, but if we are honest we have to admit that we don’t understand our need for God. He is our greatest need. The thing we need more of than anything else in the world is God. When we exhibit a prayerless life, we know that our heart isn’t aware of our need for him. The proper response to this is to confess our sin. We should throw away our excuses and justifications and be honest about our spiritual state. Confess it and ask God for the grace of forgiveness AND the grace of transformation that will stir our hearts to want to pray to him more.
#3 Remove Obstacles
Once you’ve gotten some basic training on prayer and taken some time to confess the sin of prayerlessness and the sins under that sin, it’s time to take some action. You may have thought that the action to take was to start praying. By all means, don’t let me stop you from praying during this entire process. What you may find is that even though you’ve learned some prayer basics and confessed sin, that you are still struggling to embrace a consistent and meaningful prayer life. One of the reasons for this may be some other habits or circumstances that are getting in the way.
For example, if you plan to get up in the morning and pray, but you tend to stay up too late and not get enough sleep at night you don’t end up praying. Or you decide to put some time aside in the evening for prayer but keep getting sucked into social media on your phone. Or you get the sleep you need, you turn off the phone, but your roommate or family is making so much noise that you can’t really concentrate. These, and many other kinds of obstacles, can really discourage your journey from spiritual couch potato to prayer warrior. It will be very helpful to take some time and think through what undermines your efforts to engage in prayer and come up with ways to overcome these obstacles.
#4 Just Do It
Eventually you need to pray. A great way to start is to pray about praying. I was first introduced to this idea when I read Richard Foster’s chapter on prayer in his book Celebration of Discipline. One of the most helpful things I gleaned from that book was to approach spiritual disciplines with an attitude of absolute dependence on God. In all my other experiences with “discipline” there was a lot of teeth gritting and willing of myself to start a new habit. Foster does a masterful job (especially in the introduction of the book) of explaining how one can approach any spiritual discipline by relying on God’s grace through faith. This understanding of doing something is how Christians should always take any type of outward action - in humble dependence on God which is the very essence of prayer.
So let’s do it! If you have not yet embraced a meaningful and consistent prayer life, learn from the Master, confess the sin of and the sins under prayerlessness, remove all obstacles, and then pray. Then keep learning to pray, confessing sin, removing obstacles, and praying. Through these disciplines, I pray that God will develop in me, in you, and in our congregation a deep, meaningful, life-changing, congregation-changing, world-changing experience of this amazing gift of prayer.