Then He spoke a parable to them, that men always ought to pray and not lose heart. (Luke 18:1)

Pray or quit.

Pray or grow discouraged and drop by the wayside.

Pray or weaken and wither away.

If I were the devil, I would do anything within my power to stop God’s people from praying.

If I were the devil, I’d be patting myself on the back about now, since it would appear that very few are praying. Well, praying in any sort of meaningful, situation-altering way, anyway.

No one believed in prayer the way the Lord Jesus did.

Perhaps no subject so permeates the four gospels like prayer. Jesus exhibited it, taught it, reminded His disciples of it, and told stories of people who did it well.

Pray or else, disciple of Jesus.

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This is one that almost never gets addressed. It was put to me this week by my friend Nancy. Her note, almost verbatim:

Someday I need you to help me understand why we are told when we pray and believe our prayers will be answered. Then people die in spite of our pleas for health. I know it is within God’s will but why ask if His will is what is going to occur anyway? I know thousands of prayers were said for (a friend who died some years back) and for my friend I saw buried today. Thousands are being said for (a friend with cancer) yet she is in a battle for her life.

We are told “you have not because you ask not.” Maybe this would be a good blog topic. I can’t be the only one who struggles with these thoughts.

If you only knew, Nancy.

On this blog, I probably have fifty articles dealing with prayer in one way or the other. And–truth be known–most of them skirt around the edges of this subject.

So, let’s try to meet it head on.

Let’s start by this upfront admission: Things are not as simple as they seem at first.

Frankly, as one who likes things simple and cut-and-dried, this is painful to admit.

The Bible actually does say things like: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives….” (Matthew 6:7-8) And this: “Whatever you ask in my name, that I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything in my name, I will do it” (John 14:13-14).

There are plenty more, but those two are sufficient to establish that the blanket promises are out there.

What are serious disciples of the Lord Jesus to make of such prayer promises?

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You’re sitting in church, working hard to worship. You’ve had a hectic week and this Sunday morning has had its share of stresses. But finally, you’re here, in place, in the Lord’s house, sitting in your favorite pew. You’ve joined the congregation in singing the first hymn of the day. The minister has started the service right with a wonderful call to worship. And then it happens.

The person leading the opening prayer strays across an invisible border and says something that offends you or frightens you or angers you or troubles you or at the very least disturbs you.

That’s what this is about.

Just so you will know, I’m a pastor. We pastors have the same reaction you do when the person praying–whether a layman or a trained minister who should know better–says something very wrong or quite stupid or somewhat offensive. We wonder what that was all about, where he learned that doctrine, or where he picked that weird phrase up and decided to incorporate it into his public prayers.

Everyone has his/her list of prayers that cross that deadline. Here is my list of the Top ten prayers I hope never to hear again.

10. “And Lord, we want to tell you…and Lord, this, and Lord that.”

My neighbor Kay Swanson hears people pray, “Father God, Lord, I pray….and Father God, that you would…Lord God, Father God, be merciful to us….” Kay says, “Please! When you’re speaking to me, you don’t invoke my name between every couple of words. Why do you do this to God?”

Using the Lord’s name as punctuation is a no-no.

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They invite you to bring a talk, a lesson, or a sermon on prayer. Your first thought, if you are normal, is, “Who me? What little I know about prayer you could put in a thimble.”

There may be some Christian somewhere who considers himself an authority on prayer, but I have yet to meet him. The truly godly men and women known as prayer warriors will tell you they feel they have just enrolled in kindergarten.

I’m confident of this one thing: our Heavenly Father is not happy with any of His children claiming to have the inside track on how to approach Him, how to “get things from God,” “how to make prayer work for your benefit,” and how to get on His good side.

Jesus Christ has done everything necessary for us to enter the Throne Room of Heaven. See Hebrews 4:16.

Jesus Christ has opened the divider between man and God and we have an open invitation to “come on in.” See Hebrews 10:19-22.

If you and I are not entering God’s presence and lifting up our needs and petitions and interceding for those on our hearts, it’s not God’s fault. It’s not the fault of Jesus, who did everything necessary to make it possible for us to pray effectively.

So, come on in. Come in humbly, for this is the Throne Room of the Universe. Come in worshipfully for the One on the Throne is the Lord of Lords. Come in boldly because your Authority is the Blood of Jesus. Come in regularly because you live in a needy, fallen world. Come in with Jesus: in His Name, by His blood, for His sake.

That’s what we want to teach others.

But there are some things we do not want to teach, no matter how great the temptation.

Here are three cautions for anyone about to stand in front of others to teach prayer.

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This kind cannot come out by anything but prayer.(Mark 9:29 NASB)

Anything but prayer.

In my Bible where this verse has been highlighted, I’ve underscored those three words and written in the margin, “Yep. That’s us. Anything but prayer.”

To be sure, I’ve taken those three words right out of their context. That is, I’m using them in ways not intended in the text. But the point is a valid one: We are prone to try everything in the world before we turn to prayer.

Somewhere I read where a fellow was talking with his elderly grandmother about a family problem that was eating at her. “Well, in the final analysis, Grandma,” he said, “All we can do is pray about it.”

“Oh my,” she said. “Has it come to that?”

Yes, and sooner or later it always comes to that.

Let’s talk about that.

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Nothing jerks our prayers out of their “blessed generality” stage like a crisis. The best kind of crisis for that is for a close loved one to get in serious trouble–car wreck, cancer, emergency surgery, that sort of thing.

But a close second is a personal crisis, the kind where someone is making life miserable for you and it’s taking all the reserves you can muster to get out of bed in the morning and walk into one more day. You either quit praying altogether, the worst possible choice, or your prayers lose their vain repetitions and meaningless phrases and get down to business.

Yesterday, going through a stack of notes from the 1990s, I found such a prayer of mine, written in the thick of church conflict. It’s undated, so there’s no way of determining what particular struggle was going on then. We went through so many, the first six or seven years of my 14-year pastorate at the last church we served.

The prayer was written in longhand and filled two pages. It’s about as specific as one would want a prayer to be. No more “bless him” and “help her.” But on the other hand, it does not call names and I’m glad to report, it’s not as harsh as some of the Psalms where David or whoever is praying for the children of his enemies to not live to see that day’s sunset.

Here is the prayer, along with a few comments. I send it forth in the hope that some servant of the Lord in the fight of his life may find encouragement to hang tough and be faithful.

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What if you tried this some Sunday soon….

While the pastor is in his Sunday morning prayer or a deacon is invoking the blessings of the Almighty on the offering, interrupt them.

“Pastor.” (Or, “Deacon.”)

“May I interrupt you for a moment?”

This is not normally done, so don’t be surprised if it takes a moment for it to get through to the one praying that he’s being summoned.

“What?” he says. “Shhh. I’m praying.”

“I know you’re praying. That’s what I want to ask you about.”

“You want to ask me about my prayer? Couldn’t this wait until after church?”

“No. It needs to be asked right now, in the middle of your prayer.”

“All right. What is it?”

“I just wanted to know what you think you’re doing. I mean, what is the point of this prayer? Where are you going with this?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Well, your prayer sort of touches on half the issues in the world and doesn’t really dwell on anything, and I was just wondering. What exactly do you want the Lord to do?”

“What I want Him to do is to bless us, to bless this world. To be with us today, and to make this worship service special.”

“Oh. That’s good. You could have fooled me. I suppose that somewhere in the middle of all those words you were flinging heavenward there was that. But those requests were buried in the wordiness.”

“Uh, friend, are you rebuking me right here in front of the entire church?”

“No, not really. Because you see, I’m not really doing this. I’m just fantasizing about it. This is not really happening, pastor.”

“Well, good. Now, if you will excuse me, I’d like to get back to the morning prayer.”

Now, since we all agree that this scenario is not going to occur, I have an alternate suggestion.

Do it to yourself, to your own prayers. Interrupt yourself. Ask, “Where am I going with this? What am I seeking from the Lord? Or am I just filling the space with religious words, trying to make this worship service impressive to someone other than the Lord?”

We church people have created categories of prayers. We have invocations and benedictions. In between, we have pastoral prayers and offertory prayers. And, in most of our churches, that’s about it.

I have one more suggestion: how about prayers of faith?

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One of the lies of the enemy is that you are different, that others are more spiritual than you and find spiritual disciplines easy.

You’re the only one with these problems in prayer.

Others get up in the morning eager to spend an hour with the Lord in prayer; you’re the only one who has to drag yourself over to a chair and open the Bible and force yourself to pray.

Others pray smoothly and eloquently and always know what to say; you’re the only one who stumbles along haltingly as though you were just learning to speak or were trying on a foreign tongue.

Others never are plagued by doubt and offer up these magnificent sacrifices of praise and intercession that Heaven welcomes, values as jewels, and immediately rewards; you’re the only person who fights back the doubts as you pray and wonders whether the whole business is accomplishing anything.

Others see answers to their prayers as a matter of routine; you’re the only one who doesn’t.

Way wrong. Not so at all.

Satan is a liar and the father of lies.

The fact of the matter is that those holy people you admire a lot for their piety and resent a little for their religiosity fight the same battles you do. They encounter the same temptations, struggle with the same difficulties, and know the same doubts about prayer’s effectiveness.

You’re not so different.

You’re definitely not fighting battles in your walk with the Lord others have not faced, or more likely, are struggling with at this very moment.

In my yesterday’s reading, I came across reminders of this from two of the Christian faith’s heroes, Elisabeth Elliot and C. S. Lewis.

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Hey, if your prayers are boring you, how do you think the Almighty feels?

In the introduction to his book on prayer, “Invading the Privacy of God,” Cecil Murphey begins, “Prayer bores me and I sometimes wonder why I’m doing it.”

“There! I said it in print,” he continues.

For years Murphey admits he has vacillated between excitement and boredom in his prayer life. He writes, “I’ve read dozens (literally!) of books on the subject; learned four different methods for praying the Lord’s Prayer; embraced techniques for praying the Psalms; recited the Jesus Prayer (‘Lord Jesus Christ, be merciful to me, a sinner’) for nearly an hour at a time; taken lessons on meditation techniques; praised my way out of despair; sung hymns of petition; and like a lot of others, I’ve used the Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication (ACTS) method of prayer.”

And did all that work for him? “Yes — sometimes and for a while.”

At the best of times, Murphey has “felt such a closeness to Jesus Christ that it seemed I could actually feel a hand wrap itself around mine.” And at other times, “I’ve fallen asleep on my knees, or I’ve prayed for four minutes that felt like two hours.”

At first, he confesses, he rebuked himself for being bored during prayer. He chided himself to “get past the boredom, press on!”

The best solution he has found to the problem of being bored while praying was to use different methods in his prayers. After all, Murphey says, “there is no one method of prayer. We can approach God in many ways.”

I agree completely.

The times when I’ve felt bored while praying, I have confessed what seems so elementary as to be silly: it’s my problem and not God’s. I mean, imagine walking into the control-central of Heaven where the Ruler of the Universe sits enthroned — and being bored. (Okay, I can imagine some teenagers pulling it off. But we’re talking about normal people.)

The problem is mine.

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If we were required to be worthy of entering the Lord’s presence before our prayers were heard, Heaven would never hear a peep out of me.

When the young Martin Luther knelt to pray, a sense of shame often overwhelmed him. He was unworthy to approach the Lord and knew it. Some scriptures in particular, instead of assisting him, only added to his misery.

“Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who may stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart….” (Psalm 24:4a)

That let Luther out–as it does me, and I suspect you, too. Who among us is innocent, who has not “lifted up his soul to an idol, nor sworn deceitfully”? (Psalm 24:4b)

Philip Yancey says as a young monk Luther would spend hours trying to identify every stray thought and sin in order to confess it. “No matter how thorough his confession, as he knelt to pray he felt himself rejected by a righteous God.”

The breakthrough came, Yancey says in “Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?” when Luther saw that in Jesus Christ God was pouring out grace and forgiveness to the foulest of sinners, the least worthy.

Thereafter, Luther recognized feelings of unworthiness and shame for what they were, agents of the devil which he rejected and handed to the Lord in gratitude.

It is indeed true that we are all unworthy. Without even understanding all its apocalyptic ramifications, the poorest of believers will read in Revelation 5 and say, “Yes, yes.”

“I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, ‘Who is worthy to open the scroll and to loose its seals?” John says, “I wept much, because no one was found worthy to open and read the scroll or to look at it.” And then, shortly, he hears the angelic chorus intoning, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain….”

I am unworthy; Christ is all-worthy.

It’s one thing to know that and another to live it, to believe it in our heart of hearts, and to feel it.

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