If there is one topic that, by preaching it, any preacher could easily bring immense guilt upon a congregation, it would be the topic of prayer. Do we pray enough? Do we pray with freshness? Do we pray with passion? And after answering “no” three times you begin your trek up the aisle at the end of the service to dedicate yourself again to faithful prayer.
I often chalked up the lack of prayer in a believer’s life to that of laziness. However, I think Groeschel is probably more on target when he believes it is more a lack of believing that prayer truly works.
One of the greatest challenges I face with prayer is that of just speaking genuinely from my heart to God. There are so many phrases I have used for many years that automatically pop out with absolutely no meaning behind them – ie. “Dear God, thank you for this day” or how about this one – “Bless this food to our bodies” – oh, how original! God must get so bored with our meaningless verbage. Crazy how I can talk to God and seldom engage my brain. I often think how my wife, Lisa, would feel if I quoted the same identical phrase in every conversation I had with her. I’m sure it wouldn’t be too long before she questioned my sincerity through it.
Well, how sincere are our prayers? Are we honest with God when we pray? (It doesn’t make much sense to not tell the truth since He can see through it anyway.) Do we try to stay away from brainless ruts in prayer?
I’ll make a deal with you – let’s both ask ourselves one question throughout our prayers – “Did I really mean that?” After every main thought we express we can ask that simple question which, hopefully, will evaluate our sincerity in what we say to the God of the universe. Try it out and let me know what how it goes!
I simply don’t pray enough. I can’t say it any more plain than that.