DIFFICULTIES IN PRAYER
Isn’t it amazing the excuses you can find not to do something. I am constantly amazed at my ability to find reasons why I should not do administration. Or why it would be better not to go running and just to read a book. But what is not so amazing is how easily reasons not to pray creep into my Christian life. This morning I want to flag up for us all some of the difficulties we all encounter in Prayer. By identifying the difficulties we encounter I hope we can also identify how to overcome them. As I said last week the purpose of this series is to encourage you in your prayer life, especially at times when you encounter difficulties.
Let me set before you this morning what I believe is a common scenario in the lives of many of you:
You have a desire to pray but it feels like such an effort and a burden that you are ready to give up. You feel guilty for even thinking about giving up and so out of a sense of duty you pray. Your prayers are empty of meaning and life because it is out of duty that you pray. This leads to further guilt. The more effort it takes to pray the more neglected your prayer life becomes and the more guilt ways heavy on your soul. You feel alienated from God because of your lack of prayer, more guilt. Your mind becomes more worldly and the result is that prayer gets pushed further down or even off the agenda. Yet you still believe in prayer. You still talk to people about prayer and about the necessity of prayer as a daily discipline in the life of a Christian believer. With the result that you have two parallel lives – the public Christian face which may even on occasions pray in public and the private (real) life where prayer is virtually extinct = guilt again. The end is a downward spiral of neglect and guilt which culminates in spiritual desolation and you walking in the wilderness. Is that a fair description of the prayer life of many Christian believers? I think it is and the reason I believe it to be so is because it has been my Christian experience on many occasions.
Many of us have a desire in our hearts to pray. We really want to pray each day. We believe prayer is important for our relationship with God, with others and in our own lives. We desperately want to have a good prayer life. We talk about the importance of prayer. We receive prayer letters from missionaries, Christian organisations and prayer requests from others. We believe in prayer and yet the practical outworking of that in our daily lives is sometimes non-existent. We are full of good intentions but that is all they remain – ‘good intentions.’ Why? Why do we fail to put into practice what we believe about prayer?
This morning I want to identify for you some of the key things which create difficulties in our prayer life and feed the scenario I just outlined to you.
SIN AND DISOBEDIENCE.
Listen to these words of Jesus in John 14.21 READ. Those are familiar words to us but they convey so much concerning prayer. What is actually revealed to us here is the ‘cycle of intimacy’ in a believer’s life. Jesus tells us that our love for Him is expressed in our obedience to Him, to His Word. He then promises that if we obey Him He will reveal Himself to us. This revelation of Himself to us will lead us deeper into a love relationship with Him and so the cycle continues. But the opposite of that is also true. If we do not obey Him then intimacy is lost. If we disobey Him then we lose that revelation of Him in our lives and our love for Him starts to wane and with it our intimacy with Him. Isn’t that what happened with Adam and Eve when they disobeyed in the Garden of Eden? Whilst they obeyed the commands of God they had intimacy with Him. Whilst they obeyed the commands of God He revealed Himself to them. But once they disobeyed intimacy with God was lost. Their disobedience brought sin into the created order and placed a barrier between God and them and the result was a loss of intimacy, loss of revelation and loss of relationship. Sin brought about a loss in their lives and it does the same to us in our prayer life. Listen to these words in Proverbs 28.9 READ. Did you listen carefully to what God said there? If you disobey (turn a deaf ear to the law) then your very prayers are detestable to Him. Strong words! Listen to how David expressed it in Psalm 66.18 READ. David says if he tolerated sin in his life, in his heart then God would not have listened to his prayers. Friends listen to me now – if you entertain sin in your life then you will have difficulties in your prayer life. If you are walking in the ways of sin you cannot know intimacy with God. If you disobey the Word of God then your prayer life will be a struggle. In fact the Word of God says God finds your prayers ‘detestable’ because your walk reveals you do not love Him and you should not expect Him to listen when you disobey.
Turn with me to 2 Chronicles 7.11-22 – our OT reading for this morning. I want you to notice a few things here. Firstly in verse 12 God tells Solomon he had heard his prayer. This is an answer to Solomon’s two requests in 6.20, 40. But read on to verse 14. God tells Solomon here are the conditions for answered prayer:
(a) Humility of my people.
(b) Seek my face in prayer. Note that – ‘seek God’s face in prayer’ not ‘seek God’s hands in prayer.’ Too often we come looking for what is in God’s hands and not what is in His face – but I will come to that in moment.
(c) Repent – if they turn from their wicked ways – obedience.
(d) Then God promises to hear and to answer. So friends this morning I want you learn from that. Unconfessed Sin will bring difficulties into your prayer life. In fact if it remains unconfessed it will stop your prayer life altogether.
WRONG RELATIONSHIPS.
In the passage from 2 chronicles 7 we read that God said He would answer prayers spoken in the Temple. We know from the teaching of the NT that we are now god’s Temple of the Holy Spirit – 1 Corinthians 3.16. We know that sin can hinder prayer but listen to these words from Matthew 5.23-24 and Matthew 6.15. What do you notice about them? Do you notice the teaching of each of them? Jesus says that if you come to pray and there is a wrong relationship in your life then you must sort it out or the result will be that difficulties will arise in prayer. Listen to what Peter says in a more specific way concerning prayer and the marital relationship – 1 Peter 3.7 READ. Peter warns that if a husband does not respect his wife, fail to love her as Christ loves His church, then a hindrance (barrier) will arise in their prayer life. That is a very sobering warning to us all this morning. Friends wrong relationships are a reason we have difficulties in prayer. It might be a relationship that needs a fence mended, an apology given or forgiveness asked. It might be a relationship that is forbidden in the Word of God and you are persisting in it, or about to enter upon it and you wonder why your prayer life is beginning to be difficult. Examine your life. Examine your relationships and bring them before God and then mend the fences.
LOSS OF FOCUS.
2 Chronicles 7.14 READ. Matthew 6.6 READ. I could list many more Bible passages which show that our focus in prayer is to be God. The Psalms, especially, are replete with commands to focus on God in prayer. The Bible teaches us that when we come to pray our focus is on God and not on anything else. Listen to these words from Exodus 20.1-6 – they are familiar to us as the 1st and 2nd commandment. But did you ever stop for a moment and think how they relate to your prayer life? When you come to pray you are to have no other God but God on your heart and mind. When you come to pray God’s glory, the worship of God is to be the focus of your heart and mind – not the ‘prayer list.’ It is easy to allow ‘prayer requests’ to become ‘idols.’ It is easy to forget that prayer is about a relationship with God and communication with God. It is easy to lose the focus of an encounter with the living God, which should always lead us to worship Him before anything else. So wrong focus can create difficulties in prayer because we come not thinking of God but of our requests. The result is that our minds wander, stray on to the list of things we want God to do for us and that leads us to the next difficulty.
WRONG MOTIVES.
READ James 4.2-3. Again these may seem like harsh words but they are so true of our lives. How often our prayer life becomes difficult because we come to God with wrong motives. We come seeking His hands and not His face. We come with a shopping list and then sulk when we do not get what we asked for. Turn with me to John 2.1-11 and Jesus’ first miracle. Jesus was attending a wedding at Cana of Galilee. The wedding party has run out of wine, which would not only be an embarrassment but a social scandal at that time. Mary, His mother, comes to Him makes a request of Him – a prayer to Him. I want you to note the following about her request (prayer):
(a) she came to Jesus – v.3.
(b) she told Him what they lacked –v.4. She did not tell Him what to do or when to do it. She simply told Him what they lacked.
(c) She left it with Jesus and told the servants to do whatever He said – v.5
You might think there is nothing out of the ordinary in that sequence. But allow me to compare that passage with how we generally pray.
We come to Jesus – great start. We not only tell Him what we lack, but how we would like it to be answered and when we would like it to be answered. I know we should be specific in prayer but that is different than telling God what to do and when to do it. We can, and often do, use prayer as a means of giving instructions to God. We use it as a means of commanding God to do our bidding and the result is it becomes a burden to us because we have failed to trust God for the answer. We think we must tell God how to answer our prayers and the result is we spend hours trying to work out the answer to the prayer request and then we proceed to tell God how to answer the prayer and all the time we say ‘we are depending on God to answer.’ While all the time we are in fact being ‘hypocrites’ because we do not trust Him to answer in any other way than the once we have commanded of Him in our prayers. The result is that when God answers according to His perfect will, and not our sinful commands, we either fail to see the answer, have stopped looking for the answer and generally begin to give up on prayer. The difficulty has arisen not because God does not answer but because He did not do our bidding. It was a wrong motive in prayer and it leads to difficulties in prayer.
So when you come to pray come with the right attitude or motive. Come, seeking God’s face, and not His hands. Come not with the answer already worked out but with trust to a Father who wants only what is for our good. When we come with the wrong motive/attitude fear is the driving force. Fear and anxiety will rob us of our faith in prayer and will create the difficulties that will lead us to give up on prayer.
PRACTICE AND PERSEVERANCE.
Turn with me to Luke 18.1-8 READ. This is a well known parable about the widow who was persistent until she got an answer from her neighbour. Jesus used the parable to teach the disciples about persistence in prayer. One of the reasons we have difficulties in our prayer life is because we are not discipline people. We give up very easily. We do not stick at prayer. Coaches and athletes speak of a thing called ‘muscle memory.’ It is where the athlete, in whatever sport, has practiced time and again an action needed – so much so that the muscle remembers instinctively how it is done – so that under pressure the muscle’s memory will repeat the action despite the stress of the moment. Friends we need to develop a prayer memory so that even when the pressure comes, the storm hits and the stress rises we instinctively know how to pray. That will only be if we persistently practice prayer. That will only be if we make prayer so much part of our daily lives that without faltering our memory knows how it is done even in the midst of the storms of life. Jesus said ‘you do not have because you do not ask.’ The widow was rewarded for her persistence – it was an important lesson for the disciples and it is for us also.
Finally let me read you one more verse – Exodus 14.15. You might wonder ‘what on earth has that got to do with prayer?’ Friends, Moses was still praying when he should have been up on his feet and leading the people across the Red Sea. There are times when difficulties in prayer arise because we are still on our knees when God wants us to be up and walking forward through a Red Sea path He has prepared for us. Don’t you get frustrated with your children when they ask the same question repeatedly – even after you have given the answer? Sometimes we are guilty of asking repeatedly when God has already given the answer. The reason we ask repeatedly is because we have fallen into the trap of telling God what the answer should be or we have failed to have eyes open for the answer. We are like the man sitting on the roof of His house as the flood water rises all around and who refuses several means of rescue because ‘I am praying the Lord will rescue me.’ He eventually drowns and standing before God he asks ‘why did you not rescue me? I prayed hard and long.’ God’s reply ‘who do you think sent all the means of rescue?’ Friends, like Moses, there comes a time when God has answered and we need to get up and walk forward. To remain on our knees in prayer when we should be up and walking is a lack of trust, lack of faith and disobedience and the result will be difficulties in our prayer life. So having identified some of the difficulties in prayer I hope we will now have a more Biblical understanding of how we can overcome them.
AMEN.
