Learning to Pray
Obstacles to a Life of Prayer
January 23, 2005
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
Video clip of Ben Stiller saying grace in "Meet the Parents."
Do you ever feel like that clip pretty much sums up your prayer life? Now think about the difference between that prayer --an adult attempt to look spiritual in prayer -- hilariously failed though it was --and this simple prayer from a child:
"Dear God, please take care of my daddy,
mommy, sister, brother, my doggy and me. Oh, please take care of yourself, God. If anything happens to you, we’re gonna be in a big mess."
My goal in this sermon series on prayer is to keep it simple. I don’t want to be Ben Stiller’s blustering buffoon in Meet the Parents. I’d rather be like this child -- few words expressing amazing truth in a simple way.
I want to talk to you this morning about obstacles to a life of prayer -- the stuff that gets in the way of our pursuing prayer as a lifestyle. I know the names of the heavyweights who have written on prayer -- Thomas Merton, E.M. Bounds, J.I. Packer, Emilie Griffin, Henri Nouwen. Anthony Bloom. I could go to those amazing books and mine for you the deepest truths about prayer - the most splendid, incredible insights on connecting with God -- and every week you could walk out of here knowing more about prayer than you knew the week before but not really find yourself praying more. God help us avoid the sin of hearing but not doing. Help me avoid the sin of preaching but not practicing, of imparting to others what I am not instilling in myself.
So as to help us avoid those sins, I am going to issue a simple challenge to you right here at the beginning. Will you commit to pray at least five minutes a day for the next seven days? Morning, noon, or night, I don’t care. Will you commit to setting aside time in your schedule, clearing away all distractions, and making that time a priority? Will you realize that your intentions will not be good enough --we can earnestly intend to pray all our lives and never really do it. Will you understand that it is only the activity of prayer that counts, not wishing or wanting to pray, but only doing it.
This challenge is for everyone here today. New Christian, established follower of Christ, skeptic, seeker, whoever. God says in the Bible:
Jeremiah 29:13 (NIV)
13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
Non-Christians here today, are you seeking God? You will find God when you seek Him with all your heart. Christians today, are you seeking MORE of God? You will find God when you seek Him with all your heart.
So will you partner with me today? Partner with me in setting aside time to seek God in prayer -- to look for Him, to learn how to communicate with Him, to become not just someone who knows more about praying, but someone who prays more.
The first thing we must all learn about prayer is that the constant temptation in prayer is to talk about it, read about it, learn about it, study it, perhaps write about it, and somehow never actually do it. This is true because the #1 obstacle to prayer is learning about prayer. I suppose in my case the #1 obstacle to prayer would be teaching about prayer. Your attendance at church during this series on prayer will be of little value if you are not actually praying during the week, learning to implement what you are hearing into your practice of prayer. So a commitment to actually pray is the first order of business.
Spiritual writer Henri Nouwen wrote in The Genesee Diary: "Writing about prayer is often very painful since it makes you aware of how far away you are from the ideal you write about. People who read your ideas tend to think that your writings reflect your life. . . This week all I am reading and writing about is prayer. I am so busy with it and often so excited about it that I have no time left to pray, and when I pray I feel more drawn to my ideas on prayer than to praying. While it is true that in order to pray you have to empty your heart and mind for God, you also have to empty your heart and mind of your feelings and ideas on prayer. Otherwise, prayer gets in the way of praying."
I believe the second obstacle to prayer is lack of willingness to be a student of prayer. We are sometimes willing to LEARN something, assuming that means that we hear a fact, store it away in our minds, and then claim that we know it. But there is a difference between learning something and knowing it -- a great chasm between storing away knowledge of something and being a STUDENT of it.
When you have learned something, you are finished with it. You can tuck it away into that category of things you now KNOW. When you are a student of something, you are engaged in a process of learning it continually, allowing it to embrace you, to shape you, to define you. Learners seek to master their subject matter, students seek to be molded by it. This sounds kind of esoteric, kind of philosophical and out of reach, but let me bring it home to you. I think many marriages are in trouble today because spouses are not students of one another. I must be a student of Christy. I must devote myself to the never-ending search for what makes her, her. I must learn more every day to appreciate the intricacies of her personality. I must find out what makes her tick. I must realize I am on a quest. As soon as I cease being her student and think I have LEARNED her,-- or that she cannot ever be learned,-- I take her for granted and miss much of what is special about her. More marriages would be healthy today if spouses saw themselves as students of one another. But most of us don’t, do we?
Why is that? Because many of us have a perception of ourselves that we are not "student material." We don’t see ourselves as students, as studiers, as those who are continually learning new things. Some of you have occasionally said to me, "I’m not really a student kind of person. But you’re wrong. Every single one of you is a student of something.
Think of your favorite hobby. I can almost guarantee you that you are a student of that hobby, at least to some extent. You find that you are always learning more about it, always seeking to get better at it or learn how to enjoy it more, or at least how to save money at it! For many of you, you have continued to learn more and more just through years of constant exposure. That’s what it means to be a student of something -- to expose ourselves to it again and again until it begins to shape us.
Anyone here know virtually nothing about music? Raise your hand. Let’s say that today you began piano lessons. At first it would be this difficult, deliberate attempt for you to master certain basic skills. You don’t consider yourself a musician and for you to learn piano, at first you would kind of feel like you are stepping into my world, or Dan’s world, or the world of some other musician you know. But at a certain point you’d realize that you consider yourself a musician and are at home in that world. At first you strive constantly to capture music, but at some point you find yourself captured by it. It has begun to form you, so that even as you continue to learn more, it continues shaping who you are, from the inside out. You’re not all musicians but almost all of you can relate to what I’m saying if you simply think about what it is that you love -- the hobby or activity that has captured your heart. Chances are you are a student of that thing --fishing, hunting, Xbox, sewing, golf, music, athletics.
We do not move forward in prayer when we are not willing to be a student of prayer. This resistance is a normal human tendency that shows up in many areas of our lives. There are some of you in this room today who say you want to make a bigger impact on the lives of your friends and family, but you will not prioritize your schedules in order to learn how to do it -- will not make yourself a student of it. There are some who say they want to learn how to manage their household, their money, their economic lives better to live free of the burdens of debt and bad credit -- but you have not been willing so far to make yourself a student of it -- to learn not the new technique, but the new lifestyle that will deliver you. We can learn techniques, but we must be students of lifestyles. You could say, "Dave, show me the one technique that would make me a guitar player." And I’d tell you that being a guitar player is a lifestyle of continual learning of many techniques that never ends, each building on the one before. The more you learn, the more you realize there is to learn.
So let me ask you: are you willing to think of prayer in that way? Are you willing to become a student of prayer? In our website survey a few months ago, 80% of respondents to the survey said they wanted to hear a series on prayer more than any other topic. That’s great, but what if I tell you that all you¡¦re going to learn in this series is how important it is that the series just be the beginning -- that you dedicate yourself to a lifetime of learning the lifestyle of prayer, that you become a student of prayer. That is what I want to urge us toward today -- a lifestyle of the learning of prayer that we can embrace together.
Another obstacle to learning to pray is our expectations of prayer. Friday as I was finishing up this message I got a call and was told that the mother of one of my former youth group students was diagnosed with terminal cancer that morning and has six months to live, and would I consider going up to the hospital. She’s 51 years old.
Instantly I got the feeling I always get when I am asked to intervene in one of these situations -- a feeling of complete uselessness -- the embarrassing sense that I have nothing to offer in the face of such tragedy. I have to be honest and admit to you that normally in these circumstances I might say a prayer on my way to the hospital that God would give me the words to say, but since I was right in the middle of writing a sermon on prayer, I decided to kneel at my altar in the office and devote some real attention to prayer before leaving. And as I prayed I realized that I was nervous because my expectations were wrong. I had always hoped God would show up through my words in the hospital so that I didn’t have to feel useless. I was terrified of being useless. But as I prayed I sensed God saying to me, "My friend, the only time you’re of any use to me is when you realize how useless you are. The more you can let go of yourself the more you can cling to me. And the more you cling to me, the more it will be ME you are bringing to those hurting people, and not YOU. And honestly, are YOU really what they need?"
And I understood the answer. Of course not. Of course I’m not what they need. But so many times I have prayed that prayer to God -- God, please help me not to be ineffective. Each time I pray it I think I’m praying it because God won’t be able to get through if I’m ineffective. But what if God WANTS me to be ineffective? What if it’s God’s desire that I not know what to say? What if that’s God’s way of pushing me toward silence, toward holding the hand of a dying person and offering nothing but presence?
We pray with wrong expectations anytime we think that the actual words of our prayers will somehow overrule the whole orientation of our lives toward or away from God. In other words, prayer forms us gradually, and helps us become containers who are capable of carrying the presence of God in us. Prayer is not a magical force that instantly transforms people or situations by the words of the prayer --’it is not an incantation. So when I pray and ask God to help me know the right things to say in a hospital, the far more important issue is not whether I am praying at that exact moment, but whether I am "prayed up" -- the extent to which prayer has already oriented me toward the power of God, and made me sensitive to spiritual things. Oftentimes we want to live however we want to live, then expect prayer to work like some kind of magic potion to change the consequences of our ungodly actions and decisions. Prayer does not work that way. Prayer orients us toward God. The more we pray, the more we are oriented toward God and God’s point of view.
The Apostle Paul writes of a time when he begged God to take away this thing in his life that was afflicting him and driving him nuts -- the Bible never says what it is. Paul says he prayed three times, "God, please get rid of this flaw in my life." We pick up in the text in 2 Corinthians:
2 Corinthians 12:9-10 (MSG)
9 and then he told me, My grace is enough; it’s all you need. My strength comes into its own in your weakness. Once I heard that, I was glad to let it happen. I quit focusing on the handicap and began appreciating the gift. It was a case of Christ’s strength moving in on my weakness.
10 Now I take limitations in stride, and with good cheer, these limitations that cut me down to size¡ abuse, accidents, opposition, bad breaks. I just let Christ take over! And so the weaker I get, the stronger I become.
That’s a powerful passage because it’s the story of how Paul came to abandon his own point of view concerning his weakness, and embrace God’s point of view.
If this passage is true, folks, and I believe it is, (that the weaker we are the stronger we become) then the final liability we have in learning to pray (or the final one I’ll talk about this morning) is our need to feel competent at it -- our need to feel like we’re good pray-ers. This feeling of insufficiency I believe is nearly essential in approaching God in prayer.
Have you ever felt insufficient in prayer? The answer is yes if you’ve ever found yourself saying any of the following things:
- I don’t know how to pray.
- I don’t know what to pray for.
- I am too afraid to pray out loud.
- It’s not like MY prayers ever get answered.
- Why would God listen to me?
I want to encourage you to consider this morning that that very feeling of insufficiency is the starting point of true prayer -- it begins with a sense of smallness before God, a sense of our own non-importance, the sense that if God doesn’t show up we’ve wasted our time.
Luke 18:10-14 (NIV)
10 "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.
11 The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ’God, I thank you that I am not like other men--robbers, evildoers, adulterers--or even like this tax collector.
12 I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
13 "But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ’God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
14 "I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."
We will almost certainly turn again to this passage later in the series, but for now it’s sufficient to note that the prayer of the Pharisee was all about his own goodness -- the prayer of the tax collector was all about God’s goodness.
Today we have looked at four obstacles to a lifestyle of prayer.
1. First is learning about prayer but not actually praying.
2. Second is unwillingness to become a student of prayer -- wanting just to be prayer-dabblers.
3. Third is our wrong expectations of prayer.
4. And fourth is a need we have to feel like we are good at prayer. Chances are we will never feel good at it!
So all this brings us back to the first point. Because we are unwilling to be students of prayer, because we have wrong expectations of prayer, because we fear we will never be good at it, we are often content to simply learn ABOUT it and not do it -- we become perpetual prayer-dabblers.
So I invite you to pray with me this week. Yes, we’ll pray right here in a moment, but I invite you to pray this week. Don’t give in to the temptation to just hear a sermon about it and think you’re growing. You won’t grow in prayer unless you pray, so pray with me this week -- make it a priority, and let’s come back here next week prepared to build on the proper foundation -- one of doing, not just hearing.
