How Do I Increase My Desire to Pray?
God doesn’t just call you to prayer; He wants to meet you in prayer.
"How would you evaluate your prayer life today?" "What grade would you give yourself?" "Are you failing, or are you thriving?"
It’s questions like these that make us resistant to prayer. No Christian, at least one I’ve ever met, has a mastery of prayer. But while we give grace to others, we tend to do this mental grading system in our minds. OK, I prayed a little today, so I’ll give myself a B-. I haven’t prayed for three days, so it's a D+.
Prayer is simple at its core. As Philip Yancey writes, “Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God’s point of view.” But it's also wildly unpredictable. It's so unlike anything else we'll ever do. In Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools, Tyler Staton writes:
Prayer can’t be mastered. Prayer always means submission. To pray is to willingly put ourselves in the unguarded, exposed position. There is no climb. There is no control. There is no mastery. There is only humility and hope. To pray is to risk being naive, to risk believing, to risk playing the fool. To pray is to risk trusting someone who might let you down. To pray is to get our hopes up. And we’ve learned to avoid that. So we avoid prayer. [1]
I believe the core reason most Christians avoid prayer isn't discipline–it's disappointment. They asked God for help, and he didn't answer the way they expected. So now they feel stuck. They know they should pray, but they don't want to pray.
So how do we get that want back? Here’s the secret.
