How Sick Am I?

What is the cause of prayerlessness? To answer that question we must, first, be able to answer the question, ‘What is the ultimate cause of all sin?’ All sin is unbelief. It is the age-old cause of all sin as seen first in the Fall of man. When I don’t believe the promises of God, refuse to take Him at His Word but, instead, buy some lie of Satan wherein he offers something that would better suit my fancy, the result is sin against God.

This is where we get down to a proper understanding of exactly what we have been called to as Christians when we embraced the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Called to repent of our sin and to believe on Christ, we responded by turning from our sin and establishing in our hearts that desire to follow Him no matter what the cost. That cost would automatically call for a life of self-denial. Jesus told us that we are to ‘deny ourselves, pick up our crosses and follow Him.’

How are we to do that? What are we to deny? As I said, Jesus said we are to ‘deny ourselves.’ We are to deny the flesh that still wars inside every believer. Paul, in Romans 8, talks about this war between the flesh and the Spirit which is waging inside every true child of God. Where does the flesh most love to be? The flesh loves to be right in the center of the world. Now, that presents a problem for the Christian. In 1 John we are told not to love the world or the things in the world because the world is passing away and all its lusts. All that is in the world is temporal; we now are to live for what is eternal. We know that we are to be people who are ‘in’ the world but not of the ‘world’. As children of God we are most comfortable in His kingdom, not the world.
What does this have to do with prayer? Prayer is laying hold of heaven. All that is in the world and of the world is what we can see with our physical eyes. The Christian walks by faith, not by sight. The righteous man lives by faith. Faith can only be exercised with the EYES of faith; it is being able to see things that are eternal and believe that they are what Christ says they are in His Word.

The Christian, in his daily battle with the flesh, the world and with Satan must put his faith in the promises of God and treasure those promises more than the sin that he so loves in his flesh. Faith is only lived out as it holds onto God’s promises.

I asked the reader to ask himself a question at the beginning of this study: ‘Do you believe that you live more in the flesh or in the Spirit?’ Here is one way to find an honest answer to that question: A life lived according to the flesh and not according to the Spirit is the origin of the prayerlessness of which we so often complain. Uh, oh, there’s a speed bump in the road!

The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick. We’re racing along through life, and we think that we’re okay because that’s what many in this world of ‘post-modern Christianity’ are telling us. We’re busy with this and busy with that, and can’t stop all this busyness for any number of reasons. All of a sudden we hit one of these stumbling blocks and we can either get angry that it is there and find some way to walk around it, or we can go over it very carefully gaining insight as to why it is there. It is there intentionally to slow you down, to show you something. Once we have seen it, we can deal with it. The person who walks around it has not clearly seen the truth of Jeremiah 17:9.

Hopefully, we have all admitted that we don’t pray as we should. Right away we must realize humbly that we don’t live according to the Spirit as much as we think we do. We ARE more fleshly than ever we would have classified ourselves.

When a person is sick and wants to be healed, it becomes a primary matter of importance to him that the true cause of the sickness be discovered. This is always the first step to recovery. We can’t just mask the disease by dealing with the symptoms instead of the cause, or healing will be out of the question. That is why it is vitally important to secure a correct insight into the cause of the sad condition of deadness and failure to pray. Prayer in the inner chamber of our hearts should be the most blessed place for us that we cannot wait to get there and long to stay there. This is why we need to fully understand what is at the root of this sin.

Oh, the depth of our sin! How can we come to understand it? God must show us our human depravity, the sin-stained blackness of our hearts before Him. Only the Light of God can expose what is in the heart of man.