Pastor: Please Teach me to Pray!

Why is prayerlessness such a great sin? That is the question we want to consider today.

The Almighty Creator God of this universe has invited us to come to Him, to have communion and fellowship with Him, the ultimate blessing a human being could experience. What an incredible privilege is this opportunity of prayer.

Our response? We give Him five minutes a day. Some days we can’t even be bothered to do that. We’re much too busy, we think. If truth be known, most Christians wouldn’t know how to spend half an hour with God in prayer.

Even those who go to Him out of a sense of duty or rigid discipline do so without joy in their hearts. They don’t go to Him as though He is everything to them. Why? Because we believe the world revolves around us. It shows up in every facet of how we “do religion” today. We start with a man-centered Gospel telling us that we need to love ourselves more and have a better self-esteem. We are told that we need to learn to forgive ourselves. We want to focus on us and have the focus on us; we have little time for things that focus on another, let alone God. So even if we do ‘pray,’ it is to take our many petitions to God for every little hang nail we have. We’ve just adopted the world’s religion and slapped the title of Christianity on it and wonder why we have no joy in doing all the things the Bible says we should delight in.

Why are we so busy anyways? First of all, Satan loves to keep us busy so that we do not have time to stop and focus on God and on the true meaning of life. It’s ultimately why we hate silence and have to have the squawk box on 24/7 when we are home alone. We love to keep busy, too, because that somehow means we’re important. We love to tell people, “I have to do this and this and this today. I don’t know how I’ll get it all done. This person needs me and that person needs me, and I have a hard time telling anyone, ‘No’! My, aren’t I such an important person?”

But what happens when, in the midst of all our business, a friend drops by to visit? Do we push them out the door and say, “I’m sorry, really I am, but I’m much too busy for you today”? They say, “Well, I just really wanted to spend some time with you.” Do we reply, “Sorry, don’t you know how important I am?” No! We wouldn’t dream of doing that because this person needs us, and, after all, we so need to be needed because then we’re important. It feeds our egos to be needed! Funny how we can find time for a creature who can be of service to us, but we can go day after day without spending even one hour with God.

We must ask ourselves why we have time for the things that really interest us, but admittedly often have no time to practice fellowship with God and delight ourselves in Him. This is such a dishonor to the one we call our God. As a pastor I know once said, “There should be a blood bath taking place in our souls right about now.” With deep shame we should be crying out: “Woe is me! For I am undone! O God, be merciful to me and forgive me this awful sin of prayerlessness; this hideous sin against You.”

The second reason prayerlessness is such a great sin is because it is proof, for the most part, that our lives are still under the power of the flesh. Prayerlessness shows us the true state of our heart. The doctor can listen to a person’s heart and know whether that person has heart problems. Remember the show, “Lost in Space?” Remember when the robot would say, “Danger, danger Will Robinson?” Prayerlessness should send off sirens to our hearts that there is danger; something is not right in our spiritual lives. In fact, the life of God in the soul is deadly sick and weak.

Men sit around and devise ways to bring large amounts of people into the church because it does not seem as though the ‘church’ today has much power or influence. They assume they must be doing something wrong. Is that the case? Why is the church so weak? We must ask the deeper question: Where does the power in the life of a believer come from? If we spent time in the Word of God and got to know it as we should, we would know that attached to faithful prayer is the sure promise of the Spirit and the power from on high.

We must ultimately start with the leadership in the church. The pastor(s) in the church cannot lead a congregation higher than he is himself. It is his business to train believers up to a life of prayer. If he is not doing that, we must ask ourselves why that is. What I have found to be true is that those Christians who do spend a great deal of time in the Word of God and in prayer find it very difficult today to find a solid church, especially when they live in a small community. I don’t want to be taught by a man who spends far less time in the Word than I do. Is that being arrogant? I don’t believe it is. Why would I want to submit to someone who obviously takes a very low view of the Scripture and of God, Himself? Is it possible that many pastors today do not understand the art of conversing with God and receiving from the Holy Spirit every day the grace he needs for himself and for his work?

I am convinced that there are multitudes of Christians who know next to nothing of the blessedness of prayer fellowship with God, but there are also many who know something of it and long to be further taught to understand and implement this awesome privilege each child of God has been given.

I, for one, have had this great struggle throughout my walk with God regarding prayer. For years after my daughter died I wrestled on and off again with the assurance of my salvation (a whole other subject for another day!), but each time I would stop and examine myself to be sure I was truly in the faith the Spirit would always bring me back to this great sin. I had times when I spent great amounts of time in prayer, but usually when things were going wrong in my life.
I, too, just thought this was a severe weakness, not a real sin, so I would shrug it off and think there must be something else wrong. (Yeah, my heart is desperately wicked above all else…). After about five years of this, I seriously started seeking His face to teach me to pray. (Okay, I admit that I am one of those who has to be hit over and over again on the head with a brick!!!) But I GOT IT!!! Better late than never.

I’m so far from where I should be at this time in my life, but I do see a change in my heart and God’s power working through my prayer life like it never has before. I have been devouring great books on prayer over the last couple of years, and it turns out that I had a lot of hang-ups about prayer that I didn’t fully realize. It’s been good. However, I can look back to a time in my life when the last thing that would have interested me is this subject of prayer. It just didn’t seem all that important to me. I hate hearing myself say that, but it is true. This is yet another proof to me that I am growing and that He is putting His desires in my heart and making them mine, too. And I’ve had the best teacher…the one who asks Jesus to teach him how to pray will never be disappointed.

Am I where I want to be? I’m absolutely nowhere near where I want to be. I find I’m still so negligent. Am I praying more, with more sincerity and passion than I ever have? Absolutely.

I have never truly heard an in-depth teaching on the Christian’s prayer life worth anything. Maybe it was because I didn’t have ears to hear at the time, but I don’t believe that it is something the average pastor in the average church is spending a great deal of time teaching. I have sought great teaching out on the internet, in books, etc. and it has opened up a whole new world to me that I didn’t know existed. Maybe people in congregations come from so many different backgrounds that pastors do not want to tramp on the toes of those who think they have a ‘prayer language’. I would hope not because that would be pure compromise and such a tragedy. I’ll deal with the subject of ‘prayer languages’ at some point, but not today. I don’t understand why there is not more teaching out there on this great subject. Every new believer should at least be made aware of what has been made available to him by God in prayer. Maybe there are those who believe it is not something that needs to be taught, that people will somehow grow naturally into a life of prayer by following examples within the church. The disciples had the greatest example of prayer, yet they still asked Him to teach them how to pray.

I have heard numerous pastors complain because the prayer service is severely lacking in attendance. News flash: people don’t know how to pray automatically. People talk a lot about prayer, “They say, ‘I’ll pray for you pastor.” But that doesn’t mean they are praying. In fact, it should scare every pastor out there that there is a possibility their congregation does not know how to pray.

So prayerlessness is such a dreadful sin because it is a slap in the face to our most holy God, it is the cause of a deficient spiritual life, the church suffers because of a lack of prayer, and, then, we will never be able to reach people with the Gospel without prayer.

Prayer clothes us with power from on high. We will never be able to preach the Gospel to men with power until we know this fellowship with God in prayer. It is impossible to walk with God, to obtain His blessing or leading, or to do His work joyously and fruitfully apart from close, unbroken fellowship with Him. He, alone, is the living fountain of spiritual life and power.

If someone came to you and asked you to be very instrumental in the work of some monumental project, how would you feel? Overwhelmed, I would imagine. Especially if you knew that it was not in your power to do so; in other words, you had no capability to do this work without the resources that were needed. What if you knew that the person who had asked you to do it had all the power and resources in himself to do it, but was asking you to be a part of his work? What if he said, “Anything you need, just ask and it will be made available to you.” Wouldn’t you ask for those things you needed? How stupid it would be to just sit there and try to do it yourself, and then wonder why things didn’t turn out the way they were supposed to. What do you think this person would say to you when he came and found that you never asked for any resources?

Think of the magnitude of the Kingdom that God is asking us to partner with Him in building. Oh, that the thought and work of the kingdom might drive us to the acknowledgement of the sin of prayerlessness! I pray that this burden will be laid so heavily upon us that we will not be able to rest until we learn what it means to have fellowship with God.

The next time we will look at the causes of prayerlessness.