A Few Thoughts on Prayer

Lately I find myself under great conviction about the subject of prayer.  My good buddy Adrian Warnock has been blogging on prayer this month, a subject that deserves more blog space than it probably gets. 

I have also recently had the good providence of learning more about the great works of God in China over the last 50 years (from 1 million to over 50 million believers since 1949) and how the church has been built on prayer.

So, as I say I have been convicted and am grateful for the recent blogging on this.

One of the most helpful things I have seen in the blogosphere on the subject of prayer is Scott McKnight's post on Short Prayers.

Scott's post reminds me of the words of my old seminary prof, Richard Pratt, who used to tell us that every family should have family devotions but that they should be very short.  His main point then was that small children need to be introduced to the things of God at a young age.  But he was also saying that devotions aren't rendered more effectual by being long.

This is what Scott is getting at, based on Matthew 6:7:

And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.

The Holy Bible  : New International Version. 1996, c1984 . Zondervan: Grand Rapids

Scott says this:

Gentiles, so Jesus stereotypes, think they’ll be heard because of the length of their prayers. Not so with the followers of Jesus. The implication being: Jesus gives a prayer that counters long-windedness with brevity and to-the-point prayer. Why? the Father knows what you need, so tell him.

I think he is right.  The bible neither comands nor exemplifies long prayers.  This is not to say that there is anything wrong per se with long prayers.  Matthew 6:5ff deals with our understanding of the nature of prayer and motivation for it.  We are not to pray with a desire to be seen or known for our prayer lives, and we are not to pray under the assumption that the efficacy of prayer is in any way correlated with the length of prayer.

The question of course comes up as to how this fits in with Paul's command to pray without ceasing (I Thess 5:17).  Again, I'll go back to some of Richard Pratt's words on I Thess 5:17.  The word pray here is in the present tense which can denote continuous action.  If "pray" is a present continuous action here then we must always be in prayer, a very difficult thing to do.  And the idea of simply being in an "attitude of prayer" doesn't seem to capture what is in view here.  Pratt reminded us that the present tense can also have an iterative sense, meaning that is repetitive, not continuous. 

Hence, this "prayer without ceasing" can be short, finite bursts of prayer repeated regularly.  This would help  harmonize Matt 6:7 and I Thess. 5:17.

It would also embed prayer in our daily lives.  To pray continually in this way means that we would be praying in the midst of our regular activities, taking the affairs of life to God on a regular basis. 

Some of the best advice I ever received on prayer came at a Prayer Life seminar where the instructor said that the basis of prayer is worry.  This is what I Peter 5:7 and Philippians 4:6 are all about. 

In view of all this I suggest that it may not be the most helpful thing to roll out George Mueller and Rees Howells and the like as examples of prayer that everyone should emulate.  This is not to disparage them in any way.  It's just that when people talk about Mueller and Howells and other great prayer warriors it is often suggested that the reasons they saw such remarkable answers to prayer was because of the length of their prayers.  In other words, we usually say things like "George Mueller prayed for hours every day, and God answered his prayers remarkably."  In other words, God answered his prayers because of their length. 

But the problem is that Jesus specifically chastizes such reasoning.  There is no doubt that God answered their prayers in remarkable ways, but if we take Jesus seriously we need to find other reasons for this than length.

So, thanks to Scott and Adrian and any other bloggers who are writing about prayer, and I hope some of this was helpful.

Next thought to consider, is there any correlation between blogging length and blogging efficacy? I've definitely got the length thing down.

Related Tags: Christian, Christianity, Prayer, Scott McKnight, Adrian Warnock

Comments

[William Meisheid]

I also think there are times to write prayers down. I wrote a prayer for my daughter, laminated it and gave it to her. She carries it in her wallet, so in a sense my prayer is always with her.

I did a post on the process with the prayer as an example in Personal Prayers Written Down.

[DLE]

Hmm.

I find it curious that my Christian library is stocked full of books by the likes of E.M. Bounds, A.W. Tozer, Ole Hallesby, Leonard Ravenhill, R.A. Torrey, and on and on. Those men are all dead and yet their books and ministries live on. And one of the things that characterizes those men is that they prayed long prayers and spent hours a day in prayer.

When I look over my same collection of Christian books, I see not a single one by a man or woman who was NOT known for praying many hours a day. There are no authors I own who only dashed off prayers or threw a few up here and there as need be.

Now I'm not trying to pit the Lord against any of those men, but I wonder if we aren't missing a greater point to Jesus' words about pagans babbling in prayer. The ESV translates the key portion there as "empty phrases." I'm sure that everyone reading this has heard people heap up empty phrases as they pray. And we can all agree that flowery language will get us nowhere. The fact that Jesus goes into the very non-flowery "Lord's Prayer" after this tells us that it's not about trying to impress God with our high-sounding language. It's the heart of a prayer that matters--and the heart of that prayer has nothing to do with short or long. If it's short, great. If it's not, then that's great, too.

Another thing that works against the idea of short prayers is the fact that Jesus Himself repeatedly retreated to mountains to pray. No one goes off to a place like a mountain to spend fifteen minutes in prayer. In fact, Luke 6:12 says this: "In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God."

That verse alone seems to blow the short prayer idea out of the water.

Leonard Ravenhill once said this and I agree: "No man is greater than his prayer life."

Prayer isn't just petitioning God for things; it's for drawing near to Him. And I can't believe that God would not want us to draw near to Him as often and for as long as is possible.

[Steve S]

David, I enjoyed reading your thoughts here. Your thoughts on "pray without ceasing" was pretty much the conclusion I had come to myself. That is where I try to live my life -- especially when blogging or responding to other blogs! ;)

steve :)

[Rodney Olsen]

Erwin McManus has a great message on prayer available on podcast here www.mosaic.org/podcast

He has a very interesting look at prayer and his thoughts may surprise you.

[David Wayne]

William - thanks for this. I actually have been very blessed on the few occasions that I have written prayers - I think I am going to follow your advice here and re-up on that.

Dan - I agree with you and I hope my language was soft enough to not sound like I was chastizing the lengthy pray-ers. And I also think you are right on the money in bringing out something I didn't - the fact that Jesus is chastizing empty phrases in prayer. I'm just looking for a balance here and caution against the idea that longer prayers are more effectual simply because they are longer.

Steve S - glad we are on the same track here and Rodney, thanks for the link

[Dan B.]

Thanks for the post on prayer. I've been struggling with the short vs. long prayer (perhaps even as a barometer on my walk with Christ), and I've come to the conclusion to err on the side of having shorter prayers (and do them throughout the day), unless I have a specific list on paper or in mind.

I totally agree on the idea of "empty phrases" because it seems if I'm not concentrating on what I'm doing, I get distracted and this is what I end up doing. My grandmother is close to 80 years old, and she spends a lot of time in the morning praying, but this is because she has a physical list of people (3 college ruled sheets of paper, front and back) that she prays for every day.

Lengthy prayers for the sake of having lengthy prayers simply do not honor God, so whether the prayers are long or short, honoring God with our words should be our goal.

[Mark Daniels]

David:
Increasingly, I find my prayer life consiststs of a single word, uterred repeatedly in many different circumstances: "Help!"

I actually feel good about the more limited vocabulary that's taken hold of my praying in recent years. If prayer without ceasing is constant communion with God then, as situations present themselves, simply presenting them to God seems absolutely appropriate. Too often in my life, I've had ideas about how God should answer my prayers. This is presumptuous for the person taught to pray, "Your will be done."

Besides, as the years roll by, I learn that my perceptions of issues, problems, or challenges are often wrong. God knows best what help is needed, as well as where and when and how and why it's to be applied.

Prayer to me, is in part anyway, inviting God into the lives and situations for which we pray. (I love Yonggi Cho's statement that the Holy Spirit is a gentleman and will not go where uninvited.) In offering up my little bursts of prayer throughout my day, I'm trying to invite Him everywhere. Most of the time, that doesn't require wordiness.

Good stuff here, David.

Blessings in Christ,
Mark Daniels

[Judy Riggs]

Spending lengthy amounts of time in private prayer is fine. But praying for someone in a public place like a hospital room or in someone's home, who you may not even be personally familiar with is tiresome to the one being prayed for and seems pretentious. I think that if we are trying to reach out to someone, our long prayer for them should be in private and a short prayer with them, fully focusing on their problem and their need and then ending and a heartfelt conversation afterwards. My daughter is in the hospital and does need prayer, but two ladies came in from a pentecostal church and prayed with the girl in the other bed and went on and on and on and on. Finally my daughter decided that she didn't need prayer after all. Then they began to pray for the "sitter" in the room and that prayer was also lengthy with one of them with a sort of prophetic word for the nurse. I was there and began to feel that they were making a show of praying more than they were actually in prayer. I did not get a real sense of sincerity, though I could be wrong on that; after all they did come to the hospital to pray for the person in the other bed.