Prayer Begins with God

In the beginning, God spoke the heavens and earth into being.

“Let there be light, ” (Gen. 1:3 ESV) He said, and the light appeared.

“Let there be. . . ,” He said, and you were born.

God speaks and life comes into being.

God speaks and prayer is born.

 God created prayer. It begins with Him. He is speaking to us all the time.

But shouldn’t prayer begin with us? Shouldn’t we be praying all the time?

The truth is I forget to pray and I don’t pray hard or long enough. For years, I felt like a failure in this area of my spiritual life.

How does the Spirit of God speak to us and help us pray? Henry and Richard Blackaby state, “Every day numerous events magnify the awareness that Christians need a timely, specific word from God. Most Christians acknowledge their need for God’s guidance. Many people regularly seek it. The problem is that they are not sure they recognize God’s voice.”

Hearing God can be compared to making a business call that can be extremely complicated. You almost never get a human voice. Instead you get a dizzying selection of menus to choose from, none of which may be the one you need.  You make your best guess and after you’ve pressed all the numbers, you find out you still have more options to choose from. One mistake, and you have to start all over again.

Or you get a voice mail recording telling you to leave a message. What’s worse is when you finally reach a real human voice only to find out you have the wrong person. You get transferred or you have to start over and work your way through more menu options.

When we pray we may feel the same kinds of frustrations. How do we reach God and does He really hear us?

A friend of mine said, “My struggles with prayer are very much like the struggles I first had with leaving a message with voice mail. It’s easy to talk to someone you can see and hear — someone who responds to you at that very moment. But to talk and continue talking with no feedback or immediate response is hard for me.”

The difficultly with prayer is that God does not communicate with us in the same way we do with people. We can’t have face-to-face, back-and-forth conversations with the Lord as we do our loved ones and friends since He is not visibly present.

We cannot do things with God as we do loved ones, such as play sports, eat a meal together, or do other activities. We cannot see God’s face or hold his hand or hug Him. Prayer is not even like talking on the phone because we can’t hear His voice audibly.

Moreover, you may be “understandably wary of any talk about hearing a direct word from God because of the rampant, exaggerated abuses of this claim, both now and throughout history. People can recoil from talk of God speaking to people because they think this can refer only to God’s audible voice,” said the Blackabys. (Hearing God’s Voice, 6,)

 How do you discern when God is speaking to you?  You need to know God, which “comes through experience as He reveals Himself to you.” (Experiencing God, 57.)  He desires to guide you, have a personal relationship and open communication with you. He is the only One who fully knows you and your needs because He is the only One who is with you twenty-four hours a day seven days a week.

To hear God, we need listen to His Word and open our hearts to what He is saying to us through His Word. If we only listen for what we want to hear or what we want from Him, we will be deaf to what He is saying to us. He makes His presence known to us as we open our heart to Him and listen. Knowing God is a growing experience; it’s a process that comes over time as He reveals Himself and His plans to us and as we share ourselves with Him in return. The Lord gladly guides us and gives us the wisdom to live and be the godly person He desires us to be. But how? That is the question we need to answer.

 

 

Introduction: Struggles with Prayer

Soon after my husband Ron suddenly lost his eyesight we went to the Braille Institute, which offers many helpful services for blind people. I was trying to lead him by the hand into the building.

The changing shadows and the rough and smooth textured sidewalks frightened him, certain I was leading him into an obstacle he would trip over.

I kept saying, “Trust me. Just trust me.”

But he was terrified as we walked from the sunlight into the shadows, and from darkness back into the light again. I kept reassuring him, “The sidewalk is clear.”

He still didn’t believe me, and I couldn’t understand why he didn’t trust me to safely guide him.

As we inched our way into one of the rooms, both of us feeling forlorn and frightened, Pablo, one of the employees introduced himself and said, “Let me show you how to guide him.”

Pablo told us about his grandmother who was blind as he showed me that Ron needed to hold onto my arm instead of trying to pull him along by the hand as I was doing.

When it comes to prayer, do you ever have problems trusting God to safely guide you? Do you feel as if you are stumbling into obstacles? Do you struggle knowing how to pray or you think your faith is weak? Are you afraid to trust God to guide you through the dark places?

I’ve been a Christian for fifty-two years, but I sometimes feel blind and lost. I still struggle with doubt and trusting the Lord. I don’t see how He will guide us when so many obstacles block the pathway ahead of us.

I also struggle with prayerlessness. During my devotions, I pray as I read. But I don’t pray using a list of requests. Some days, I am in an attitude of prayer and constantly seek the Lord’s guidance and intercede for others as I am working. I pray as the Lord brings people to mind, which He often does. Other days hours slip by without praying. I don’t pray as much as I should for our church or missions or the needs of the world at large.

I also struggle with feelings of spiritual failure when I read books about the kind of prayer-life I should have. Some books on prayer claim spectacular answers, numbers of people saved, great financial and personal successes, phenomenal church growth. The bigger the answers the better our prayer-life others seem to say, which only makes me question if my faith is weak.

When I read the lists of sins that prevent God from answering prayer I feel even more defeated. I am left with the impression that none of my prayers will be answered unless I am a sin-free saint. Until I conquer all the sins in my life, the Lord can’t or won’t respond to my requests.

I struggle with questions about prayer. What about Christians who have seen many ordinary answers to prayer but have been waiting for years to see their most important requests fulfilled? Waiting can break your heart. And what about prayers that were answered with a resounding, “No”? We question, what’s wrong with us and our faith that we don’t see the same kinds of spectacular “yes” answers as claimed in books or testimonies?

Many Christians struggle with prayer because they are told they should make specific requests or their prayers won’t be answered. But they honestly don’t know what to ask of the Lord.

We struggle with hindrances to prayer. Our fast-paced life is one. Our society places a high value on work productivity and instantaneous results. We must get the job done and it must be done now. Our jobs become all consuming, so we don’t feel we have time to pray.

We highly value personal rights and pleasures that consume our lives and keep us from prayer. Television also leaves us with the false impression that solutions are found and problems solved in thirty to sixty minutes. But the answers we desperately need may not come easily or quickly.

Moreover, prayer may seem like a waste of time considering medicine, science, technology, and even the internet that we can rely on for answers to solve problems. Why pray when we have so many resources to help us?

Others question that prayer works because they feel God has abandoned them as Job did when he prayed, “I cry out to you, O God, but you do not answer; I stand up, but you merely look at me” (Job 30:20). Still others are convinced that the Lord cannot forgive their sins or they’re not worthy enough for Him to answer.

We may feel as if God is deaf to our pleas, has hidden his face from us, or even rejected us (Ps. 39:12, 88:14). When heartaches become worse, we become disappointed in God and can’t understand where He is or why He doesn’t intervene. We also feel guilty because we’re so quick to pray in an emergency and so slow to pray when all is well.

We feel ashamed that we haven’t been praying as we should or hard enough or with enough faith. We may think that if we were a better Christian and had a powerful prayer-life this tragedy wouldn’t have happened to us.

So the cycle of guilt and failure about prayer continues. That’s certainly been true of me. But I am convinced that I am not alone in my struggles. One of the best-kept secrets among Christians is our sense of failure about prayer.

I can hear a vast array of Christians breathing a collective sigh relief that someone has said what we could never say aloud. We feel as if we’re the only ones who are poor pray-ers. If we ever admitted our feelings of inadequacy about prayer, we fear more pious Christians’d criticize us, or we don’t want others to think that we’re not as good or spiritual as we appear to be. We’d like to have a better prayer-life, but the fact is we don’t. That’s reality!

If you can relate to the struggles I have in praying, then you may find hope here. I’ve discovered that prayer is so much more than talking to God, asking and trusting Him to meet my needs. I have been greatly encouraged as I have discovered God’s role in prayer, the Spirit’s help in prayer, and how Jesus prays for us.

I have come to realize that I cannot maintain a prayer-life on my own. God initiates and sustains prayer. It’s is a “full circle of communication.” (Walter Wangerin, 41). Prayer is an ongoing dialogue between God and His beloved friends.

Once we realize that God initiates communication with us, we won’t be so discouraged by feelings of inadequacy about our prayer-life. We will be built up in our faith as we rely on His Spirit to pray with and for us.