DaveJays Blog

The Practice of Praying

JAN 25th 2006 • 1 Comments

More and more recently I've been feeling God's pull on me to draw nearer to Him and spend more time with Him. Daily devotions are the best way I think to actually get to know God better. I have to spend time with Him if I want to know what His direction is for my life. But the discipline of daily devotions is hard! In the matter of praying, I have a prayer list that I try to pray through every day. Just general requests for my friends and for myself and my family. I also try to follow a little acronym that Laura and Aaron gave the youth group a few years ago: A.C.T.S. Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication. I think that one of the things I've been learning is that you can't just put your prayers into a formula too much. I don't want to just pray the same thing every day. The adoration part was always hard to do. How can I adore God and tell Him how much I love Him if my personal relationship with Him is un-developed? The only way that I found I can truly grow close to Christ is if I learn to pray with the right motivations. What am I seeking? Am I seeking to glorify God or myself? Am I praying for selfish reasons or for God glorifying reasons? In what I ask for in my prayers, is it going to serve to draw me nearer to Christ or to the things of this world? James 4:3 says, 'You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions." I can't remember where I heard this recently, but someone said that when you pray for the wrong reasons, it's like a wife asking her husband if she can go be with another man so she can commit adultery with him! God is a jealous God and isn't going to grant a prayer that only serves to grow my dependance on the world. He wants me to pray that I would grow closer to Him! That my dependance would be more on Him than on material things. So my prayer life is dead unless I seek to glorify Him with what I pray for.

So, in addition to praying the right way, I've also found that my heart has to be in the right place. Where does my heart truly lie? Is it on advancing my career? On earning lots of money so I can buy shiny new Apple products? Is it on the desire to have a relationship with a girl? Or more specifically speaking, on a day to day basis, what is the highlight of each of my days? I've found that just being able to sit down and watch TV, or work on my computer was a high point for me. I saw it as a reward for a hard days work. I finished my homework, I did my devotions, I prayed, I did all that so now I can finally take a break and waste the rest of my day. What's pathetic is that sometimes, I didn't finish my homework, I didn't have devotions, and I didn't pray. I just skipped to the end and wasted the rest of my day. And there, I found a little bit of satisfaction. I tried to feed my spiritual hunger, and my work on school and all that. But the best part of the day was when I was just able waste it in front of the TV or my computer. I found that deep inside my heart while praying I'm thinking. "Ok, I pray for this same thing all the time, God knows what my intention is in praying for this. Do I really need to spend that much time on this one request? I think I'll just read it through real quick because God knows what it's all about and it'll make my prayer end sooner so that I can just get through this list. Then I'll have completed my prayer time for the day and I won't have that horrible chore hanging over my head anymore, and I can finally do something else." My devotional time was more like a chore! Something that I just had to do and get it out of the way so that I could do something that I wanted to do instead. God started to show me that my heart did not truly belong to Him, it belonged to some other trivial thing. My prayers are going to be dull and routine tasks because my human heart in its natural condition is always running away from God and towards sin, or simple triviality that serves to keep me from growing closer to God. God has to change my heart, and I need to pray that He would do that for me.

I often wondered why God doesn't speak more plainly to us. Why doesn't He just speak clearly and audibly to me, and tell me what He wants me to do? I think that the reason is because if He did, we wouldn't truly love Him. We would just do as he says, and we wouldn't enjoy having communion with Him or spending time with Him. We were created to be with Him. If he just told us what to do, I think we would simply do what He asked, and then get on with OUR lives, lives that find happiness in triviality and sin. We wouldn't enjoy fellowship with God the way that he meant us to. And then the focus would be on our works and our obedience to God to get us into heaven. And then when we get to heaven, why would Heaven be a great place? A bunch of people singing praises to God and glorifying Him. How exciting is that? Sounds pretty boring, I just want to watch Star Trek and work on an Apple computer for all of eternity. That's where I found my happiness! But that's not the way things are! Praise God! Because God is invisible and doesn't speak directly to us, it requires that we spend time with Him in prayer and devotions and study. It requires that we put our faith in what we can't see, and that is credited to us as righteousness as it says in the first part of Romans 4. Heaven will be heaven because God is there and we can finally see Him in all of His glory and spend all of eternity fully realizing that.

I want to glorify God not just in spending time with Him on personal day to day level, but in the work that He's entrusted to me as well. He's helped me to see that everything I do, even if its something seemingly insignificant or unspiritual, such as school (not the insignificant part, the unspiritual), I can glorify God if I do it as unto Him. I want to treat it like a task that Jesus personally came up to me and gave me to do, instead of something that I put upon myself. Colossians 3:12-17 is an encouragement.

12 And so, as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience; 13 bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone; just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you. 14 And beyond all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity. 15 And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body; and be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. 17 And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father. (NASB)

I truly want to give praise to God for all the people that He has used in helping me to see Him and grow closer to Him. There are so many, they range from people in my church, my family, my friends to people I've never met like John Piper, Eric Simmons, Joshua Harris and Rebecca St. James. The Christian life was not meant to be lived alone, and I've had the wonderful chance to experience this first hand. I shudder to think where I would be right now if I didn't have other Christians to be held accountable to and encouraged and admonished by.

I am no where close to being done growing. I still struggle with laziness, sowing to my sin nature instead of my spirit, and a lack of discipline. But I have confidence in Phillipians 1:6

"For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus."

posted in: God |