Paul Miller in his book A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World said: “Prayer is bringing our helplessness to God.”
In many ways, prayer is helplessness in action.
But that’s the difficulty.
For us to pray, we must admit our helplessness. We must acknowledge that we don’t have it all together, that on our own we are weak, lost, helpless.
For some of us, this is easy to do, but for many of us, this gets to the core of who we are.
We are raised to be self-sufficient. We have been taught from a young age that you can’t trust anyone, count on anyone. Why? We’ve been betrayed, cheated on, hurt, abandoned. So, when we pray and talk about our faith in God, this is in the back of our minds.
It makes sense.
But Jesus tells us to pray to God our Father like a child, to ask like a child.
If you think about a child, a few things come to mind: they are relentless in their asking. They are focused on the present, not the past or the future. They have confidence that the person they are asking can come through for them.
But we don’t do this.
Have you ever stopped to ask why?
Recently a friend of mine gave a great talk on prayer to pastors on five reasons pastors struggle with prayer, but I think it applies to everyone:
1. We think we should be better at this. We should be able to handle it. We should be able to figure it out. We think we should be able to get through the day without asking for help.
And we don’t pray because we think we should be better at praying, so we beat ourselves up about how bad we are at praying.
2. We’re afraid of vulnerability. We’re okay with social media vulnerability, “I’m the worst mom ever, well that happened, here’s my pile of laundry, here’s my messy garage, here’s my failure.” As long as we decide the vulnerability, we’re okay with it, but to be known we have to vulnerable.
Vulnerable is sharing needs, but it is also sharing who you are and sharing weakness.
Tim Keller said, “To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.”
3. We like to look competent. If I have a prayer need, I don’t want to say it. I want people around me and God to think I’m qualified and have my act like together.
Remember: Prayer is helplessness in action.
This is why our favorite prayer request in a group is “unspoken.”
4. We’re hurting, but don’t want to admit it. I don’t want to admit that I’m in pain or having difficulty. We don’t want to share that our marriage hurts, our kids don’t listen, and we have trouble forgiving or trusting God.
Have you noticed how praying about something, asking someone else to pray about something makes it real? It is the moment of truth because
5. We’re cynical. Deep down, many of us hedge our bets with prayer. We don’t believe that God will come through. This is why many of us aren’t generous and don’t give back to God. We need to hold on to some money just in case it rains, and God doesn’t show up with a big enough umbrella.
How do children pray? They are honest; they recognized that they are a mess, that they need help, and they didn’t stop. Have you ever noticed that children never stop asking? They are convinced they will wear you down. God invites us to pray like that, yet few of us do.
I came across this the other day that I think sums this up:
To watch my sermon on this, click here.
