Prayer. A shift in attitude

Christian prayer so often gets a bad press.

Both outside and sadly sometimes within the church.

I meet so many people who say that they have little or no prayer life.

I've had people coming to me in the past asking for help with their prayer life, and one common problem they might express is why is prayer necessary?

People can find it hard to get their heads around the concept of talking and listening to God as expressed through prayer because they wonder why if God knows what we need before we speak then why bother?

I remember my own prayer life struggled for so long.

My own struggles included things like wondering if it was making any difference to my life? Is anyone listening? It seems like I am making the same old requests over and over again. Prayer is such a bind, I have to do it because I'm told its what Christians do.

In my early days after my initial euphoria, my life as a Christian started to settle down, and prayer was easily left in the background because it felt heavy and tiresome and too much like hard work. Frankly the demonstrations of prayer I seemed to see around me added to the gloomy view I had of this frankly boring discipline.

For example sitting in a circle with a group of equally bored people waiting my turn to pray in a prayer meeting, or an excuse of one, because someone thought it would be best to have a prayer meeting because that's what we do.

No wonder that I almost lost the will to live in some of them.

My own journey with prayer took a turn for the better about ten years back.

I realised that the bad press, the negativity surrounding prayer, the bleakness that surrounded it was down to one thing.

Attitude.

So I flipped my attitude over.

My attitude was rubbish!

The way I looked at prayer was being fuelled by the negative spirit which sadly prevents large parts of today's church from understanding that prayer is vital to its actual survival.

I began to see prayer differently.

I started with my personal prayer life. And it's that on which I want to reflect on in this post.

The first thing I began to see was actually a revelation to me, it was a very simple thought in my head. The thought consisted of this, that prayer is not a method but an attitude.

This changed the way I pray straight away.

Before this revelation my personal prayer was methodical and mechanical. It usually consisted of me asking God for something, then setting the answer to that request myself. Then anything less than that answer ended in me being disappointed in God and edging ever further away from him as far as my relationship was concerned.

That was my attitude.

It needed changing.

So I flipped it over.

Then I thought what if I just trust God to be God. What if my prayer life actually had a helping of faith attached to it. Maybe I could just leave the answer to God and stop telling him what the answer should be.

The second part of my attitude bypass was that I needed to drop the dread. Drop the attitude that I had to do it, and drop the striving to do it out of duty.

So I looked at a different way.

I began to look at it as the vital lifeblood of my relationship with God. So I began to practice developing a lifestyle of prayer not a method. I know liturgy, rhythm, prayer meetings, quiet times are all necessary for some people and do have a successful history throughout Christendom, and are open to development and creativity, and can be brilliant ways of keeping the flame of prayer burning, but they also have a dangerous side. Namely that they can become dry, repetitive and can frankly put God into a little compartment that we open up to see him for half an hour in the day.

So I thought.

Why not try to speak and listen to God in everything I do. That includes set rhythms of prayer, but means I have to keep the flame of prayer burning outside them times too.

As I did that I began to see my hope grow and my faith grow as I started to see things that I'd never seen before. I began to see Gods answers in every day life. The walls came down on my conscience and on my compassion, as I began to see God in the every day.

I rid myself, as I developed (and continue to develop), of the chains of complicated prayer and began to just speak to God in my own way and in the realms of my own character. It's daft how many people try to be like someone else in prayer. All that does is make us feel inadequate and the voices in our heads say, "You can never pray as eloquently as that person" and in fact creates an arena where "superstar" people of prayer develop their high status images, and we end up thinking we are best leaving the prayer to them.

That's not the point of prayer.

The point is that God is desperate to communicate with us whoever we are. He's not bothered about eloquence or status, he just wants to share everything, namely the whole of our lives with him.

So it makes sense that we should just be us when we are entwined with him in prayer.

There are no levels of prayer.

Some people would have us think that there are.

But all I can see is that we all have equal access to God.

And God wants us to be, well, us.

We just need to be sharing everything with him as we talk to him and listen back to what he has to say to us.

So we are required to pray.

Because God seriously desires our company and wants us to seriously desire his.

The second thing I think I had to understand apart from changing my attitude was this.

That I needed to have total trust in His Spirit that lives in us, and to be receptive to that Spirit.

Three verses can help me explain what I mean.

If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus up from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Jesus Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through His Spirit that lives in you. (Romans 8: 11)

For those who are led by the Spirit are the children of God, the Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again, rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by Him we cry Abba Father! The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. (Romans 8: 14-16)

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God's people in accordance with the will of God. (Romans 8: 26-27)

These scriptures talk of the Holy Spirit living in us. Instead of thinking after reading this, "Well if the Spirit is praying for us anyway, well why pray?" I began to see that I needed to through his grace develop my receptivity to towards the work of the Spirit in my life.

Faith that the Spirit of God even when I'm struggling to pray still communicates the prayers I need to pray. Hey, even when I'm not struggling the Holy Spirit is still in me, still working all the time.

In prayer you can't lose.

The Spirit of God prays in accordance with the will of God.

Obviously there is multi-aspects to prayer, personal prayer being one. It is the basis of a relationship with God. It shouldn't be a chore. It should be a necessity. If you are struggling with prayer and you feel like your prayer life is not going well then it may be time to shift your attitude. There is so much to discover just waiting on the other side of your attitude change. A new level of relationship, a release of revelations and a depth of spiritual life that you maybe couldn't seem to grasp a hold of before.

So get praying!

It will change everything for us.