When My Prayers Seem Not to Work
While the sweet prayer of a little child comes forth effortlessly at bedtime, it is a fact that when that child grows older, prayer becomes harder. There are many reasons for this, each needing to be examined with an agenda that seeks scriptural solutions.
And how we do need those solutions! Anyone having a track record of prayers that don't work knows how disheartening this can be.
Tozer wrote, “Most prayer is like forever turning a key on a dead battery, and the starter does not even whine … God does not want us to pray like that.”
Can there be anything more destructive to our faith than constant failure in prayer? A.B. Simpson writes, “Every time we find our prayers ineffectual we are weakened for our next attempt, and after a time, like iron heated and cooled successively, the temper of our faith is worn out and its very fiber disintegrated .…”
This shotgun approach to prayer, whereby we spray a hundred requests skyward with hopes that a few might be answered, was rightly taken to task by G.D. Watson’s cryptic remark, “If you had a carpenter who hammered away and only hit the nail once in twenty times, you would discharge him.”
This hit and miss routine, with a lot more misses than hits, will continue until we get a better understanding of the nature of prayer.
Perhaps you have gone no further than you have because you thought prayer was a mystery. But there can be no mastery of prayer as along as the mystery of prayer is overemphasized. To assume at the outset that prayer is a mystery is to accept our ignorance of it as inevitable, in some sense inconsequential, and therefore tolerable.
True, other daily-life activities can be engaged with little knowledge. For example, I don’t have to be a mechanic to drive a car. And I don’t have to be an electrician to turn on the lights. But if I don’t understand how prayer works—its components, its methods, its interlocking functions—then the contributions of prayer to my life will be radically reduced.
In seeking a better understanding of what prayer is, we must first identify what it isn't.
Prayer isn’t conditioning our minds with wishful thoughts, it isn’t directing our emotions to some phantom ideal, it isn’t a harmless, cathartic release or a mystical venture into the great beyond: it isn’t the last resort for unprepared students, and it isn’t the strange preoccupation of gray-haired saints who long ago lost interest in this world.
Believers may be earnest and honest in the prayers they say, but there is an enormous difference between saying prayers and praying. To speak to God from our own minds is one thing. To have a prayer birthed in us by the Spirit and then borne by him to the Throne Room of the universe is another.
Once we learn how to pray like that, we will benefit from prayers that work. Indeed, it was the full intention of God that your prayer should work!
Pascal contended that God “instituted prayer in order to allow his creatures the dignity of causality.” This observation shocks those who view life as an already-scripted story, or as a reel of film already in the can, or think their own station in life as being singularly determined by a sovereign God.
The good news is: God gave men not just the power of choice, but a choice that has power; and neither fate nor predestination cancels this power of choice. Taking note of this fact, John Wesley said that “God does nothing but in answer to prayer.”
Your prayers are important, but of course they need to work.
Are you open to reviving your prayer life so they will work?
To help you with this, we will provide more in the next post.
