The Practice of Prayer

‘Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.’ (I Thessalonians 5:16-18) Paul gives us some great tidbits of wisdom in these verses. What is the will of God for our lives? First, rejoice always. Have a good attitude. Be full of God’s joy. Pray without ceasing. Does that mean that if you stop praying that you’re in sin? No. It means to always have an ‘open door’ policy with God. Never put prayer on the shelf. Continue your conversations with God and pray to Him often. Give thanks to Him in everything.

We see these tenets in the life of Jesus Christ. He is our model; He is our master. In Luke we read, ‘Now it came to pass in those days that He (Jesus) went out to the mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God.’ (Luke 6:12) Talk about a prayer life! Jesus apparently could engage in a prayer with God all night long! That’s intimacy.

Have you ever tried to see how long you could pray? I’ve been in prayer meetings in a group where we’ve prayed collectively for up to three hours. But individually, I don’t think I’ve ever prayed for longer than an hour. And those times came when I wanted to get as deep as possible into prayer with God, and it was still only an hour. You’d be surprised how many topics you can cover in a solid hour with the Lord!

Wouldn’t you have loved to have been able to hear the conversations between God the Father and God the Son? What spiritual depth that must have been. Prayer was a practice in the life of Christ, and if we’re going to be followers of Him, then prayer needs to be a practice in our life as well.

Let me give you four different types of prayer that are similar to the pattern of prayer, but will be another way for you to think of prayer and to start the practice of prayer in your life. This is an acronym using the book of Acts—‘A’ ‘C’ ‘T’ ‘S’.

• A doration
• C onfession
• T hanksgiving
• S upplication

Adoration is just worshipping God. Start your prayer by adoring and worshipping the Lord. Proceed with confession, that is, you ask for His forgiveness. Next, praise Him with thanksgiving. Say, ‘No matter what you do, Lord, I’m going to have a good attitude about it, and I’m going to thank you because you’re the boss. Finally, cry out in supplication and make your request known to God.

Remember ‘ACTS’ or the five points of the pattern of prayer and this will keep your prayer life in line as you bring the practice of prayer into your life.

As you start the practice of prayer, you need to remember that there are going to be obstacles to making prayer a constant practice. Every Christian struggle at some point when trying to make prayer a steady part of their lives. Here are the ten most common obstacles to the practice of prayer and how to overcome them:

• 1. Daydreaming: It’s easy to daydream when you pray. Here’s the secret to getting past this one: Pray out loud. Talk to God verbally. Don’t just think your prayers, say your prayers. When you engage you mouth and your hands and your expression as you start talking to God, it helps you to stay focussed. Sometimes when I start praying and I don’t want to be distracted or start daydreaming, I’ll make a commitment to pray for a certain amount of time and I’ll talk out loud to God without stopping. I refuse to stop talking. I just let everything come out of my heart to God through my mouth.


• 2. Sleepiness: Sometimes, doesn’t it feel like if you want to go to sleep when you’ve got insomnia, all you have to do is just start praying? Here’s the solution for this: If you’re a morning person, pray in the morning. If you’re a night person, pray at night! Of course, you want to pray all the time, but I’m talking about those really deep times of intercession. For those, you want to pray when you feel most alive.


• 3. Interruptions: A prayer is spiritual warfare. The last thing the devil wants is for you to be communicating with God. Doesn’t this make sense? It’s kind of like if you were in a fight with someone, and all of a sudden, that person pulled out a knife. All your attention would be on that weapon, because of the damage it could do. When you pull out the weapon of prayer, Satan is going to do everything he can to knock it out of your hands. Thus, there WILL be interruptions. If you think, ‘This is a perfect time to start praying. No one ever calls me at this time. I don’t get drop in visitors. The kids are asleep…’ The minute you start praying, there will be a ring at the door, a phone call, and the kids will wake up and start fighting. All kinds of interruptions come up the moment that you try to find a little time to talk to God. You need to hit this obstacle proactively. Find a time that is quiet to begin with. Then turn the answering machine on, turn the volume down, find your prayer closet of quiet space and sequester yourself with God so that you’re not interrupted.


• 4. Reminders: There you are praying, and it’s the same as when you’re doing your Bible study—up pop a million things into your mind that you absolutely have to take care of. You remember important things that you’ve been trying to remember for days. There is a very easy solution for this one. Keep a pad of paper and a pen right by you. When you’re reminded of something, jot it down, and it will be easy to come back to. Trust God that whatever it is will keep until you’re done with your prayer time.


• 5. Sense of unworthiness: The feeling of unworthiness can actually keep you from praying. Feeling like you don’t deserve to be a Christian, that you don’t deserve to talk to God, that He probably wouldn’t answer your prayers anyways, that you’re nobody—all these types of feelings can be a strong obstacle to prayer. A lot of people won’t talk to God themselves because they feel like they don’t deserve it: ‘I’ll send an email to Billy Graham and ask him to offer up a prayer for me.’

Get over it! You don’t deserve to talk to God. None of us do. He wants to hear from you because He loves you and you’re His child. Do your children deserve to talk to you? What have they done to deserve to talk to you? If that was a criterion, then your child in medical school could perhaps talk to you seven hours a day and your child who’s only five years old and hasn’t done much with their life yet might have to send you a note. How ridiculous is that? You love to hear from your kids! And God loves to hear from you.

• 6. Sin: Sin is a true obstacle to prayer. The Bible says that if we regard inequity in our heart, then the Lord will not hear us. The only prayer that God will hear when we’re in sin is a prayer of repentance. So if we are harboring some sin in our life, then that can keep us from having an effective prayer life. We have got to come to terms with whatever sin is in our life and repent, or that is going to be an obstacle to us.


• 7. A lack of faith: Many people don’t pray because they simply don’t believe it will have any results. They have a lack of faith. The only solution I have for this is to get into the Word because Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. When you begin praying, and you see results from your prayers (and you will see results) then that will increase your faith as well. When your faith is increased, it will cause you to want to talk to God more, and to team up with Him in more areas of your life. This will get more results, which will give you more faith, so you’ll spend more time in conversation with God…can you see the cyclical pattern of growth ascending upward towards the Lord? So prayer itself will increase your faith.


• 8. Out of God’s will: ‘Lord, please make me President of the United States.’ That might not be God’s will for your life. If you beat that dead horse, it’s going to take a toll on your relationship with God. You have to pray in accordance with His will.


• 9. Unforgiving spirit: If you have bitterness towards someone else, if you have a relationship in your life where there’s a lot of unforgiveness, it will hinder your prayer life. Jesus said, ‘If you come to the altar to offer your sacrifice, and there you remember that your brother has something against you, go to him. Leave your gift by the altar and go and reconcile that relationship. Then come back and offer your sacrifice.’ The purpose of prayer is to get God’s will done on Earth. If the Holy Spirit quickens your spirit and tells you to go out and do something, that’s not the time to sit around and talk about it. That’s the time to do it. Once you’ve done it, then you come back to the Lord and talk about it. If you are convicted of a relationship that needs the healing of forgiveness, you need to take care of that to bless your prayer life.


• 10. Selfish motive: If you go to God because you want something out of Him, or to manipulate Him, if you treat Him like Santa Claus, this is going to be an obstacle in your prayer life. God is not Santa Claus. You can’t just go to Him with your wish list for your selfish ambitions. You won’t see results in your prayer life if you have selfish motives. You will end up with a lack of faith, because you will think your prayers aren’t answered!

Remember that saying we learned when we discovered the Bible? ‘Going without the Word of God for seven days makes one weak.’ It’s the same with prayer. If you don’t pray, if you don’t go to God in prayer constantly, it’s like being malnourished physically. You have to take in nourishment to have a healthy physical life. You have to take in nutrients and you have to exercise. It’s the same in your spiritual life. You have to take in the Word of God to hear what He has to say to you, and you have to pray to tell God what’s on your heart.

You can team up with God and begin a walk with Him. That’s what prayer is all about. As you take this opportunity in your life, as you begin to discover prayer, as you begin to talk to God about whatever it is that’s on your heart, it’s going to lift the ceiling on your walk with Him.

I love Jesus’ attitude about this whole subject. He’s so gentle. He’s so down-to-earth. He put down the religious leaders of His day for praying ostentatiously, on public street corners, reciting long, drawn out prayers, and calling attention to themselves for their ‘holiness.’ They used vain repetitions, saying things over and over again.

Jesus said, ‘Hey, you don’t need to go through all of that. Just tell Me what’s on your heart. Mean it from the bottom of your heart. And I’ll hear you.’

You can talk God about anything you’re going through. I pray that you would read through some of the Psalms sometime. They are written by King David, and as you read them, you can hear some of David’s conversations with God. You can grow as a man or woman of God by learning from other great men and women of God. The Psalms are a great way to look into the mind of David, who was a man after God’s own heart.

Sometimes David really told God what was on his mind! He was out and out open and honest with God. There’s one Psalm where he basically tells God, ‘God, I have to get this off of my chest. All the wicked people prosper! I don’t get it! All of us godly people, we’re doing the best we can. And these ungodly people in sin? They’re the ones getting all the blessings. What’s up with this?’

But you’ll notice in the Psalms of David, that although he sometimes begins by agonizing over a problem or a concern, he always ends with an attitude full of praise to God. He gives his concerns over to God, and, in the course of the prayer, you can hear him finally begin to trust in God for the outcome of the situation. By the end of the Psalm, as David ends his prayer time, you can actually feel him in a completely different state of mind because he was able to cast his cares upon the Lord.

Jesus says, ‘Come to Me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ Come to Jesus in prayer and cast your burdens upon Him. It will change your life. Discover the power of teaming up with God. We are so blessed to have a Creator who

Which Psalm?

inclines His ear toward us. Discover the power of talking to Him and sharing your heart with Him. Discover prayer.