“So I say to you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and he who seeks, finds; and to him who knocks, it will be opened.” (Luke 11:9-10, NASB)
Prayer is a topic that has been on my mind for some time now. I believe God has given me a burden to pray for many people including my wife, my mother, my brothers and my sister and their families, my brothers and sisters in Christ in Celebrate Recovery and church, colleagues at work, the students I teach, friends who do not know the Lord, and the list goes on and on. Admittedly, it is not something that comes naturally for me, in part because I feel inadequate to pray as I should and I simply sometimes do not know what to ask for or how to ask for it. I sometimes wrestle with a number of other issues like, who should I pray for, how often should I pray, is there a correct posture for prayer, etc. Then there are the deeper questions like, what exactly is prayer, what is the purpose of prayer, does God even hear my prayers, and how can I know if I am praying in His will.
There are so many different ways I can look into the topic of prayer. In the past I have used Biblical prayers like the Lord’s Prayer as a model of how to pray, but also the prayers of Paul and others in the New Testament when they would pray for believers in various places. Prayers of thanksgiving, love, and praise that acknowledge what God has already done have also been a great blessing in my life. I have endeavored to maintain an attitude of prayer, being confident that I can approach God at any time and in any place during the course of a day. I struggle sometimes with the ever growing “prayer list” that quite frankly gets so large that it becomes unmanageable and it becomes nearly impossible to pray for everyone and everything on the list. How long should I pray for a given thing that I truly believe is in the will of God yet I have yet to receive an answer (or is that the answer?) Is prayer work, or rest, or both? If prayer is work, then can it become an unreasonable legalistic burden I place on myself in a conscious or unconscious attempt to gain God’s favor? Why do I feel feelings of guilt when I lose mental focus in the middle of my prayers?
There is lot to this idea of prayer and I want to explore it and try to answer for myself some of these questions. I wanted to do a single blog post about prayer, but I soon realized that there is simply too much to talk about for a single post. So, I prayed about it, and decided to make it a mini-series of sorts. One caveat: I am not by any stretch of the imagination a Biblical scholar nor do I claim to have all the answers. I am simply relaying my experiences and insights about prayer that I feel God has laid on my heart.
