Prayer can be a difficult spiritual discipline to apply to a Christian’s life. So many other things get in the way or distract us from praying and reaching out to God. We desire God and we want to pray, but life seems to take over, and before we know it, the day is done and we’re exhausted. “I’ll pray tomorrow,” you might say. But then, tomorrow comes and goes, and prayer time was put on the back burner – again.
Learning how to start your regular prayer life is essential to your life as a Christian. According to Timothy Keller, author of Prayer, “All Christians should have and are expected to have a regular, faithful, devoted, and fervent prayer life.” Prayer is recognizing the greatness of God and is a personal, communicative response to the knowledge of God. Failing to pray is a sin against His glory (1 Sam 12:23) and a failure to see God for who He really is.
So how do Christians start a regular prayer life? How does one begin applying this spiritual discipline on daily basis?
According to Ruth Haley Barton, author of Sacred Rhythms, a Christian’s “desire for God and [their] capacity to reach for more of God than [they are] right now is the deepest essence of who [they] are.”
A constant and consistent prayer life is a direct result of our desire for God.
As we stand before Him, we will undeniably discover our true selves. Prayer is the only catalyst to achieving self-knowledge.
Timothy Keller, author of Prayer, says: “Prayer is the only entryway into genuine self-knowledge. It is also the way we experience deep change – the reordering of our loves…It is the way we know God…Prayer is simply to key to everything we need to do and be in life. We must learn to pray. We have to.”
Learning how to start your regular prayer life is commanded in 1 Thessalonians 5:17: “pray without ceasing.”
Learning how to start a regular prayer life requires you to reorder your loves and priorities. If we give priority to our outer life, our inner life will suffer. It’s important to pray constantly and consistently – no matter if your circumstances are good or bad.
Matthew 6:6 instructs us to go into our room, shut the door, and pray. The key thing that this verse is instructing us to do is to shut out all distractions and be alone with our Father.
Martin Luther believed that prayer needed to be a habit and proposed that Christians pray twice daily (once in the morning and once at night). As a habit, we must learn to pray whether we feel like it or not.
With that being said, sometimes Christians lack the desire to pray. That’s okay. The Holy Spirit gives us the assurance and desire to pray to God in addition to enabling us to pray even when we don’t know what to pray for or about.
Don’t condemn yourself if you’re not where you want to be in your prayer life. Prayer is a journey that helps us endure. We have to remember that we cannot go into the presence of God unless we are reliant on Christ’s forgiveness and His righteousness before His Father.
Prayer is our response to God and becomes a continuation of the conversation that God has started. Once we understand how God first speaks to us, we can learn how to answer Him in prayer. That is why meditation on the Word of God is so important; meditation is the bridge that brings us from reading the Word to prayer. For this reason, reading the Word of God is also essential to one’s Christian life.
God speaks to us through His Word. Timothy Keller tells us to “listen, study, think, reflect, and ponder the scriptures until there is an answering response in our hearts and minds…only if we respond to His Word will our own prayer life be…rich and varied…we should do everything possible to behold our God as He is, and prayer will follow.”
2 Samuel 7:27 states: “For you, O LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, have made this revelation to your servant, saying, ‘I will build you a house.’ Therefore, your servant has found courage to pray this prayer to you.” If it weren’t for the Word of the Lord occurring first, the servant would never have found the courage to pray. God speaks to us through His Word, resulting in our own response through prayer. That is why reading the Word and reflecting on it daily is so important when it comes to starting a regular prayer life.
Prayer is a blended balance of praise, confession, petition, thanks, and intercession. To start a regular prayer life, follow this order of what to pray for and about; the Holy Spirit will help with the rest. The Bible says in Philippians 4:6 – “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (emphasis added).
My prayer for those of you reading this today is the same as the prayer Paul had for the church in Ephesians 1:15-23: “For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God’s people, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.”
God bless you – now and always!
