Pleasure and Pain in Praying

The last couple months we have been going through the Lord’s prayer found in Matthew chapter 6. This means that we have been talking and thinking a lot about prayer. This is not surprising because there are all kinds of difficulties when it comes to prayer. In fact, a vast array of doctrines will come up when prayer is the topic. Study about prayer will eventually lead to discussions about God’s sovereignty, man’s responsibility, matters of sin in both believers and unbelievers, various doctrines in the gospel, the role of the Holy Spirit, the deity of Christ and His role as intercessor, matters of eschatology and the coming kingdom, how sanctification works, and on and on it goes. Prayer is a wondrous and varied thing.

I would like to highlight one more feature; the paradoxical nature of ease and difficulty in praying. Scripture affirms both of these two opposing realities of prayer. It is both as simple as breathing, and as difficult as wrestling.

Let’s look at the ease of prayer. At its core, praying is nothing more than directing words to God. One does not even have to be able to talk. Simply think and you are instantly sending communication to God. We see this in Nehemiah. Nehemiah was right in the middle of speaking with the king about Jerusalem. The king asked a question, and Nehemiah responded, but not before we read this in 2:4 “Then the king said to me, “What would you request?” So I prayed to the God of heaven.” There it is. It is instantaneous, unspoken, and powerful. Seems like easy stuff, no? Jesus seemed to affirm this when He told His disciplesin Matthew 7:7-8 “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.

We have to quickly move to the second point. It just sounds too easy in the first point. If left with just a smattering of verses it would sound that way. But there are other verses to consider. We read in Colossians 4:12, “Epaphras, who is one of your number, a bondslave of Jesus Christ, sends you his greetings, always laboring earnestly for you in his prayers, that you may stand perfect and fully assured in all the will of God. Jesus said in Luke 18:1 “Now He was telling them a parable to show that at all times they ought to pray and not to lose heart…” Paul prayed three times for the thorn to be removed in 2 Corinthians chapter 12. Jesus prayed all night before choosing his disciples. We also know of Jesus’s agonizing in the garden in prayer.

So what is going on here? Why is there laboring with something so easy? Why is there agonizing in something so privileged? Here are a few thoughts.

1) As sinners, we have an incredibly hard time with trusting God and believing His Word. We get impatient when His timing doesn’t match ours. We get distrustful when bad things happen. We become self-sufficient and feel little to no need to pray.

2) As fallen people removed from the physical presence of God, prayer is weird. We don’t hear anyone speak and we don’t have face to face contact. Distraction is a real problem when you don’t have someone grabbing your attention.

3) Knowing what to pray for, how to pray for it, when to pray for it, and for how long to pray for it can become so frustrating for people that they basically give it up.

4) Being selfish, we can become fairly detached from other people. Instead of weeping with those who weep and rejoicing with those who rejoice, we just bump into people at church, share some friendly words, and move on. We feel little need to wrestle in prayer for those we love little.

These are the kinds of issues that make prayer difficult. So, yes, it is easy. God will hear and move when you pray. But His timing and methods and fatherly wisdom are fully at play in all of this praying. What does this mean? It means we have to fight our disbelief. We have to fight our distracted and disorganized praying. We have to fight for growth in understanding what God calls for in prayer. We have to fight for great love for people. Fighting is hard. It demands blood, sweat, and tears. And so this is what prayer demands as well. All those who would like to step into the prayer closet will find the door opens easily, but the skeletons of your own sin will be waiting for you to make it hard. Not secret sin necessarily, but just the dead stuff of your old self. Therefore, fight the good fight of faith.