As a pastor, I had often felt I ought to preach a series on prayer. But I have to confess that I had always been put off doing so because so many of the sermons I have heard about prayer have made me feel rather depressed.
You know the kind of thing: somebody will tell you, with fervent emotion, about a great preacher getting up at four o’clock every morning and praying for six hours before breakfast, and if only you would do the same, it will be the secret to unlocking the spiritual blessing in your life. I’m afraid I just find that sort of thing really disheartening. I find I’m doing very well indeed if I can manage to pry myself out of bed at all before breakfast, never mind have hours of prayer. That kind of pious exhortation, which no doubt is genuinely intended to make me determined to go on praying and not give up, well, it just makes me want to give up altogether even before I’ve begun.
I may well simply be more perverse than you are, but that’s the effect that kind of sermon has on me. It wouldn’t surprise me to find that many Christians feel the same.
Some time ago, however, as I was thinking about how I could encourage my Christian brothers and sisters in prayer rather than discouraging and depressing them, I was reading a book that I found to be one of the most helpful I can recall ever reading on this subject. It was not a light book; it was a substantial biblical theology of prayer, with plenty to excite the neurons and tax the gray matter. But the reason I found it so helpful was that in looking at what the whole Bible teaches about prayer, it reminded me of something very important: that we learn most about prayer simply by learning about God. That is a great thing to be reminded of, because the real truth about God is never discouraging. The Lord himself is never depressing as some very well-meaning and over-pious Christians often are, or can make you feel.
So after reading that book on prayer, which really turned out to be a book about knowing God, I found for the first time that I really did want to preach about prayer, because I thought I could prepare for it without getting depressed, and I could perhaps preach on it without depressing and discouraging others. (There can surely be no worse crime for any preacher than to depress and discourage the people of God.) I discovered that as I focused the congregation on God himself, asking the most basic question of all—Why do we pray?—we found immense encouragement in our relationship with the Lord and real help in the chief expression of that relationship, which is prayer.
Content taken from Why We Pray by William Philip, ©2015. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, Il 60187, www.crossway.org.
Main Photo by (Flickr CC): Ryan Wiedmaier
