Secrets to an Easy Prayer Life

I believe every Christian wants to pray, yet for many the struggle of maintaining a consistent prayer life is very real. To overcome this, and the guilt and condemnation that comes along with it, there are truths we must recognize. When we do even the acknowledgment of them brings freedom.When we give our life to Christ, His Spirit comes to abide in our hearts and produces a longing to be with Him. We were created for fellowship with God, and prayer is fellowship with God. This is the most open secret of all. It’s where we belong. We were not created for work, play, doing chores, eating, and entertainment. All of these things are parts of our lives, but they are not the reason we were made. We were made for communion with God. That’s the reason we are most at home when we pray. Prayer makes everything right.

If spending time with God in prayer is so wonderful, why do we struggle to maintain a consistent prayer life?

Many Christians live under condemnation because they have been told they ought to pray. We will never discover the beautiful life of prayer by doing it out of duty or obligation. In fact, being told constantly that we should pray without discovering how to pray actually drives us away from prayer.Prayer is not a law; it’s a relationship. For example, I enjoy spending time with my wife, not because I’m told to do so but because I want to do so. I love her. If I came home to my wife with a list of things I was supposed to do—tell her I love her, hold her tightly, kiss her, and so on—she would think I’m crazy. Yet, ironically, we do this with God when we come to Him with a prayer list. This is legalistic praying. Is it any wonder then, why prayer like this is so unfulfilling?If I were to ask you if you love God, I’m sure you would say “yes.” If I were to ask you if you want more of God in your life, I’m confident you would say “yes.” If I asked you if you want to be closer to God than you are presently, I’m sure you would say “absolutely.” Well then, you can pray!

We don’t need a list of rules when praying. Talking with God is about a love relationship.

Prayer is simply being with someone we want to be with. When we complicate prayer with rules and obligation, it loses its beauty. The conversation becomes one-sided, consisting mostly of asking for the most pressing needs to be supplied.Many times when people begin praying, they feel it hasn’t done any good because they ran out of things to say. Yet, remember this! When you spend time with someone you love, you don’t always have to have something to say. Think of times when you’ve been with a friend and didn’t talk much at all. Sometimes it’s enough just to be with them in unspoken companionship. True friends can be together without having constant conversation.When you’re with a friend, do you do all the talking? I hope not! I hope your friend also talks while you listen. Being quiet and listening is part of the relationship. Both of you want to be heard and both of you want to share things that are important to you. It’s the same way when we commune with God through prayer. Just showing up and being with Him is sometimes enough. We talk, and we listen. Sometimes it’s enough to just sit quietly in His presence. Other times our heart is full of things to pour out to Him, and because we know He’s listening, we anticipate what He will speak to our hearts.

We put too much pressure on ourselves to perform while we are in God’s presence. Some time we just need to be quiet and listen.

For instance, some days while in prayer, I have been tired and didn’t feel like saying much. I just opened my Bible and let God minister to me through His Word the entire time. Usually this will end up with me being inspired by something I’ve read and cause me to respond with a time of worship.One time I was leading an early morning prayer meeting at our church, and I was so very tired having been up late the previous night. During the prayer meeting, I fell asleep in front of all the people. When I woke up, I looked around, and everyone was gone. The prayer meeting had long been over. When I looked down, I saw that someone had placed a blanket over me with a handwritten sign that read,“Good Morning, Pastor.” I was so embarrassed, and said, “God, I’m so sorry. Did this time in prayer count?” I’ll never forget what God so gently said to me: “Well, at least you showed up!”I’m not advocating sleeping in prayer, but this made me realize that as long as we show up with our heart open and desiring to be there, we are in God’s presence. Remember, God looks at the heart, not our great ability to pray. We need to throw out the rules of obligation and just spend time with our wonderful Savior Jesus.

Spiritual Hunger

We must understand spiritual hunger because our spirit gets hungry just like our physical body does. Actually, there are some interest- ing parallels between hunger and prayer. For instance, the more we pray, the more we want to pray. The less we pray, the less we want to pray. It’s like eating dessert. The more often we eat it, the more we want to eat. The less we eat dessert, the less we want to eat it.Notice how David describes His hunger and thirst to be with God in Psalm 42: “As the deer pants for the water brooks, So pants my soul for You, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?”

There is a longing, a hunger, and a thirst inside each of us that can never be satisfied apart from time spent with God.

We can busy our lives and time with many things, trying to fill that hunger, but it will never fill the place that belongs to God alone. When we give place to that spiritual hunger deep inside us and turn to God in prayer, we will be satisfied!This is why Jesus told his disciples in John 6:35, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst.” Jesus is the bread of life! In those days, bread was so nutritious that a person could survive as long as they had bread and water. Everyone knew that and it’s why the statement was meaningful. He’s the real deal! So much of what we fill our lives with is not real “bread.” It’s junk food!When we are bored, we find something to do. We turn on the TV. We find something that needs to be done around the house. We head to the refrigerator to find something to eat. We’re “hungry,” but nothing seems to satisfy us because it’s our spirit that’s hungry, and we’re mistaking it for another kind of hunger. It’s a wonderful day when we learn to distinguish when our spirit is hungry and reach for Living Bread instead of other things!Years ago, I went on my first prolonged fast. It was twenty-one days with only water. For the first week or so, my body was crying out for physical food so much that I didn’t have a great time in prayer. I thought, This isn’t working. I feel more distant from God than when I was eating. But after a number of days, my body finally quieted down. The physical hunger was gone. Once my physical hunger quieted down, my spirit came alive in a whole new way. I felt so hungry for God. My times in prayer were wonderful. I would sit in the presence of God and not want to leave. I felt so close to Him!Spiritual hunger was there all along, but the voice of my physical hunger had drowned out the voice of my spiritual hunger. The satisfaction I was getting from the presence of the Lord was so much sweeter and fulfilling that I thought, If I could keep fasting for the rest of my life, I would! It made me realize exactly what Jesus meant when His disciples questioned Him as to why He wasn’t eating. He told them He had food to eat that they didn’t know about ( John 4:31-32). He wasn’t fasting on purpose at that time, but doing the will of the Father filled Him to the point that natural food lost its attraction. Through this God-called fast, I was given a glimpse of this, and it has stayed with me to this day.I had another interesting revelation as my fast came to an end. For my first meal, my wife made me a bowl of tomato soup. When I took the first little sip, it tasted like the sweetest ice cream sundae I had ever eaten. Before the fast, this soup would have tasted very bland to me and it would have never been my first choice of something to eat. I hate to admit it, but I loved French fries and soda and they were my first choice of food. Several days after ending the fast, I sat down at a restaurant to eat my first meal of solid food. Of course, I ordered French fries and a soda and couldn’t wait for the familiar wonderful taste of them. It was a total shock when I took the first bite of a French fry. I almost spat it out! It tasted like cardboard. It was even more of a shock when I took the first drink of the soda. It tasted like pure chemicals. I hated it!What happened? The things that I hungered for and thought  were so tasty before tasted horrible to me. I learned an important les- son through this. When we fill ourselves with junk food every day, we develop a taste and hunger for it even though it’s not real or nutritious. If we ever cleanse our taste buds through a period of fasting, we will develop a hunger and taste for that which is real and nutritious for our bodies, exposing the junk food as fake.In the same manner, our spirit is hungry for that which is real food, time with God, worship and seeking to obey Him. When day after day, we continually fill ourselves with only the junk food of busyness and entertainment, we will develop a greater hunger and taste for those things over time spent with God. Eventually, we will come to the point where it seems like those are the right things to fill our time.They taste like real food to us. The problem is the more we fill ourselves with the junk food of this world, the more it robs us of our hunger for the real food found in the presence of God. This is why it’s so hard to pray. It is why the time we do spend with God in prayer and His Word seems so dry and unprofitable. We have lost our taste for spiritual things. Then, we go through the motions out of duty, but there is no joy in it. We begin praying with good intentions, but are soon bombarded in our brains with thoughts of so many other things we could be doing. Our spiritual taste buds need to be cleansed. We don’t realize it, but the junk food is destroying our spiritual vitality.Let me tell you what it’s like when you’re eating the bread of heaven, Jesus Christ. You get up in the morning and start your day with God. You go somewhere quiet with your Bible in hand. You say good morning to Jesus, tell Him how much you love Him, and begin to worship Him just for who He is. Then, you thank Him for all He’s done and is doing in your life, and invite the Holy Spirit to enlighten His Word to you today. You read a passage of Scripture and meditate on it. You prayerfully ponder it until something in it speaks to you. At that point you may stop and spend the rest of your time there, or the Spirit may lead you to go on. He may illuminate many things to you in this one passage. You ask God what He wants you to do with what He has spoken to you. If it’s something to be believed, then believe  it with all your heart. If it’s something to be done, then do it with all your might!

I hope you can see now that prayer is not a monologue; it’s a dialogue. It’s sweet communion between you and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

It is great to ask God to give you a burden, or deep compassion to pray for certain people and situations in your city and the world. It brings great satisfaction to your own soul to be an instrument that God can use to pray for others. This little exercise is also a sure way to keep you from becoming focused on ‘all about me’. It is also empowering to know that when you are in sweet fellowship with God, you have great power in prayer to ask God for things to change in people’s lives and in the world.When  your  time  in  prayer  is  coming  to  an  end, don’t  rush  out of His presence. Some of the most wonderful times are experienced when you are just sitting there and soaking in His presence and worshipping Him.There is nothing laborious or boring about true heartfelt prayer. When you rise up out of prayer, set your mind to obey God through- out  the  day. Don’t  just  pray  in  the  morning  and  then  forget  about God the rest of the day. Acknowledge Him throughout your day, and do whatever He says. This is what Jesus calls “abiding in Him.” This is praying without ceasing. This is what it means to turn talking with God into walking with God!