The Principles of Prayer LI

 Luke 18:1-8, “Then He spoke a parable to them, that men always ought to pray and not lose heart, saying: ‘There was in a certain city a judge who did not fear God nor regard man. Now there was a widow in that city; and she came to him, saying, ‘Get justice for me from my adversary.’ And he would not for a while; but afterward he said within himself, ‘Though I do not fear God nor regard man, yet because this widow troubles me I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me.’ Then the Lord said, ‘Hear what the unjust judge said. And shall God not avenge His own elect who cry out day and night to Him, though He bears long with them? I tell you that He will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will He really find faith on the earth?”’

I have yet to find a verse in the entirety of Scripture wherein God encouraged His children to pray less or spend less time in His presence. God is not a bored faux-friend who can’t wait for you to say your goodbyes and leave so they can get back to their lives, or some disinterested therapist who sits and nods for an hour knowing they’re getting paid to be there and it’s the only reason they’re sitting through the story of one’s perceived childhood trauma about that one time when they wanted chocolate ice cream but all the place had left was vanilla.

There has never been one instance in the history of mankind when God looked down upon one of His servants and admonished them for being too single minded in their pursuit of Him, or insisting they should find a hobby to take up some of their time because they were just too present, and too focused on their prayer life and spiritual growth.

God is ever willing, even eager, for His children to approach Him, fellowship with Him, spend time in His presence, and have dialogue with Him, and in this case, moderation is not the best course of action. The more we pray, the better it is for our spiritual man, our spiritual growth, and our spiritual walk.

The more we pray, the clearer we hear His voice, and the quicker we are to discern the voices of others pretending to be Him.

When we begin to weigh every element of prayer on its own, we realize they are equally indispensable if the desire of the heart is to know more of God, feel more of God, and be ever more in His presence. Whether discussing frequency, length, focus, distractions, or the absence thereof, these all come together to form effective prayers that do more than just echo off the walls, but that reach the heart of God and to which He responds in kind.

That there will be roadblocks on the path toward a robust, fruitful, engaging, and effective prayer life is a given. It’s something to be expected, if not something to be looked forward to. Perhaps it’s just the way I’m built, but every time I feel resistance in my attempt to spend time with God, I press in all the more and make it my singular priority and focus for the day until it is accomplished.

If we allow the enemy to keep us from God’s presence once, be certain he will try to use the same situation, circumstance, emergency, chore, or individual to do it again and again. The devil is a proponent of the idea that if it’s not broken, don’t try to fix it, and if he can find that one thing that will get us off our knees, out of our prayer closet, and back to the chaos of everyday life, that one thing will become so commonplace as to be mathematically improbable.

How many times can you change the battery in your smoke detector only to have it start beeping five or ten minutes into your prayer time? It happened to me a couple of weeks before we left for Romania. After the second go round of incessant chirping, I even lowered myself to reading the instruction manual. Yes, I made sure it was a fresh battery, yes, I made sure it was properly secured, but even so, when the house was empty and I was getting into that place of solitude with God, it would start up again, breaking my concentration, distracting me, and snapping me out of that mindset of worship.

The third time it happened, I took the battery out altogether, laid the detector on the floor, and proceeded to have my alone time with God. Once I was done, I put the battery back in its housing, reattached the detector to the ceiling, and wouldn’t you know it, not a chirp since.

Identify your distraction, and insulate yourself from it. If you know it to be your phone, and the constant rings and dings that inform you of a new message, request, or e-mail, turn it off for the time you spend with God. If it’s your dog, suddenly getting antsy and scratching at the door to be let out, put it outside for the time you’ve allotted to be in God’s presence. If it’s the children being children calling your name every fifteen seconds, wait until they’re off to school, or have gone to the park.

The purpose of the distraction is to keep you from being in fellowship with God. It’s to keep your prayers from going beyond mere words to something deeper and more profound. It’s not that the devil is jealous of the time you spend with God; it’s that he knows the more time you spend with God, the less effective his plots, schemes, temptations, and devices will be. It’s not because he wants to be your friend instead of God; it’s that he knows the more time you spend in God’s presence, the stronger you become, and that’s not something he wants to see. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

The Principles of Prayer L

 To claim victory over anything, a battle must be fought, whether it is physical, spiritual, or mental. Victorious living has been bandied about so often and with such gusto that it has become a cliché absent definition, with no nuance or detail as to what it means, or what is required to achieve it. In order to be victorious over our thoughts, we must take them captive. In order to be victorious over our inclination to procrastinate and find other worthless things to fill our time with rather than come before God in prayer and supplication, an active, disciplined, and focused plan must not only be thought of but also implemented and put into action. We are victorious only insofar as we overcome the obstacles in our path, defeat the enemy of our soul, and press on even when the road gets hard and all you want to do is lie in bed in the fetal position and wait for the sweet embrace of sleep.

It’s when you least feel like doing something that you must purpose in your heart that you will let nothing stand in the way of starting it, and also finishing it. Some of the most refreshing, rewarding, and memorable times I’ve spent in prayer before God were those instances where everything seemed to be crumbling around me, when there were a dozen other things vying for my time, and when my mind insisted that I could put off the prayer time for a day because there were just too many other things to do.

Make the conscious choice to prioritize prayer not as something you’ll get around to when you can, but something you must do every day, consistently, without wavering or delay.

It comes down to desire and whether being in God’s presence is the single most important thing on your schedule on a given day, or if He’s somewhere in the middle of a long list of things we need to get done.

There is also a pervading theory that I am inclined to believe, that the harder fought a battle, the sweeter the victory at its end, when the dust settles and the battle is won. The things we work hardest for seem to be the most fulfilling and rewarding, perhaps not in a material sense, but in the sense of having accomplished something others might have thought you incapable of accomplishing.

I like chopping wood. Not with a chainsaw or some mechanical contraption, but the old-fashioned way, with an axe and plenty of sweat equity. Whenever I visit Romania, I set aside a day to find someone in a village who has wood that needs chopping, and I offer my services. It may seem like a small thing, but if you’re pushing eighty with a hunched back and arthritic fingers that can’t hold a fork, never mind an axe, having someone show up and offer to do the job for you free of charge is a blessing.

As is the case with shoveling snow, I think the reason I enjoy chopping wood is that I can assess the progress at a glance. By the time the day is done, all my muscles are sore, I’ve likely changed shirts three times, but the satisfaction I get from seeing the job done and all the wood chopped and piled by the side of the house is indescribable.

The harder it seems to get alone with God on a given day, the more you should strive to do it because you know it is essential, even existential, for your spiritual growth and maturing. If you know certain things are required for survival, you prioritize those things over other trivial matters first because, in order to accomplish anything else, you must first ensure that you are alive and breathing.

The western church has been in the cycle of putting the cart before the horse for so long it’s forgotten that there are certain basic yet essential practices it must contend with, grow accustomed to, and practice consistently in order to attain or achieve the things they’ve been focusing on and pining over with such fervor.

If your church has courses on how to be a prophet, spark revival, or something more ambiguous like unlocking your spiritual sensitivity, but not one on how to pray, they’ve essentially put the cart before the horse and are hoping to teach something that can only be gifted by God to the faithful who are walking in the way and have a consistent relationship with Him.

Well, I don’t pray, but I want to prophesy. That’s like saying I can’t read, but I want to write the Great American Novel. I can’t swim, but I want to free dive for clams. I can’t drive, but I want to be a Formula 1 driver. I struggle with basic math, but I aspire to be a mathematical statistician.

It’s telling that of all the things the disciples could have asked Jesus to teach them, they asked Him to teach them to pray. They’d seen Him perform miracles, they’d heard Him preach, they’d seen Him teach, yet the one thing they considered worth knowing above all these was that they knew how to pray.

Conversely, if they’d never seen Jesus pray, or never awakened to see Him far removed from them in communion with the Father, they likely would never have grasped the importance of prayer and how significant a role it must play in the life of the believer. It is not a leap of logic to conclude that the disciples had seen Jesus praying so consistently as to conclude it is the one thing they needed to learn to do first before anything else they might desire to know.

If the adage that success leaves clues holds true, then the disciples were wise enough to see the clues clearly enough to ask Jesus to teach them to do as He did. More often than not, everything boils down to whether or not what we are doing is effective. Does it work? That’s the most important question. Not whether it’s exciting, flashy, or if you feel a tingle running down your back, but whether or not it works.           

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

The Principles of Prayer XLIX

 If we can’t learn to control our thoughts, if we can’t discipline ourselves to take them captive, our prayers will always remain disjointed, jumbled, confused, and unfocused. Come before God, determined to give Him your undivided attention. If you’ve ever tried to hold a conversation with someone who was simultaneously trying to scroll on their phone while pretending to listen, you have a good sense of how God feels when we pray distracted prayers.

It happens with greater frequency than ever before, with everyone seemingly glued to their phones, and while you’re trying to engage and speak to them, their attention is elsewhere, fixed on a screen, and you begin to feel like your words are no more than background noise. They’ll nod once in a while, perhaps give you a grunt or two, but you know that nothing you’ve said registered, or if it did, only partially and lacking the appropriate context.

Why is it that we feel comfortable engaging with the God of the universe, the Creator of all that is seen and unseen, in a less respectful manner than we would a middling manager at some regional outfit? Imagine going in for a job interview, plopping yourself in a chair opposite the manager of your local Sip-n-Zip, then pulling out your phone and scrolling through your Instagram or Facebook while he’s trying to have a conversation with you. None would dare do such a thing, especially if they wanted the job, yet we have no qualms about giving God scraps and tatters of our attention rather than the whole, convincing ourselves that God will settle for whatever we give Him because we’re so special that He should feel flattered for whatever fleeting thought we have of Him.

A little something is better than nothing at all, isn’t it? As though it’s we who are doing God a favor by being in His presence. As though it was His high honor to be granted an audience with us rather than ours to be in His presence.

I try to write every morning. Some mornings, the words come easier than others, but if I commit to a certain amount of time rather than a specific word count, chances are I’d spend the allotted time thinking about a hundred things and only get a handful of words on a page. Because my goal is a certain number of paragraphs or pages, I can either spend an hour writing or five, but no matter what, I must reach my goal on that day for me to be able to attend to other duties.

What’s my point? My point is that most of us start with a set quantity of time allocated for prayer, but as we grow and mature, we come to realize that the quality of the time we spend in God’s presence is just as important as the quantity. At some point, quantity becomes irrelevant because the goal isn’t to speak some words but to feel the presence of God, and we commit to being in that quiet place, crying out to Him until we feel His presence, His touch, His comfort, and His peace.

Usually, when people insist they don’t feel the presence of God when they pray, it’s because they gave up too early. They didn’t press in, they didn’t purpose in their hearts to be before Him until they felt His touch, or heard his voice, but gave the allotted ten minutes, then went on about their day.

Prayer must be habitual in practice, but not in approach. By this, I mean that we prioritize our time with God and the time we spend in prayer, but never do it just to do it, going through the motions without a conscious effort for meaningful dialogue or interaction.

By its very nature, fellowship with God cannot be mundane, ordinary, dull, or routine. It is a glorious, much-cherished experience for which we vie, which we desire, and toward which we progress with every prayer uttered, and every block of time spent in His presence.

Being in the presence of God never grows old, stale, or unexciting. It isn’t something we get used to, to the point that it no longer animates us, excites us, or impresses the depth of the experience upon us.

Those who insist that being in the presence of God, communing with Him, having dialogue with Him, and feeling His presence can become as ordinary as ordering a happy meal at a drive-through, pretty much knowing what to expect, and never being amazed by the experience have never truly been in His presence, nor heard His voice.

Even when the true desire of the heart is to spend some time in God’s presence, the mind is constantly bombarded and under assault by all manner of thoughts, feelings, and emotions whose singular purpose is to keep you from doing what you set out to do. The mind works in concert with the flesh, as well as the heart, and their common enemy is the spiritual man, and the spiritual growth these three know will come about if we commit to prayer and supplication, to reading the Word consistently, and desiring to know more of God with each passing day.

Your flesh isn’t your friend, and neither is your heart. They are both passing, fleeting things whose singular purpose is to keep you from contemplating eternity, or breaking ties with what they desire, in order to pursue what God desires. The flesh and the spirit will never be in harmony, nor will your spiritual mind be in harmony with your heart of stone. It is the reason the flesh must be crucified, the reason the flesh must wither and have less sway over you, that your spiritual man might grow, mature, and pursue the spiritual things to which it knows it has access, and in which it knows it can prosper.

Those who conflate the needs of the spirit with the needs of the flesh do so not in the interest of your spiritual betterment, but the earthly increase of their possessions. They know that if your flesh is praised, elevated, pandered to, and catered to, your flesh will be drawn to them and give them a position of prominence they otherwise would not enjoy. All this is done to the detriment of your spiritual man, your spiritual growth, and a deeper understanding of God and the ways of God.     

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

The Principles of Prayer XLVIII

 God will not look down on you for praying in a broom closet, just as He will not allot extra brownie points to someone praying from a gilded stateroom. He won’t dismiss you offhand for having a five o'clock shadow, or having bread dough under your fingernails, because the wife asked if you could help her stretch and fold it minutes earlier, nor will He show special favor to someone with perfectly manicured nails in a tailored suit.

The things that draw the eyes of men, the things that impress and cause others to see you in a certain type of way, neither move nor impress God. It’s the manner in which we approach Him, whether our hearts are humble and contrite, whether we desire to know Him for the sake of knowing Him, or feign interest in hoping to get what we really want, that God sees and weighs.

You don’t learn to swim by reading about water. You don’t learn to pray by reading about prayer. Reading about the effectiveness of prayer and how others who practice it have grown through it can motivate you and inspire you, but to know these benefits for yourself, you must actively pursue it with fervor and focus.

That prayer works is an undeniable reality. It is a proven thing. That there is no barrier to entry when it comes to prayer is likewise a truth that we cannot deny. You don’t need a degree or a high school diploma to pray. You don’t need to complete a course or workshop to qualify for spending time with God. All you need is the willingness and desire to lay all else aside and pursue Him. Knock, and He will open. He will not turn you down, or tell you He can squeeze you in for five minutes in three months' time.

Whenever, wherever, each time you come before God in prayer, He hears, and He sees.

This morning I woke up early. By early, I mean before 3 am, and since I usually allow myself to sleep in until five or so on any given morning, I consider it early. I tiptoed into the kitchen, brewed myself a cup of coffee, then tiptoed back to my office, ready to spend some time in prayer without the distractions of a bustling household, hungry children, or traffic noises from outside.

What I was reminded of as I began to pray is that there are two types of distractions that are equally detrimental to a focused and effective prayer. There are external distractions, such as phones, alerts, bells, whistles, ringtones, and various other things; then there are the internal distractions, the ones that occur in one’s mind.

The external distractions are easy to free oneself from, often with the push of a button or an off switch, but the mental distractions are far more challenging to unburden oneself of, because you can’t walk away from them, and it takes practice to be able to switch them off at will.

It’s amazing how many things your mind starts to ponder and dwell on as you begin to pray, things that had not crossed your mind until that particular moment, and when this occurs the first thing we must do is identify whether it’s a distraction, or an urging of the Holy Spirit to pray for a specific situation or a specific person.

Not everything that crosses your mind is worth dwelling on when you enter into prayer, but some things may be no less than a nudge of the Spirit to direct you on what you should be praying about, or who you should be interceding for. Whether taking a Bounty, wrapping it in a crepe, dipping it in batter, and then deep-frying it might be the next big thing in over-the-top state fair fare is likely just a garden-variety distraction. Remembering someone you’ve had on your heart, and feeling the need to pray for them, likely isn’t.

It is our duty to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. What this means is that when a thought arises unbidden, we do not dwell on it or become preoccupied with it, but filter it through the prism of the mind of Christ and determine whether it’s worth continuing to think about.

We’re always thinking about something. Our minds are like flowing rivers, and occasionally, a thought gets snagged on a rock or a shallow spot and ceases its natural flow. Usually, what gets snagged isn’t something worth devoting endless amounts of time toward, but something trivial and not worthy of contemplation. It’s our duty to shake it loose and let it go on its way rather than grow fascinated with it when there is no spiritual benefit to doing so. How many times can you patch a shirt before it becomes a whole new shirt? Who cares? Is it really something worth researching and trying to figure out? Obviously not, but we go down rabbit trails more often than we’d like to admit, and find ourselves squandering time we could have put to better use.

Prayer is one of the handful of things the enemy is actively trying to keep us from pursuing consistently because he understands the power of prayer more thoroughly than most believers. He understands that the more we pray, the stronger we become, and the stronger we become, the easier it is for us to resist him, rebuke him, and walk in the authority rightly ours as sons and daughters of God.

The enemy is not bothered by half-hearted, lukewarm, situational, or casual Christians. Powerless believers, lacking in authority and spiritual grounding, or those with a stagnant prayer life, pose no threat to him. What he loathes and fears in equal measure are those who walk by faith, and do not lean on their own understanding but submit to God’s will in all things.

If you feel like the enemy is targeting you, if at every turn there is an obstacle you must overcome, if the attacks come swift and sure without reprieve, know that you are on the right track, and the enemy sees you as a threat.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.