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.