When Praying is Difficult

Prayer is one of the most important things we can do as Christians, yet many of us struggle with it.

There are a lot of people who have some difficulty in praying, and judging by the fact that you are reading this, you likely have difficulty praying or have had a tough time praying at some point. I think there are three main reasons why people have issues with prayer, lack of faith, a fear that they are not good enough for God to listen to their prayers, and pride that keeps us from humbling ourselves before God. I will discuss each of these hindrances to prayer, and hopefully help someone, and possibly myself, in the process. 

I would like to say that I have never had problems going to God in prayer, but I would want it to be honest if I said it, and it simply would not be and therefore I won’t say it. It took me a while to figure out why I sometimes have a difficult time praying, and as I already mentioned, there is more than one reason. I am convinced the reasons I sometimes find it difficult to pray are fairly universal and are the same reasons other people find it difficult to pray. 

Even as a child when I believed in the existence of God as much as I believed in my own existence and that of my family, praying was often difficult, not because I lacked faith in the existence of God but because I doubted the magnitude of his love and I felt like I had to redeem myself in his eyes before I could approach him in prayer, and especially before he would do anything on my behalf. Whenever I had an important prayer that was not answered I immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was because I was not worthy enough or because I had not done enough. I did not grow up viewing God as a vending machine where you insert a prayer and pull out a miracle like some people do today, but rather I viewed God more as an absent father who was difficult, if not impossible to please. 

Even today, even though I know that God longs to hear from me and that the only way I will ever be right in his eyes is if I go to him and get his help, I sometimes fall victim to the lie that I have to fix what I have done before I can approach God, but that is not the only problem I have. Despite my knowledge of the Bible, whenever I do something that I know God is displeased with I have a difficult time approaching God because I feel like I need to somehow redeem myself in his eyes before I can approach his presence. God never leaves us, we leave God, and if we feel distant from God than we are the ones who has moved. 

Nowhere in the Bible does it say that we have to feel like we are in good standing with God before we can approach him, but from the beginning people have felt like it was a requirement. Adam and Eve, the first two people, once they were aware of the fact that they had disobeyed God and did the one thing he asked them not to do they tried to hide from God, but if you recall from the story, God sought them out and did not abandon them, and despite the fact that he allowed the natural consequences of their sins to affect them, God helped them and their children and spoke to them. 

Avoiding God when we fall short is like a person who was involved in a serious car crash trying to avoid  the doctors until they have healed on their own. We will never be right with God without his help, and we will never get the help to be right with God by running from him and trying to do it on our own. 

We know from the Bible (Romans 3:23), and by simple observation, that all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God and that if any of us say we have not sinned than the truth is not in us (1 John 1:8) and the one and only way to becoming right with God is through what Jesus did on the cross so there is simply no point in avoiding God when we have sinned, and we need him more when we are struggling than ever before. 

When I was younger I went through a rather painful divorce, and in order to leave and take whatever she wanted without my interference, my wife called the police and told the lie that I had assaulted her and tried to kill her, and as a result of those accusations, I was arrested and placed in county Jail. I had never felt so alone, and at times I wanted to pray, but I had convinced myself that there was no God and, as a matter of principle, I refused to pray so that I could say that I got out of my situation without any help from any God. Three long days later, once the court system discovered there was absolutely no evidence that I had done anything wrong or that my wife had been assaulted at all, all charges were dropped and I was released. 

When I got home almost everything of value was gone and as a final slap in the face my wife had turned up the heat to 90 degrees and left a frozen turkey on the kitchen table, so when I walked through the front door I about passed out from the smell, and when I walked into the kitchen I saw maggots cascading over the edges of the table onto the floor like a living waterfall and the floor was crawling with them. Honestly, it may have been the nastiest thing I have ever seen, and I was extremely upset about it and it took me a long time to forgive my ex wife, which was the subject of an earlier post. I also blamed God, despite the fact that I claimed to be an atheist, because my wife believed, or at least claimed to believe, in God. 

I tried to convince myself that the reason I refused to pray while in county jail and afterward was because there was no God, but the real reasons I refused to pray was because I was blinded you my own pride and arrogance and I wanted to say that I did it on my own. I have, all of my life, had somewhat of an issue asking for help from God or from anyone else and while most of it was fueled by pride, it was also that I did not want to be a burden on anyone, including God. I have always been the type of person who would do everything on my own or die trying  Even when it was painfully obvious that I could not do something on my own, I would refuse to ask for help and thought that if I could not do whatever it was on my own than I probably didn’t deserve it after all. 

When I was younger, not only did I want to do everything on my own, I also wanted other people to be proud of me for doing it on my own. I think wanting to do everything on my own and feeling that I had to do everything on my own was one of the major reasons why I embraced Mormonism when I was younger because it is all about what we do for ourselves and very little, if any, of it is about what God did for us. Mormonism is a religion of works and they believe that even grace has to be earned, which by definition means that it is not grace at all. 

 I firmly believe that pride is one of the biggest things that gets in the way of prayer because to properly pray to God we must humble ourselves before him and admit that we are lost without him and that with him we can do all things but without him we can do nothing. There are a lot of times when we want to think we are all that and a bag of chips when in reality we are just a hot mess, and when we humble ourselves before God we have to face the fact that God is awesome and good and we are just lucky to be here. 

Jesus was not only willing but eager to humble himself before the father, so if there was need for Jesus to humble himself before the father than that should be some sort of an indication of how much we need to humble ourselves before God. I mentioned this in last week’s post, but in the strony Jesus told about the two men who went up to the temple to pray (Luke 18 9-14), the Pharisee and the tax collector, the first man only approached the temple to tell God how awesome he was and list of his own accomplishments while the tax collector instead realized that only God was awesome and that he was a sinner and did the correct thing and admitted his fault before God and said, “Have mercy on me a sinner.” Jesus said the tax collector went away justified where the Pharisee did not.  

Some of the time when I am faced with some type of temptation, the thought of prayer crosses my mind, as it rightly should, but I don’t always do the right thing when I realize my need for prayer. Sometimes I don’t pray for help in escaping the temptation because I want to prove that I can do it on my own, which always ends up with me proving the exact opposite. At other times I don’t pray for deliverance when I am tempted because, if I am honest, I don’t; actually want to be delivered from the temptation at that moment, even though I hate myself for giving in to the temptations, the carnal side of me doesn’t want me to pray because it knows that if I do then I would be delivered from the temptation and would not participate in whatever temporary pleasure I would gain from the sin. Sometimes we blame God for not delivering us when we never gave him the chance. 

The Bible tells us that “No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it,” (1 Corinthians 10:13). If anyone says they were tempted beyond what they could bear they are making God out to be a liar, and if they were to examine the situation in an honest way they would see that God provided a way to escape but they ran from God headlong toward the sin. While it is good to pray to God and ask for forgiveness for sinning, it is far better to pray the very instant we find we are tempted instead of avoiding God and allowing the temptations to grow to the point where we can no longer resist them. 

The other major reason many people find it difficult to pray is that their faith is weak, and the longer we go without praying the weaker our faith will become. The more we pray, regardless of whether or not we see immediate or obvious answers to our prayers or not, the more faith we will have. It is difficult to have a relationship with a person when we don’t talk to them, and it is not a good relationship if we only talk to them when we need something. I would strongly suggest, and I strive to do this myself with varying levels of success, that we talk to God all throughout the day and not just the morning or nightly prayer, and not just asking for things. We should also tell God what is going on in our lives, not because he doesn’t know but because it will increase our faith in God and will help us to have a lot better relationship with him. I talk to my mother all the time, and not just when I think she can help me with something, I talk to my mother all the time about the most mundane things, and we have a great relationship. I sometimes think, “God doesn’t want to hear about that,” or “God doesn’t care about that, but according to Jesus, not one hair falls from out heads without God knowing and caring about it. If God takes notice of the random hair that I loose than he certainly cares about my day at work, what I am struggling with, the things I am excited about and the rest of my daily life. 

God is good all of the time, but if we only approach God when we need something and then complain because we did not get what we think we deserved than we are not allowing ourselves to know the goodness of God or the richness of his love for us.