I Need Your Help Figuring This One Out
“Why don’t we just buy a rabbit’s foot and rub it for good luck before each meal to save time?”
Annette and I had just gotten married, and we were in the process of expanding our Cru ministry support base. We were in her hometown of Adrian, Michigan in the shadows of Detroit. Unfortunately, the country was experiencing an economic downturn, and auto-dependent Southeastern Michigan was particularly hard-hit. Consequently, we suspected reaching our financial goal would be a long slog.
I had been on Cru staff for seven years, and support development was a perpetual challenge. I would always start out optimistically doing my best to trust God with the results. But as the weeks sometimes turned into months, I would get ground down, moving closer and closer toward internal despair and even low-level panic.
As a new husband, I wanted to provide strong spiritual leadership and demonstrate full trust in God. Three times a day, as we sat down to eat, one of us would ask for God’s blessing on that day’s activities and our overall support development efforts. Of course, we were sincere and serious, but before long, our prayers pretty much became “memorized” words and almost incantations. Hence Annette’s astute comment about the rabbit’s foot.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus criticizes pagans who worship other gods trying to win them over through their excess of words.
When you pray, don’t be like the people who don’t know God. They say the same things again and again. They think that if they say it enough, their god will hear them – Matthew 6:7 (ERV)
Their approach showed they were treating their prayers almost like magic spells. Annette and I weren’t guilty of that obvious excess, but we were drifting toward “empty phrases,” to use the ESV ‘s wording from Matthew 6:7.
Here’s where I need your help. Tell me your thoughts on the balance between:
Praying without ceasing (1 Thes. 5:17) and being relentless in prayer as Jesus urges in two parables: the persistent widow (Luke 18:1-8) and the man who needs replenishment of his cupboard for an unexpected late-night visitor (Luke 11:5-8), and
Falling into empty repetition and trying to manipulate God like the pagans did
About a year into my Christian life, I determined to show my devotion to God by consciously thinking about him as often as I could. If I recognized that if I hadn’t thought about him in the previous ten minutes, I stopped to seek forgiveness and vowed to do better moving forward. This practice lasted about two days before I realized that continuing in that mode would result in my being fitted for a straight jacket.
I’ve concluded there are three aspects to prayer:
Quantity – This is how frequently I pray about a specific need and how many people I get to join with me. Of course, God hears the prayers of every single believer, and Jesus references two agreeing in prayer (Matt. 18:190). But how much “better” is 100 agreeing?
Specificity – At one extreme are the “bless everyone in the world”-type prayers. Some people simply run through a list of names, asking God’s blessing on those individuals. At the other extreme are highly specific and detailed prayers. Stormie Omartian has written more than a dozen books on prayer spotlighting the power of a praying husband/wife/parent/grandparent/etc. These books are filled with hundreds of specific topics for prayer, covering every aspect of people’s lives: their spiritual lives, their physical health, their friendships, their work lives, etc. How much “better” is this approach?
Intensity – We can either casually run through our list or spend extended time – sometimes agonizing – in prayer. Is my prayer more effective if I am emotionally worked up?
How do all these dimensions work together?
Even though I am a “left brain guy,” I am not looking for a formula. We can’t reduce prayer to specific “preferred” words, particular body positions, or minimum required length. But I am I’m trying to understand prayer dynamics a little better.
I would love to hear your thoughts on how these factors interact. What are your thoughts on the questions I raise? Please weigh in, but remember, no formulas!