Simple Prayer
Where do we start with prayer? How do we begin?
Verse of the Day
“Even if we feel guilty, God is greater than our feelings, and he knows everything.”
Today’s Devotional
Here’s one of the things I love about a relationship with God: I don’t have to become someone or something other than exactly who I am today to begin or restart anything with God. This includes prayer. I don’t have to know how to pray. I don’t have to know the Lord’s prayer. I don’t have to master childlike living. I don’t have to know what to say. But if I desire to have any sort of relationship with God, I must pray.
In Richard Foster’s book Prayer, he has an entire chapter devoted to what he calls “Simple Prayer.” If I had the patience to type out the entire chapter for you, I would. Because it is that good. I will humbly attempt to give the highlights of this beautiful chapter (over today and tomorrow) which encourages us to begin exactly where we are.
- We yearn for prayer and hide from prayer. We are attracted to it and repelled by it. We believe prayer is something we should do, even something we want to do, but it seems like a chasm stands between us and actually praying.
- [What holds us back] is the notion – almost universal among us – that we have to have everything “just right” in order to pray.
- Our problem is that we assume prayer is something to master the way we master algebra or auto mechanics. [It is not.]
- The truth of the matter is, we all come to prayer with a tangled mass of motives – altruistic and selfish, merciful and hateful, loving and bitter.
- We do not have to be bright, or pure, or filled with faith, or anything. That is what grace means, and not only are we saved by grace, we live by it as well. And we pray by it.
- We will never have pure enough motives, or be good enough, or know enough in order to pray rightly. We must simply set all these things aside and begin praying. In fact, it is in the very act of prayer itself – the intimate, ongoing interaction with God – that these matters are cared for in due time.
- God receives us just as we are and accepts our prayers just as they are. In the same way that a small child cannot draw a bad picture, so a child of God cannot offer a bad prayer.
- So we are brought to the most basic, most primary form of prayer: Simple Prayer. In Simple Prayer, we bring ourselves before God just as we are, warts and all. We open our hearts and make our requests. We do not try to sort things out, the good from the bad. We simply and unpretentiously share our concerns and make our petitions.
- In a very real sense, WE are the focus of Simple Prayer. Our needs, our wants, our concerns dominate our prayer experience. Our prayers are shot through with plenty of pride, conceit, vanity, pretentiousness, haughtiness, and general all-around egocentricity. No doubt there will also be magnanimity, generosity, unselfishness, and universal goodwill.
- Simple Prayer is the most common form of prayer in the Bible. [See Numbers 11:11-12, 2 Kings 2:24, and Psalms 137:9 for examples.]
- Simple Prayer involves ordinary people bringing ordinary concerns to a loving and compassionate Father. There is no pretense in Simple Prayer. We do not pretend to be more holy, more pure, or more saintly than we actually are. We do not try to conceal our conflicting and contradictory motives from God – or ourselves.
- Jesus calls us to Simple Prayer when He urges us to ask for our daily bread.
- Simple Prayer is necessary, even essential, to the spiritual life. The only way we move beyond “self-centered prayer” (if indeed we ever do) is by going through it, not by making a detour around it.
- When we pray, genuinely pray, the real condition of our heart is revealed. This is as it should be. This is when God truly begins to work with us. The adventure is just beginning.
Does this make anyone else feel better, or is it just me? There have been many days recently when I felt like I needed to pray “better”. Today, as I sat down to write about prayer, not knowing what to cover next, I felt this PULL to Richard Foster’s book. Yet my thought was, “I don’t have time to read more today. I’ve read so much already. I need to write.” Now I see why God was pulling me toward this specific chapter in this specific book. He knew it was exactly what I needed. Hopefully it helps you too. I am an ordinary person with ordinary concerns with a loving and compassionate Father that desires for me to talk to Him about all of it. And so are you.
Journal Prompts
Answer only the questions that seem relevant to you today.
How have you held yourself back from prayer and why?
How can you talk to God about exactly what is going on in your life today?
If Simple Prayer really is necessary, how can you practice it today?