Why do I struggle to pray?

Introduction

Be turning in your Bible, if you will, tonight to Psalm chapter 34. Psalm chapter 34. In just a moment, we’ll begin our study in that text. Before we do, let me tell you how much I appreciate your presence tonight. So glad that we could come together to study from the Word of God. Let me especially express my gratitude to those of you who have made it a point to be here every night this week. Some of you have made it a point to be at every service and to be attentive to the studies. And I’m so grateful for that. That is such an encouragement to me. It really uplifted me this week as we’ve had this time to consider the Word of God together. And I’m excited about this time we have tonight to look into the Word of God and to think about this struggle we have with prayer.

Last fall, we surveyed our congregation back in Beaumont, and we asked the folks there to share with us. What are you struggling with spiritually? What can we do to help you to walk more closely with the Lord? What kind of problems are you having with that? One of the items that came up again and again and again on the surveys that were returned to us was people telling us that they were struggling to pray. And I want to suggest to you tonight that that really strikes me as sort of an odd thing. That disciples would struggle to pray. Now, please don’t interpret that as being some kind of an unkind or an insulting remark, because I have to admit there are times when I struggle with it too.

I get busy and distracted and caught up in finishing a task, and I get focused on that one thing and I neglect other things, and before I know it, I’ve gone some time and haven’t really been devoted to prayer like I ought to be. I’ve neglected it in my own life. And when I realize that, when the light comes on, I feel guilty. I feel bad about that. I regret it. And I try to do better, and for a while I do. And then I get caught up in something else. And in talking to other disciples, it would appear that that’s not unique to me, that a lot of disciples struggle with maintaining a meaningful prayer habit. But let me say that the fact that a lot of us may struggle with it doesn’t make it any less odd.

Let me explain what I mean by that. God has given us, as his children, this amazing privilege. That we can talk to him. In Psalm 34, look down at verse 15 and notice what the psalmist says. He says, the eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous, and his ears are open to their cry. The face of the Lord is against evildoers to cut off the memory of them from the earth. The righteous cry, and the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. Think about it. All we have to do is turn our attention to the Creator of the universe. I mean, we don’t even have to speak the words out loud.

That’s not necessary. I just have to turn my thoughts to the creator of the universe, and what the psalmist tells me is that he will hear. Verse 15. His eyes are open or his ears are open to our cry. He will listen to me, pour out my fears and my concerns and my frustration and my anger and my request, whatever I want to bring before him. But I will tell you, that’s not the most amazing thing about prayer. We’re just getting started. Because not only does the Bible tell us that the God in heaven attends to the prayer of his people, but did you see something else there in verse 17? He says, the righteous cry and the Lord hears, and that’s only half the verse.

What else does it say? And delivers them out of all their troubles. The promise that goes along with the promise that God hears is that he also responds and to our prayers, he will act in our behalf in response to them. So that prayer literally becomes a way of accessing the power of God in our lives. He will hear us and he will answer. What an amazing privilege. That we can talk to the Creator of the universe anytime we choose with the confidence that he’s going to listen to us and respond to us. Now, do you see why I suggest that it is sort of an odd thing? That we would have a hard time doing that? If anything, folks, prayer ought to be something that we enthusiastically embrace as an integral, regular part of our lives.

How odd. That instead of being that to us, it has become instead the source of guilt and frustration and regret. I sometimes wonder in my mind how the God of heaven feels about that. That He’s opened the doors of heaven and said, talk to me. And not only do we not take this great privilege, but we feel so badly that we don’t. But it seems to me that his children are just as frustrated with this situation. I don’t talk to very many disciples who say, Yeah, I don’t really pray much, and I don’t really care. What I hear people say is, I don’t pray much, and I feel terrible about that. And I don’t really know why it’s that way. So, how about if we tackle that question tonight?

1. I Struggle to Pray Because I’m Too Busy

Here’s the question we want to think about. Why do we struggle to pray? If it is this awesome privilege that carries this promise of great blessing, why is it so difficult for us to get into a meaningful habit of doing this? What are some of the barriers that we’re going to need to take down that are keeping us from praying as we should? Why do we struggle to pray? If you were to construct a list tonight, what kind of things would be on your list? See if they’re close to some of these. Number one, some people will say, Well, I struggle to pray because I’m just too busy. Was that on your list somewhere? Of all the factors that seem to contribute to our neglect of prayer, this would likely be for a lot of Christians number one on the list, the first reason.

In fact, Bill Heibels was so concerned about it, he devoted an entire book to the subject. He called it too busy not to pray. I think he was on to something.

Maybe it’s not a surprise that we struggle with that. We are so very, very busy, and we live lives that are filled up with so many things. We work eight, ten, twelve or more hours a day, and when we’re not working, we’re commuting to work, driving there and driving back home, and then when we get home, it’s just relax and take it easy, right? Yeah, you’re laughing because that’s not the way it is. We’re going a hundred different directions. Kids have activities. We have activities every night of the week, you know. It’s really cool to find a night during a week where Heidi and I come home and say, there’s nothing happening tonight. How amazing is that? Maybe disturbing would be a better way to describe that.

But you know, folks, it’s not just that we’re busy all week long. We get to the weekends, and that’s catch up time. And our days are filled with all kinds of activities and catching up with all the stuff we didn’t get done during the week.

Do you remember when Sunday used to be a day of rest? Now the question is, how much can we squeeze in between morning and evening? And for a lot of disciples, it’s become forget about the evening, all we can fit is the morning. Even the little in-between periods of time, even those little places and crevices in our lives that aren’t filled with work or some other pressing responsibility, we still fill them up with stuff. Cell phones, text messaging, radios, iPods, television, game system, internet. Think about that. Every undistracted moment, there’s something that finds its way into that slot. And while I’m not suggesting that all of this stuff is necessarily sinful, it certainly distracts and impacts our prayer life. I think all of these things work in concert with each other to rob us of two things vital to meaningful prayer.

Time and solitude. And meaningful habit just won’t happen without those two things. Time to devote to doing it and the solitude to doing it in a way that is meaningful. You know, even Jesus understood that if you’ll turn over to your New Testament. I love this passage from the Gospel of Luke. I’m going to Luke chapter 5. I have this one marked in my Bible. Maybe you would want to mark it too. And Luke 5 in verse 15, the text says, but the news about him was spreading even farther, and large crowds were gathering to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses. And just pause for a moment and think about the scene being described. Jesus’ popularity is growing, and more and more there are people pressing for his attention that want to talk to him, that want to hear him, that want to be healed by him.

Bear in mind what is not mentioned here is the fact that he’s got these twelve disciples that are always in tow, always around, always needing to be attended to. Jesus, like us sometimes, was a very, very busy person. But look at verse 16. But Jesus Himself would often slip away to the wilderness to pray. I’m struck by that passage that Jesus understood what I think we forgive, and that is the need for time and solitude to pray. In another place in the Gospels, I believe it’s in Mark chapter 1, Mark says that Jesus would get up early in the morning and go off to some quiet spot and pray. And another place it talks about how he sent away the multitudes and sent the disciples ahead of him and then went up on the mountains so he could pray.

What do we see the Lord doing? Arranging the time to pray. The time and the solitude.

I think that often we are not praying because in our busy lives we just don’t have those two elements. Time. Solitude. And I might add that the example of Jesus also provides us with the solution. I don’t think anyone, any one of us would want to put our schedule up against his, okay? But if he could find the time to slip away in the wilderness, so can we.

We have to create the opportunities so that we can pray. However, I’m not sure that having said that, that we’ve really reached the core of our problem. It may be true that there are times when it is very hard for us to create the time and solitude to pray, but I’m a little suspicious that that’s not the problem because there are other moments, ladies and gentlemen, other very, very busy moments when that does not seem to be a problem at all for any of us. You know, when we moved away from Orlando five and a half years ago, and that next year, you guys had four hurricanes in one year. And we were feeling really good about being in Texas. And the Lord looked down upon us and said, That’s not fair.

So in the next three years, we had three hurricanes in Beaumont. The score’s almost even.

When we turn on the news and our weatherman says, folks, there’s a storm in the Gulf, and the projected path is bringing it right into Beaumont, and the Jefferson County Emergency Management Management Agency has issued an evacuation order for Jefferson County amid all the chaos. You know what we do in Beaumont? Same thing you do here in Orlando. We start praying. Even though we’re going through the busyness, and you know the panic of evacuation, don’t you? Packing everything up, batting down the hatches, getting the house ready, getting in the car, getting in the traffic, getting gas, getting out of town amid all of that. Oddly enough, with all that busyness, like no other time, we can pray all of a sudden. That there’s time in solitude to talk to God about this crisis.

2. I Just Don’t Know What to Say

To pray about our families, our brethren, our property, our homes. Somehow we find the time to talk to God. I’m just curious about that. Why is it that in very busy times like those, we’re not too busy to pray? Maybe, maybe it’s not really about time. Maybe it’s something else. Some people will say, Well, I struggle to pray not because I’m too busy, but because I just don’t know what to say when I pray. Has that ever been a struggle? I think new Christians can especially find this to be a problem, particularly if they have come from sort of a non-religious background where they just never did pray at all. Starting out to pray is rather kind of an odd habit to develop, isn’t it? You can’t see God.

You can’t read his facial expressions. You can’t get some kind of audible or visual response from him, and yet we’re trying to talk to him, and that’s well, that’s awkward. I think for someone especially who’s not done it before. But I don’t know that it’s just new converts who struggle with this. Even seasoned disciples can fall into the trap of just praying by road. Do you ever do that? You ever catch yourself thinking, well, I really ought to pray? And so you go through the prayer that you’ve prayed a hundred times, same phrases, same words. Maybe you shuffle the order a little bit to make it look somewhat different, but it’s the same thing. In fact, have you ever caught yourself just praying mindlessly, just muttering words and pause and thought, what am I doing?

God was wondering the same thing. God isn’t pleased with that kind of thing. He’s not interested in us just going through and exercise. He wants us to talk to him, to pour out our hearts. But you know, when you start trying to do that, I mean to really talk to God, again, it’s sort of strange. It can be kind of awkward. Sometimes we need help. And that shouldn’t surprise us. I’m thinking about the request of Jesus’ disciples in Luke chapter 11, verse 1. They’ve been watching him pray. Remember the request they brought to him? Lord, what? Teach us to pray. You ever thought about that concept? I think it’s been lost on our generation. I think some of us believe that prayer just ought to be sort of this automatic activity that everybody just naturally knows how to do.

I think we’ve done that with our kids. Don’t raise your hands, but how many of you have sat down regularly and instructed your children about how to pray? How many times do we sit down with our new converts and say, Let me talk to you? Let me do several lessons with you explaining the mechanics of prayer. You know, I think we make an assumption that everybody just gets it. And we don’t. They didn’t. They had to be taught. And that’d be an interesting lesson to preach. Josh will preach it later. I won’t run down that path tonight. However, I’m not so sure that we’ve gotten to the core of the problem yet. That it’s really just an issue of finding the right words to say, because there may be times we struggle with that, and yet I think there are times when we don’t struggle with it at all.

I don’t care whether you’ve been a Christian five minutes or 50 years. There are some moments when prayer comes right naturally, when we can easily find the words. Like when they post the announcement at our company that next week they’re going to cut the workforce by 25%. That’s been a little more real the last few months, hasn’t it? And maybe you and your family are living from paycheck to paycheck. If you miss one, it’s a crisis. And it may be just that your job is one that’s going to be lost. You know, at moments like that, we don’t sit around trying to find the words, do we? They just come. When the crisis is here, we find a way. We find the words. Which makes me wonder, is it is it really about knowing what to say?

3. I Just Don’t Feel Worthy to Pray

Or is it maybe something else? Others would say, my struggle is this. Then I just don’t feel worthy to pray. Well, let’s be clear. That not everybody has a right to speak to the Lord and expect that he will hear them and respond to them. I know that’s not very popular to say. Folks like to believe that anytime I want to talk to God, he’s going to be there and listening. It doesn’t matter how I’ve been living or what I’ve been doing, but the problem is, folks, the Bible doesn’t teach that. In fact, go back to our text. Psalm 34. Did you notice what the psalmist said in verse 16? We read the good part. Verse 15, the eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous, and his ears are open to their cry.

But then what does he mean when he says in verse 16 that the face of the Lord is against evildoers? That is said in contrast to his ears being open to the cry of the righteous. I think the implication is that God does not hear them. Maybe someone thinks that’s assuming too much, and so let’s go to Psalm 66 and get it a little more plainly stated. Psalm 66, look at verse 16. The psalmist says, Come and hear all who fear the Lord, and I will tell you what he has done for my soul. I cried to him with my mouth, and he was extolled with my tongue. Verse 18, here it is. If I regard wickedness in my heart, the Lord will not hear. But certainly God has heard.

He has given heed to the voice of my prayer. If I regard wickedness in my heart, the Lord will not hear. Isaiah said that was exactly what was happening in Israel. Turn over a few books to Isaiah chapter 1. As he brings God’s complaint against the children of Israel for their wickedness, he talks about the consequences. Isaiah 1, verse 14, the Lord says to the prophet, I hate your new moon festivals and your appointed feast. They have become a burden to me. I am weary of bearing them. Verse 15. So when you spread your hands in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you. Yes, even though you multiply prayers, I will not listen. Why would God ever not listen to someone who prays to him?

Verse 15, the last statement says, Your hands are covered with blood. That’s why. And so if I am defying God’s will for my life, if I am in essence shaking my fist at him and telling him, I won’t do what you tell me to do. We have no right to call upon the Lord and expect that he will hear and respond.

That’s not really the direction that I want to go tonight with this barrier, with the person that feels unworthy, because sometimes even people who are trying to serve the Lord still feel unworthy. I have been text messaging Lindsay all week. She’s a sophomore at our high school. And she’s struggling so with prayer. Oh, she’s a fine young lady. She tries to do the right thing. She just feels so terrible when she doesn’t. And so when she tries to talk to God, Lindsay feels so unworthy. And I will tell you that the person who feels that way at least has some right elements in place. There are some right dimensions to that kind of thinking. First of all, I think the person who feels unworthy.