Power To Pray

Prayer is a serious concern. That needs to be said, at least for my benefit, because it is just simply under-valued in every way. Do you doubt it? Try to come up with words to describe the significance of having a personal conversation with God. Then, consider that our ability to describe that is even lacking, let alone the fact that, any human idea of who God is fails to capture even a fraction of his greatness. But don't let that discourage you. No, instead realize the truth that if God is great and to relate to him through prayer is that important, then he must have something very special attached to it. And that is our hope.

I am embarking on a journey to find out what God, through Christ, has designed for us when we pray. I hope you will join me as I start with asking this question:

How can I find the power to pray?

My answer begins with this scripture from the book of John 16:12-15:

"I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come. He will glorify Me, for he will take of Mine and will disclose it to you. All things that the Father has are Mine; therefore I said that He takes of Mine and will disclose it to you."

Before understanding how I see the above passage giving us the power to pray we must look at some of the difficulties that exist for which we need this special power to overcome. Experience teaches us that even our best intentions to pray are often thwarted. Many people set out with ideas that they will rise early and pray, or stay up late and pray, or pray anytime they think of it, or pray every day before leaving home but what most of us can attest to is, those ideas are often forgotten. For whatever reason, and the list of reasons is very long, prayer gets pushed to the back burner of life more often than not. I realize that I am generalizing. So, if you have a different experience please share it. You likely know something I'd like to learn. But if we were to boil all the reasons down to their source we would probably come up with three primary causes for why we do not follow through on a desire to pray.

First, is the deception of the enemy. He will do anything to prevent a Christian from entering into a time of prayer. And I don't like to give him more credit than he's due, but he surely he must know that the praying Christian is stronger to resist him and more capable to deny his lies. And as the key text for this post tells us, Christ is glorified by our prayers. Satan hates that. In addition, we are constantly being swayed from spending time in prayer by the God-denying influence of the world around us. Jesus tells us that the world hates us because we are not of it (John 15:18-19). Because we now no longer belong to the earthly pattern of thinking we will find that the things we are drawn to, such as prayer, scrape against the grain. Now, the final and probably most powerful reason for our tendency to overlook prayer is our human nature, our fleshly constraint. The fact is we get distracted, hungry, bored and tired all too easily. Look at what Jesus said to Peter in the garden on the night he was betrayed, "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" (Mark 14:38). Given these obstacles, we must dedicate ourselves to discovering how God plans to enable us to overcome them.

Our single hope to triumph in attending to prayer, is the Spirit who has been given to us that are in Christ. This idea is presented by Jesus in the long discourse recorded in the book of John where our text is taken from. The Lord Jesus, as he speaks to his disciples keeps pressing this thinking with varied phrases that give us a glimpse into the nature of our relationship to him. These phrases begin in chapter 13 as Jesus washes Peter's feet he says to him "If I do not wash you, you have no part with me Me"(v7). Then Jesus makes himself comfortable and continues "...he who receives whomever I send receives Me; and he who receives Me receives Him who sent Me (13:20)". He further explains this mystery saying, "I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you"(14:16,17). Jesus goes on, "...he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him"(v21). The word "disclose" is where we are going to now turn our interest.

In the text from chapter 16 above, the phrase "He takes of Mine and will disclose it to you" is repeated. It is quite clear that Jesus is emphasizing this activity of the Spirit of truth, God's Holy Spirit. And I think that this is a direct reference to prayer. The reason that I think it is prayer as opposed to some sort of supernatural implant is this. The context of this passage is deeply personal, relational. He is pointing out to the disciples that what they are becoming involved with is not only going to affect them in their earthly lives, but it will be the pattern of eternity. And the language that Jesus is using is very caring and intimate. This is meant to invite us to encounter the living God in prayer. Just the thought of such closeness which will meet our deepest needs provides motivation necessary to overcome all kinds of resistance. That is the power to pray.