One last high place.
5. Prayerlessness. If I could snap my fingers and change one thing about myself, I would ask God to make me more devoted to prayer. Don’t get me wrong, like you, I do pray. I pray almost every morning. I pray at staff meetings. I pray before meals. I pray with my kids before bed. I go on prayer walks. I pray in hospital rooms and in people’s homes. I pray for folks over the phone. My life is not devoid of prayer. But yet, oh how I wish my commitment to prayer were more, much more–more earnest, more faithful, more saturated in Scripture. What to do with Acts 6? I’m not sure what it would look like for me and my elders to hand off almost everything else so we can be fully devoted to the word of God and prayer (Acts 6:4), but I can’t imagine we are looking just like it quite yet.
I desperately want my church to be known as a church of prayer (not known for the sake of being known of course). We certainly aren’t failing in prayer. But I don’t know that we truly believe we would fail without prayer. Several weeks ago I listened to an interview with Ben Patterson where he talked humbly about the prayer meeting he leads at the church he attends and about the four hours he spends in prayer each morning. Hearing Ben, who I know from my days at Hope College, talk about prayer did not make me feel guilty. It didn’t make me feel competitive, like I need to pray as much as he does. And it didn’t make me feel skeptical, because I know Ben and know people who know Ben and I know that he is the real deal when it comes to prayer. Listing to the interview made me feel like I want to pray more. It made me want my church to pray more.
I could be wrong, but I seriously doubt that the church in North American is know around the world as a church committed to prayer. We have money, education, books, a lot of missionaries, and some great teachers. But do we have a reputation for serious, importunate, long-suffering prayer? What if the single biggest answer for the decline of Christianity in America and our paucity of evangelistic fruit was not the lack of a new strategy for engaging the culture or the lack of new music or the lack of new ways of doing church, but the lack of prayer? What if your church, my church, took a fresh look at all we are doing, put everything on the table and said, “Let’s put prayer first and we’ll see what we can fit in after that?”
Of course, we need prayer plus–prayer plus good preaching, good doctrine, good leadership, good strategy. But so often we think of everything else we can do besides pray. We end up minimizing prayer because 1) it’s hard and we aren’t very good at 2) we probably don’t really believe in its power. Deep down I think we believe that if we spend a lot of time praying, we’ll still have the same problems left to deal with. We just won’t have as much time to deal with them. Prayerlessness is the measure of our unbelief. We don’t really believe that God answers prayers. We don’t really believe that we have not because we ask not. We don’t really believe that God can do more than we ask or imagine. True, God doesn’t need to hear from us, but he ordained prayer so that we might be convinced of our need for him and he might be glorified in answering our prayers.
Reformed Christians believe most deeply in the sovereignty of God, the mercy of God, and in the power of God to whatever he desires. And yet, we often lag behind our brothers and sisters from other traditions when it comes to prayer. If the recent interest in and identification with Calvinism is truly a work of the Holy Spirit, and not just a passing trend, then we will see among the young, restless, and reformed a passion for God, a passion for truth, a passion for people in body and soul, and, infusing it all with unction and authority, a deep passion for prayer.
