Talk to Christians about why they don’t pray as much as they want or think they should, and you’ll hear a familiar set of reasons.
- Busyness and distraction. Our schedules crowd out prayer.
- Then there’s guilt and inadequacy: I don’t know how to pray well, so I guess I’m not very good at it.
- Spiritual dryness and the absence of immediate payoff: I don’t feel closer to God when I pray, and many of my prayers seem to go unanswered.
- And, of course, self-sufficiency. We don’t pray because we don’t feel we need God’s help in our daily endeavors.
All these explanations have some truth to them. But I suspect there’s an understated reason for our prayerlessness, one that often sits beneath the others and may even supersede them.
If You Knew Me, You Would Ask
In John 4, Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. When she arrives to draw water, Jesus asks her for a drink. Startled, she questions why a Jewish man would ask such a thing of a Samaritan woman. And Jesus replies, “If you knew the gift of God, and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would ask him, and he would give you living water” (v. 10).
In other words: If you knew me, you would ask me.
Applied to prayer, two realities come into view: the power of Jesus and the heart of Jesus. If you knew his power, you would ask, confident he can act. If you knew his heart, you would ask, confident he wants to.
Most Christians I know have little trouble affirming God’s power. We believe he can answer prayer. We confess his omnipotence. We trust his ability.
What we struggle with more is God’s disposition toward us. Does God want to respond? Does he delight to hear from us? Is his heart inclined toward generosity or stinginess?
Father Who Gives Good Gifts
Jesus addresses this question in the Sermon on the Mount. After urging us to ask, seek, and knock, he ties prayer to the benevolent heart of God:
Who among you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him. (Matt. 7:9–11)
Prayerlessness, then, often has less to do with doubting God’s power and more with wondering about God’s heart. If you knew who you were talking to, you would ask. You would know the Father’s heart is turned toward you in love. You would trust the eagerness of Jesus, our interceding brother. You would lean into the Spirit, who groans with and for us.
John Piper captures this connection in Desiring God:
A failure in our prayer life is generally a failure to know Jesus. . . . A prayerless Christian is like having your room wallpapered with Saks Fifth Avenue gift certificates but always shopping at Goodwill because you can’t read.
The inverse is just as revealing. Those who pray regularly do so because they see God as generous, a great Gift-giver who delights in blessing his children. A virtuous cycle then gets going. We pray to know God’s heart better, and as we come to know his heart toward us, we find ourselves praying more.
Trust the Heart of God in the Hard Seasons
Of course, trusting God’s heart doesn’t mean every request will be granted as we’d like. In seasons of suffering, trusting God’s goodness can be difficult. Calvin Miller gave voice to this tension: “In desperate times, living becomes an altar where you pray and sing because the only good news of the day is that God lives longer than you do.”
To trust God’s fatherly heart means we also trust his fatherly knowledge, a wisdom far surpassing our plans and perspective. God knows what we really want, not just what we think we want.
This brings us to the biblical word that best names God’s heart toward us: hesed—steadfast love, covenant faithfulness, loving-kindness that endures forever. Michael Card defines hesed this way: “When the person from whom I have a right to expect nothing gives me everything.”
That is the posture God takes toward us in Christ. It’s the heart that motivates his work of salvation and sustains our work of prayer. As John Starke describes it, prayer is grounded in the “divine hospitality available to us that makes God our constant friend and transforms prayer into communion.”
And that’s why prayerlessness is never ultimately a technique problem. It’s a knowledge-of-God problem. When we fail to pray, it’s because we’ve forgotten who invites us. But when we remember, and when we glimpse the Father’s smile, praying no longer feels like a soldier performing his duty but like the reflex of a child leaping into Dad’s outstretched arms.
If you knew him, you would ask.
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