Since then, I set out to try praying prayers of lament.  My timing turned out to be pretty good, given events in the world.  And events in my own life.

In the process, I really found myself lamenting on two different levels.

Big Picture Lament

The first level of lament involved the bigger picture.  This bigger picture includes world events.  Events like civil wars, natural disasters, and economic downturns.  This bigger picture also includes systemic issues.  Issues of injustice, inequality, racism, and the like.

The crucial common thread in these bigger picture problems is that all of them are completely out of our individual control.  There is no decision we can make by ourselves that can fix these problems.  Our individual choices might be able to reduce our contribution to the issue.  Or, our choices might serve to alleviate some of the suffering involved.  But in the end, we cannot solve the problem all by ourselves.

Two bigger picture issues weighed particularly heavy on my heart the last few weeks.  The first is the Florida school shooting.  It is always a tragedy when this happens.  This time, I particularly hurt for the parents.  I had always thought primarily of the students, but this time I was particularly burdened for the parents.  Seventeen parents didn’t see their kids come home that day.  That breaks the heart.  And I cannot do anything to undo that day.   But I can lament.

The events in Syria also weight heavy upon my heart.  News coverage spills a lot of electronic ink debating who bombed who and telling us what the UN is trying to do.  Yet human suffering is occurring on unprecedented levels.  BBC news recently did a story that featured a little Syrian girl.  Her picture was at the top and she was quoted as saying, “At least in heaven there is food.”  True Despair.  Again, I cannot stop the fighting in Syria.  So, I lament.

Small Picture Lament

I found as I explored lament, another dimension of it emerged.  This is what I would call small picture lament.  This level of lament consists of all the hurt, pain and suffering that happens in our own lives.  In our own little worlds.  This is pain found close to home.  This is local.

Ironically, in small picture lament, we still don’t have much control.  This time the cancer strikes a family member.  This time the economic downturn causes our loved one to lose their job.  The tsunami strikes our hometown.  The effects of this suffering are felt nearby, and deeply.  And often we have no more control over these events that happen in our lives than we do the big picture events, like Syria.

Perhaps in the ultimate demonstration of God’s timing, within a week of putting up our post on lament I received some bad news.  Some events happened that could spell the end of my small business.  Nothing I did caused these events to happen.  Nothing I could have done could have prevented them.  And it is looking like there is little I can do to fix it.  Talk about hitting home.  This is time for lament.

Both Levels of Lament are Important

It is important that we as followers of Christ, lament on both levels.

Value of Big Picture Lament

Our social justice minded brothers and sisters in Christ helpfully remind us that as believers it is imperative that we know what is going on around us.  The Bible commands us to love and serve our neighbors.  Yet, if we are blissfully unaware of their needs – or even their existence – we can never fulfill the Biblical command.

One reason we avoid awareness of others, and in particular their hurts and struggles, is that we are afraid to enter their pain.  It hurts us to fully recognize others’ pain.  Especially if we are powerless to affect change.  We do not like to hurt.  We don’t want to hurt, so we tune out others who hurt.

Lament turns this thinking on its’ head.  Before lament entered the prayer tool box, we had nowhere to go with others’ suffering.  Through lament, we now have a place to take the suffering of others.  We can take it to God and process it with him.  Then we can act in whatever ways we can.

Small Picture Lament Vital Too

Like any thinking, this can be taken too far.  Some will teach we must be so concerned with others that we must never think about our own problems.  Or, that we are to utterly diminish our own problems in light of the ‘real’ struggles of others.  They will say, “How can you think about your problems like that, so many others have it worse.”

This is wrong thinking.  It is not wrong to acknowledge our emotion and feelings of powerlessness.  Even Jesus wept in front of Lazarus’ tomb.  It is wrong, however, to allow our feelings to become all consuming, to allow them to become central to our identity.  To allow them to rule.

Lament is a powerful two-sided coin when it comes to small picture hurts.  First, lament is powerful because it creates a context where we can express hurt and frustration.  We can let the emotion out, and we can be raw with God.  Peruse a few of Job’s laments, we might be surprised by what we read.

Second, lament also puts bounds on the expressed emotion.  As soon as we express the hurt and despair, we immediately shine the light of God on it.  We ask God to act.  Some else is invited to help.  A person who we openly acknowledge is loving enough, powerful enough, and wise enough to actually do something about the trouble.

We get the hurt out there but quickly fence it in.  Calls to God for help and reminders of God’s character put boundaries to the emotion.  The emotion is never allowed to overrun our lives or take over our hearts.

In the end, lament acts as a bridge from being emotionally and relationaly healthy to fully serving God.

It’s (NOT) About Time . . .

Time was a big question mark as I began my first few attempts at lament.  I knew lament was different than other forms of prayer.  Lament is not like Praise, or thanksgiving, or prayer walking.  These and many other forms of prayer are easy to put the clock to.  “I will prayer walk for 30 minutes.”  Simple and done.  But lament is more of an expression of emotion.  Thus, I was careful to not set unrealistic time goals for this type of prayer.  What I found was a very flexible way to pray.

Some Lament Was Short

I found some of my prayers of lament to be short.  That is okay.  Psalm 13 is a prayer of lament, and that Psalm contains only six verses!  King David was bothered by his circumstances, yet he found he was able to fully express his lament in six verses.  Lament does not need to be long to be helpful.

Not knowing how long I would need to lament, I planned to start my prayer block with lament, and with any time left, transition into my usual outline.  The outline presented in our post on how to pray.

I started with bigger picture issues that were weighing on my heart.  I opened my time with God and began to lament.  I explored and expressed to God my anguish over these situations in Florida and Syria.  Then I asked God to help.  I offered a few – weak – suggestions as to how he might intervene, but really I just begged him to do something.  Then I turned to recognizing his ability to do something.  I ended by praising God, which was the perfect segue to my usual outline of prayer that begins with praising God.

My first few tries at lament took only a few minutes.  Those few minutes we enough, however, to clear my mind and my heart enough to have a focused time of sitting in God’s presence conversing with him.

Sometimes We Have to Go Long

Sometimes pain hits closer to home.  At times, the suffering digs a little deeper into our being.

Like it did a few days after my first attempts at lament.  The day I heard the news I mentioned earlier.  The news that could spell the end of my business.  It only makes sense that when the bad news happens to us, the orders of hurt and frustration are many magnitudes higher.

Deeper emotion reasonably leads to longer lament.  Psalm 22 records for us a lament that is 31 verses long.  Job’ laments can run even longer.  Unsure what to expect, I sat down the day after getting this news to pray as I had before.  I planned to open my time with lament and then transition to my normal prayer habits.

This time however, the lament was different.  I really embraced the process.  I was compelled to really dig into each step of the process of lament.  I gave it to God.  I begged him to act in any one of numerous ways.  Or in ways I had not imagined.  I recognized and celebrated his attributes.

To my surprise, as I was lamenting, I suddenly heard my timer sounding.  I had spent my entire block of prayer in lament.  I was surprised I could lament that long, but that was how long it took to lift the weight that was resting on me.

Something More Important than Minutes . . .

It is important to not get caught up in how long we lament.  We learned that the length of a lament does not determine how meaningful it is.  The examples from the Scriptures teach us this, as does our experience.  Just lament as long as we need to.

What is more important to lament is honesty.  Lament cannot be meaningful if we are not honest.

The purpose of lament is to acknowledge reality, request help from God, and then be encouraged.  Encouraged because God is in control and is on the job.

If we are not honest with God, we short circuit lament.

First, dishonestly affects the quality of our relationship with God.  If we are untrue with our feelings, we are not being known by God.  We are hiding a part of ourselves.  No joy comes from fake relationships.

The second short circuit of lament is a byproduct of a fake relationship.  It is the sad fact that when presented with a difficult situation, many Christians see an opportunity to impress God with their strength or their faith, instead of seeing the situation as a time to seek help and encouragement from a loving father.  By seeing things this way, and by avoiding honesty, so many people miss out on the encouragement, hope and help to be found in God through lament.

Plants need good soil, plenty of light and water to grow.  If we want a plant to thrive, put it outside in the sun and give it some water.  Negative emotions are exactly the opposite however.  They thrive in the dark and in solitude.  When we are dishonest with God, when we hide these feelings in the closet, these feelings just grow.  They thrive.  And they eventually take over.  Being honest with God in lament puts these emotions in the light, his light.  And they are put in their proper place:  acknowledged but not in control.

We have a lot to gain by praying prayers of lament.

The post Tried It – Lament appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

At the beginning, I wanted to see what would happen if I set aside thirty minutes every day, and took that time to pray.  We are now about three months in, one quarter of the way.

What I have learned or gained so far?

A More Tangible Sense of God’s Presence

A sense of the presence of God is such a subjective, intangible thing.  Many Christians fear such discussions.  We tend to prefer a God we can neatly define and categorize.  A God whose works we can neatly label.  But when we start to talk about feeling God’s presence or God’s speaking to people, we quickly grow uncomfortable.

I would often include myself in that category.  Determining the authenticity of such experiences is vital, and requires much discernment.  To simplify things, the church in large part has dismissed such experiences.  Years ago, reading medieval mystics forced me to wrestle with the reality of a tangible sense of God.  Mystics like Bernard of Clairvaux or St Theresa of Avila would describe ecstatic experiences of God.  St Theresa wrote of the time when God’s presence was so real to her, and the joy so great, that she wept for hours.  My Western, logic driven mind struggled to comprehend such an experience.

But such experiences are real.  I read the mystics’ experience.  I personally know Godly people who find great comfort in God’s presence.  And, as a new believer in junior high, I will admit I had a sense of the presence of God.  But with time, the ups and downs of life, and the sinking deeper into Christian culture – that feeling faded.

That has changed recently.  In the last few weeks, as I pray, I have started to become aware of God’s presence in a very real way.  Like Darth Vader on the Death Star when Ben Kenobi shows up, “I sense a presence . . .”

I know in my head, theologically, that God is omnipresent.  Psalm 139:7-10 clearly teaches that God is everywhere all the time when it says, “’Where shall I go from your Spirit?  Or where shall I flee from your presence?  If I ascend to heaven, you are there!  If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!  If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.”  (ESV)

So to be clear, my prayer did not cause an absent God to return to my location.  What happened is that my consistent prayer has made my heart sensitive to his presence.

I won’t mince words, this sense of God’s presence is pretty awesome.  As mentioned before, new-Christian me had a sense of God’s presence.  Over time, and life, that sense faded.  One of the things I had hoped to gain from this prayer experiment was a renewed sense of God’s presence.  And with a twinge of joy in my heart I am glad to report that it has returned.  Not that I like to agree with dastardly villains, but I am right there with Darth Vader when he finishes his sentence, “I sense a presence that I have not felt in a long time.”

More Tools In the Prayer Toolbox

Going through this year long experiment, new tools are constantly being placed in my prayer tool box.  I have discovered forms of prayer that are new to me.  Forms of prayer that have existed for many, many years – but I am only now learning about.  Forms of prayer like lament.  I am also greatly deepening my understanding of more familiar forms of prayer – like praise.

Thanks to this experiment, my prayer tool box has both new tools, and old tools that have been sharpened and tuned.

More Tools = More Flexibility

Before starting this experiment, I had one way to pray.  It was an outline taught to me years ago when I was a young Christian.  This outline is solid.  It is simple to use, easy to remember, and keeps prayer reasonably balanced.

But it was the only way I knew how to pray.  When life’s troubles were about to overwhelm me, I sat down and prayed my outline.  Learning new facts about God’s character from studying the Bible, joy welling up inside, I prayed my familiar outline.  God times or bad times, I had one basic way to pray. 

In our relationships with others, we intuitively know that different circumstances require different ways of communicating.  The way a manager will talk to an under-performing employee will differ from the way a preschool teacher will talk to his student.  The way my college football coach talked to me on the field greatly differed from how my mother spoke to me as a child.  It makes sense that different moments require different approaches.

Yet our prayer lives are often founded upon a single form of prayer – like mine has been.  By adding new forms of prayer to my experience, by adding new tools to the prayer tool box, I can now approach my conversations with God the same way most of us approach our conversations with others.  I use an outline for most of my times in prayer, the one we learned about it in our post on How to Pray, but there are times when just slogging through an outline is not the way to talk to God.  Let me give you a recent example from my own life.

A few weeks ago, I experienced a serious set back at work.  Bad enough to bring into question the continued survival of my business.  Sitting down to pray the next day, with so much pent up frustration and emotion, working through an outline was not going to happen.  Instead of stuffing the emotion and praying the outline, or skipping prayer altogether that day (and embracing the ensuing guilt), I realized this was the perfect opportunity to lament.  I spent the majority of my prayer time lamenting my situation, asking God to rescue, and praising him.  Praying a prayer of lament in that moment really set my heart right.

The next day, I was still a little bothered by my situation, but I did not want to dwell on the problems.  I decided a “praise binge” was in order.  One of my experiments was to only praise God for my entire prayer time.  This day was a great day to do that.  I just wanted to remind myself, and celebrate, how amazing God is.  So, I opened up a Psalm and prayed through it.  It was super encouraging.  It was just what I needed.

On the third day, with fear and hurt no longer swirling around inside of me, I was ready to return to my usual prayer habits.   I returned to my regular methods of daily prayer and settled back into my usual outline for regular prayer.

As we can see, it was great for me to have the tools of lament and of praise in my tool box.  Situations arose where certain forms of prayer where more fitting than others.  Knowing about these forms of prayer allowed me to use them – and have the right kind of conversation at the right time.

More Tools = More Authentic

These newfound tools have also made my prayer life feel more authentic.

Every single one of us has endured a shallow, fake relationship.  A relationship where people act like they know and care for each other, but the reality is that the relationship is shallow.  Words are exchanged, but no meaningful communication is occurring.  No one is known, and no one is being known.

These relationships live everywhere.  With our barista at the coffee shop, or with our coworkers.  Sometimes even at home.  I will even admit to them being rather common at the churches many of us attend.

The sad reality is that for many of us, our prayer life is the same way.  When we sit quietly before God, we are not interested in being honest with him, we are interested in impressing him.

When times are tough, we fell the need to impress God with our strength, or our faith.  “Everything is fine,” they tell God.  We put on our stiff upper lip.  At other times, we want to make requests to God, but instead of asking for what we actually want, we ask for what we feel we should want.  Or we ask him for what we think he will give us, since, “He would never actually give me what I wanted.”

Our time in prayer, for many of us, is our time to impress.

It should not be that way.  And putting more tools in my prayer tool box makes it easier for me to be authentic with God.  When I hurt, I lament.  When I am happy at seeing God’s hand at work, I praise him.  After recognizing his work in my life, I offer thanksgiving.  New tools make it easier to be real with God.

The post The One Year Prayer Experiment – Three Months In appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

Children gassed in Syria.

I heard from the doctor today . . .

Life hurts.

Sometimes the hurt is just ‘bad.’  We can still cope with the trouble.  Our minds can create solutions to the problems.  Solutions which we then ask God to carry out.  Or sometimes demand that he does.

But there are other times when the hurt moves beyond bad.  Those times when we watch the news about Syria, or the Florida School Shooting.  Or times when we watch our own lives collapsing around us.  There are just no words.  There are no answers that we can come up with.  Events occur that we simply cannot understand, or sometimes even deal with.  These are life’s moments that bring us to the end of our rope, and we just do not know what to do.

It is in those moments that we must lament.

What is Biblical Lament?

Many of us are likely familiar with different types of prayer and their appropriate occasions.  When in need, a believer makes requests to God.  Upon seeing God provide, a believer will offer thanksgiving.  Recognizing how amazing God is when studying his attributes, praise should be forthcoming.  But, how are we to pray when life presents to us incredible pain and hurt, and no seeming way out?

This is the place for lament.  Author Michael D. Guinan defines lament as “a prayer for help coming out of pain.”

Lament is prayer, but not as most of us are used to.  It is a direct address to God, but it is a direct address to God driven by emotion.  The intellect drives much of our prayer.  We understand God’s attributes, so we praise him.  We recognize a need and its solution, then we make a request.  But pain and loss generate powerful emotions.  Lament is a form of prayer driven by these powerful feelings.  We go before God, and we tell him how we feel.  We tell him how much we hurt, we confess our uncertainty.  Then we remind ourselves how great he is.  Lament is prayer that is brutally honest.

We Need Lament

Lament has fallen by the wayside in our churches today.  For many reasons, our generation no longer remembers how to lament, and it is to our great detriment that this form of prayer has been lost.  Proper lament is healthy and vital to the growth of God’s people.

Lament Allows us to be Fully Human

We need lament because it allows us to be fully human in our walk with God.  People are not just an intellect.  We are an amazing blend of mind, emotion and will.  All of these are not always valued by believers, however.

Years ago, a large and influential ministry popularized an illustration using a train.  Fact, the truth of the Gospel, was the engine.  It provided the power to move the train forward.  Faith was the coal tender car.  It provided the engine with the fuel that it needed to propel everything forward.  Feelings were the caboose, a car that was not necessary to movement, and was to be pulled along by the other two.

I believe this illustration properly teaches the primacy of truth.  The truth of the Gospel and our faith in those truths should be central to our beliefs.  And to our lives.  Truth and faith should govern our emotions.  But, like many teachings, they can be taken too far.  Often times it is implied that as the caboose, emotions are not necessary at all.  Emotions become dismissed entirely.

This dismissal of our emotions ruins our relationship with God.  A relationship consists of knowing and being known.  If God only knows, and cares about, our will and our mind – he only knows and loves a part of us.  This is a relationship that will bring joy to no one.

Lament allows us to bring our full emotions to bear.  When they are at their greatest, the waves of hurt and fear and uncertainty can be brought out into the open and shared with our heavenly Father.  We find a caring ear.  And a glimmer of hope for help.

With out lament, we are never fully known.

Lament Allows us to Process Powerful Emotions Properly

The ups and downs of life produce many powerful emotions.  Prayers of Lament provide a process for believers to process these emotions in a way that allow us to express the emotions but then bring those feelings back in line with the character and work of God.

Proper lament, as we shall see later, is a cycle.  It is a process that begins with the expression of deep pain and hurt. Feelings are brought out into the open, instead of being bottled up or medicated with our favorite sin.  The sin, trouble or tragedy is named, often in great detail.  The situation and the pain are openly acknowledged.  There is no pretense of a stiff upper lip or of some super-Christian “everything is ok.”

Next, crucially, we remember what God is like.  We remember God’s power, that he is all-knowing, and that he is love.  We remember how he has come through for his people in the past.  It is recognized that as bad as it is to our eyes, this situation is not beyond God’s ability to work – and we acknowledge this to him.

Lastly, in recognition that the only possible source of rescue from this situation is God, we beg him to help.  After we tell God how bad it is, we ask him to fix it.  Sometimes we have suggestions for how God should intervene, but often the situation is so dire we have no request to make other than, “Help!”

It is these last two steps that make lament so healthy for Christians.  In lament we have a space in which to express our pain.  It is widely accepted that emotions need to be “let out.”  Lament allows the expression of such pain.  But these last two steps prevent the emotion from taking over, it prevents the caboose from going to the front of the train.  The feelings are acknowledged, but they are immediately put in the light of God’s character.  The circumstances – or the hurt – will not overcome us, says the truth of God’s word.  In addition, we seek help from the only one who can help.  Knowing God has promised to rescue his people in his time, hope and confidence emerge in the midst of the pain.  Through lament the caboose is acknowledged, but we also ensure it stays in the back of the train, guided by truth and trust.

In proper lament, we find expression and hope – by expressing it to the one who can do something about it.

Lament is not fun.  But it is good for us.  We need it.

Lament as an Expression of Faith

Tragedy and difficult times typically lead to feelings of despair or doubt.  Followers of Christ of fear both of these responses.  It is helpful for us however to recognize they are different – and one need not be feared.

Tragedy and suffering lead many into feelings of despair.  For the purposes of our discussion, we define despair as feelings of utter helplessness and hopelessness.  The one who has entered despair feels like all hope is lost.  Nothing can be done by anyone to remedy the situation.  “I can’t do anything to change things” they will say.  Or, “God cannot – or will not – do anything.”  People who have given in to despair have given up on God.  They do not believe he cares.  So, they run away from God when life hits the fan.

Doubt on the other hand is a totally different experience.  For our discussion, we define doubt as feelings of being unsure.  The one struggling with doubt deep down still believes God cares, and that he can do something to rescue them.  They would say, “I don’t know how, but I know God could . . .”

Since they still believe that God cares and is still powerful enough to act, they take their feelings – and their last desperate cries for deliverance – to God.  The one who is willing to lament then, is the one who still believes God cares and is active.  They would not appeal to a God they believe to be uninvolved.

Elements of Lament

Lament is not uncommon in the pages of the Bible.  The Old Testament Book of Lamentations is one long lament over the situation of Israel.  Over one-third of the Psalms are laments.  Jesus himself, in the Garden of Gethsemane, prayed a prayer of lament.

While each of these prayers are not identical in form, they do have many common elements.  Elements that we should understand if we are going to pray our own prayers of lament.

Addressed directly to God

Prayer is personal communication.  Prayers of Lament are no different.  Open by directly addressing our Heavenly Father.

The Psalmists give us great examples.  “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!” begins Psalm 130:1.  Elsewhere, Psalm 88:1 opens with, “O Lord, God of my salvation; I cry out day and night before you.”

Ask Heartfelt Questions

Bring before the Lord our questions about what is going on around us.  These questions are not so much appeals for information as they are expressions of hurt.

The writers of the Psalms guide us again.  Psalm 13:1-2 opens with some gut wrenching, honest questioning:  “How long, O Lord?  Will you forget me forever?  How long will you hide for face from me?  How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day?  How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?”

Complaining vs Expressing

Some of us will see this call to honesty and see it as nothing more than license to complain, to whine.  This form of prayer then becomes summarily dismissed.  But I was really helped in this by the example of Job.

Job was a Godly – and blessed – man who was afflicted by the devil.  He lost his wealth, his family, everything.  Broken in spirit his words to God were eye-opening.  He was so brutally honest, but as we are told, he never crossed the line into sin.

In trying to understand how that could be, it occurred to me that there is a difference between shaking the fist at God and pointing the finger at him.

Shaking the fist at God is the reaction of someone who does not understand what is going on.  They do not know why God has not acted yet, they are frustrated, hurt and angry.  They seek help.  Desperately, they shake their fist at God.  “I don’t like this!”  “Why don’t you help us yet!”  Those who shake the fist at God are not afraid to admit their hurt or fear, but they never question God’s character or love.

Pointing the finger at God is different.  To point the finger at God is to accuse him of wrong doing.  God, you didn’t come through for me!”  “God, if you let this happen there is no way you love us.”  “God, you were wrong in this!”  See the difference?

Job was able to shake his fist at God with out ever pointing his finger at him.  We are to do the same in our lament.  Be honest, but don’t turn it into license to accuse the Almighty.

Describe the Afflictions

Tell God about the dire circumstances surrounding you.  If our troubles are coming from other people, tell God who is oppressing us and how they are doing it.  If our pains are from our own decisions, tell God about the ways we have faltered and how those choices are causing pain to enter our lives.

God is omniscient.  He knows everything.  But he still wants to hear it from us – and we need to tell him.  Whether it be sickness, relational issues, injustice, war, oppression, or our own sin, tell God about it.  Let him know what the circumstances are doing to you and how it makes you feel.

The author of Psalm 3 looks about him and is bothered by the oppression of the poor he witnesses:

“In arrogance the wicked hotly pursue the poor; let them be caught in the schemes that they have devised.  For the wicked boasts of the desires of his soul. And the one greedy for gain curses and renounces the Lord.  In the pride of his face the wicked does not seek him; all his thoughts are, ‘There is no God.’  His ways prosper at all times; your judgments are on high, out of his sight; as for all his foes, he puffs at them.  He says in his heart, ‘I shall not be moved; throughout all generations I shall not meet adversity.’” (Psalm 10:2-6, ESV)

The Psalmist sees the oppression of the poor.  It bothers him.  It bothers him to the point of lament.

Pray for deliverance

After sharing with God about the injustice and the suffering happening right before us, ask God to intervene.  Ask God to deliver.

Ask God to heal the sick, free the oppressed, punish the unjust, stop the tyrant, teach the ignorant . . . in what ever form it looks like, beg God to rescue.

As one Psalmist says, “Rescue me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the grasp of the unjust and cruel man.”  (Psalm 71:4, ESV)

Express Confidence and Trust in God

After expressing our hurts, and after seeking help from the all-powerful God, we have reason for peace.  We have reason for praise – because “God’s got this!”

Praise God for his attributes, his traits that fill you with hope and confidence as you lean on him.  Remember the ways God has come through for his children in the past and praise him for those acts of deliverance.

Let our hopes and requests turn us to praise.  Just like they did for the author of Psalm 10:  “O Lord, you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed, so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more.” (vv.17-18, ESV)

Try it – Pray a Prayer of Lament

Unlike some of our other forms of prayer we have experimented with, lament is very situational.  It is response to a certain event or state.  Given this nature, it does not really seem appropriate to do as I have in the past.  To attempt to just lament for a week is not a good idea.

To attempt to lament every day would be forcing it.  Inauthentic lament is not life-giving, nor God honoring.

Recent events however, do give reasons to express lament.  The current and ongoing situation in Syria bothers me in my heart.  While the news reports speculate endlessly on who did what and which side was responsible for each attack, the reality is that there is human suffering occurring on a scale far beyond most American’s conception.  This is cause for lament.

No explanation is needed as to why recent events in Florida are cause for lament.  Every school shooting provides cause for lament.

So this week, as part of my ordinary prayer times, I will include a few times of lament.  I will express to God my deep pain over these events that I have no control over.  I will pray in a way that includes all of the elements described above.

To help you do the same, we have put together a short one-page PDF you can download from our Prayer Toolbox page to guide you in praying a prayer of lament.

We will give it a try and let you know how it goes.

The post Try It – Lament, Prayer for When Times Are (Really) Bad appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

So, it finally happened.  I missed a day.

I committed to praying everyday for thirty minutes a day for one year.  Going in, I did not expect to be perfect.  I figured real life would happen and I would miss a few days over the course of the year.

Just over two months in, I had not missed a day and I was feeling pretty good about this whole thing.  The flu befell me – twice – and I managed to pray as I drifted in and out of consciousness on the couch.  We traveled for Thanksgiving and stayed with family, and I prayed.  Our family even did a few days at Disneyland, and I managed to get in my conversations with God.  Confidence in my ability to go the whole year grew.

I imagined that it was going to take something big to keep me from my time in prayer.  I would fall seriously ill.  A family member would go to the hospital.  The zombie apocalypse.  I was confident that I was going to get this done.

And what happened?  It was dumb.  My day got going and I just forgot!

We had a busy Saturday planned.  I slept-in a little thinking the rest would do me good.  That just made me late getting breakfast out for the kids as my wife had an event to go to.  That made for grumpy boys and a rough morning.  After breakfast it was off to pick up friends and go have some fun.  Then drop off the friends.  Lunch, then off to work across town for the afternoon.  Rush home in time for a date night with the wife.  Finally, knock out in bed.  And don’t even think about praying until the next day.  Doh!

My Failure Illustrates the Greatest Dangers to Our Prayer Lives

It is embarrassing to admit that I missed a day.  It is even more embarrassing to admit that I missed a day because I simply forgot to pray.  The story of how I missed my conversation with God is not, however, all bad news.  I learned a lot from it.

Through this experience, I came to recognize what are, in our time and place, some of the greatest dangers to our prayer lives.

Busyness Is Not the Culprit

A lot of folks at this point would expect a diatribe against busyness.  They would expect me to talk about how Americans are too busy and rail against how we have allowed ourselves to be consumed by busyness – or the things our busyness buy us.

But I live in reality too.  We all have responsibilities.  Families must be provided for.  Homes must be kept.  Communities must be served.  Relationships must be tended to.  There are many duties that we take on that we must fulfill.  Our real problem is not that we are busy, it is that we do not manage our busyness well.

The Threat of Poor Priorities

We all have a lot to do.  Everyone wakes up to a long to-do list for the day.

Often on these busy days there is a moment when we recognize that we are not going to get everything done.  The last TPS Report is going to have to wait until tomorrow.  That pile of laundry waiting to be folded is just going sit in that chair one more night.  At that moment when we realize we have more work than hours, something important happens.

Our mind starts to rank our list of to-do’s.  For many of us, this happens unconsciously.  After a look at the list, our brain starts to pick out certain tasks to do, and certain tasks to leave out.  If we are not intentional we will simply start picking out the easiest ones, or the quickest ones.  Or the ones we think will bring us the most pleasure.  Or the most praise.

And I am willing to bet if a person is overwhelmed by tasks and does not already have an established prayer life – they are not going to pick “pray for 30 minutes” first off of the list.

This moment is when we can begin to better manage our busyness.  We better manage our busyness by intentionally sorting our list of tasks according to our priorities.  If we are Christians striving to build meaningful prayer lives, then we intentionally decide to choose to pray first.

This was my mistake that day.  I failed to prioritize prayer.  I want to be a man of prayer.  But that morning I prioritized sleep over it.  Then I prioritized breakfast for the boys over it.  Then the boy’s event with their friends became more important than prayer.  Then going in to work. And so on and so on.  I failed to pray that day mostly because I failed to manage my priorities.

If prayer is a priority I will make time for it.  I failed to do so – and I failed to pray.  Pure and simple.  We will never find time for something unimportant to us.  We will always make time for something important to us.  Prayer is no different.

The Threat of Momentum

The other great, and every day, threat to our prayer lives we face is our failure to manage our momentum.  Or in other words, we fail to recognize when we go ‘in-mode’ and can’t stop until the list is done or we collapse at the end of the day.  We have all experienced those times when we start knocking things of the list, we get focused, we start actually getting things accomplished and so we just keep moving from one thing to the next with out ever slowing down.

Momentum got a hold of me that day.  I got breakfast out and cleaned up.  On to the boys’ event.  Knocked that out.  On to lunch.  On to work. Onward until the end of the day.  Looking back, I had some natural breaks between events, but I choose to keep moving on my to-do’s.  I was well intentioned.  I was trying to be helpful to people around me, people I love.  But I failed to manage my momentum.  I failed to push pause when I needed to.

I have found it is very difficult to control momentum.  It is hard to stop in the middle of the day, calm my mind, still my spirit and converse with God.  I do not think I am alone in this.  That is one reason I prefer, and recommend, prayer early in our day.  But sometimes, if we are going to be people of prayer, we need to be able to push pause, get out of ‘mode’, and pray.  And then even harder, hit play and try to rebuild our momentum.

Our Response to Missing a Day Reveals a Lot About Our Heart

If you choose to take up a One Year Prayer Experiment of your own.  You will likely miss a day over the course of an entire year.  Many different reactions to such a failure can be expected.  What ever the reaction is, I think they can reveal a lot about our heart, and our view of God.

If You Experience Feelings of Anger

Author Neil Andersen says anger is due to a blocked goal.  There is something you want, and when events occur that keep you from getting what you want – anger erupts.  So, when we miss a day of prayer, and we feel angry, we must ask ourselves the question:  What is it I am not going to get because I missed a day?

If we are feeling anger in this circumstance, my guess is that we are probably trying to get something from God by performing well.  If I pray every day, God will like me more and give me what I want.  Or, If I pray every day, God will owe me what I want.

Stop right there.  Here is some truth.  We cannot control God.  He is sovereign.  We cannot coerce God.  He is omnipotent, or all-powerful.  It is impossible for any human to put God in a position where he owes us anything.

While we cannot control God, we can appeal to God.  While the Lord is sovereign and all powerful, he is also full of grace, mercy, love, goodness, kindness and generosity.  We can ask God for things with a humble appeal, and then submit to his decision.  Being all-knowing and wise, he knows what is best anyway.

If we find ourselves in a place of anger, we must confess our attempts to control God or earn his favor.  Then trust God to take care of you.

If You Experience Feelings of Guilt

After one takes on a commitment such as this, and then fails to come through, it is very easy for us to fall into feelings of guilt.  It is easy to allow thoughts of, “I did something I should not have.” arise.  This is normal.  This is conviction.  Conviction is what causes us to stop, turn around, and head back to God when we stray.

At times however, these feelings are allowed to go too far.  When these thoughts change from, “I did something bad.” to “I am a bad person.” we have moved from conviction to condemnation.  Conviction inspires us to change and to return to God.  Condemnation tears us down.  It brings us to a spiritual halt.

When in the Grip of Guilt

When facing overwhelming feelings of guilt, we have two things to do.  The first thing to do is to keep things in perspective.  God does not love us or accept us because we are perfect.  Our pride and our enemy want us to believe this – in order to drive us away from God.  But this is simply not true.  God does want us to strive to be perfect, but we are neither saved nor kept by what we do.

As we process our guilt in perspective, zoom out a little.  For us to give in to the destructiveness of guilt and condemnation, we have to believe that God’s anger over one missed day far outweighs his pleasure at the three, five, ten, fifteen, thirty, or however many days we did pray.  Perspective.

The second thing we need to do when facing feelings of guilt is to remember grace.  Grace is defined by theologians as unmerited favor.  It means God gives to humanity gifts they do not deserve and could never earn.  We were made part of God’s family by his grace (Ephesians 1:5).  God grants us the gift of salvation by his grace (Ephesians 2:8-9).  Grace is what allows our relationship with God to begin, and it is grace that allows it to continue.

So, when we struggle with guilt, and the voices in our head tell us, “I am a bad person,” stand on grace.  Remind ourselves of the truth, the fact that “I am a bad person – who was chosen by, loved by, adopted by, and saved by God because of his grace.”

One Other Response

At the moment I realized I missed a day, I was tempted to feel both anger and guilt.  In that same moment I chose to go a third way.

I remembered grace.  I reassured myself of the truth.  Even though I missed a day, God does not love me any less.  And even though I failed to do something I said I would, my salvation was not at risk – because no part of it depended on my activity anyway.

I also chose to learn from my mistake.  I looked closely at what happened.  Understanding how that day unfolded, I recognized my failure to prioritize and to control momentum got the best of me.  It got the best of me that day, and looking back, I can see that these have been a struggle on many Saturdays and Sundays.  Going forward I have decided to always pray first thing on the weekends.  It is tough to wake up early on those days.  I desperately want to sleep in, but I want to pray even more.  So, I wake up early and get my time with God.

Choose to redeem your mistake by learning from it.  Like a coach I had in college told us once, “Make an error once and it is called learning.  Make an error twice, it’s a mistake.”

After reminding myself of God’s grace and choosing to learn from my error, I simply had to make one more choice:  Just keep praying.

When the next day came, I prayed again.  I picked up where I left off and kept going.  Or as one little blue fish from the big silver screen might say, “Just keep praying, just keep praying . . .”

The post It Happened – I Missed a Day of Praying appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

Fears Going In – Mostly My Needs!

One of my trepidations when I decided to try this mode of prayer was the lost opportunity to make requests to God.

There are a lot of needs in the world.  I have a lot of needs, real and imagined.  We all have places in our lives we need God to work in.  In light of those, we do not want to completely stop asking God to work in and around us.  Yet, we desire to learn how to – and how to get proficient at – offering praise to God.  This becomes a matter of faith.

Is God all-knowing?  Yes!

Is God all-powerful?  Yes, he is!

Is God loving and kind?  Indeed!

If I believe God is all of these, then I must be able to believe that God can take care of me for one week without me telling him how to do it.  So, to acknowledge both my continued need for his help, and my faith in his oversight, I began each prayer time with these lines:

“Lord, you know everything, including all of my needs.  You are also all-powerful.  You can easily take care of everyone of those needs.  So, for the next few days I am going to trust you to know what I need and to take care of it while I just praise you.”

And then I would praise God and thank him for his work.

What I Experienced Only Praising God

As one might expect, the removal of any requests from my planned time of prayer led to a very different experience of prayer.  This new experience of prayer manifested itself in three main ways.

Sense of Giving to God

It felt different to only offer praise to God for one week.  So often in my time with prayer, I feel like I am trying to get God to do something.  Or I am trying to get God to give me something.  It is right to make requests of God.  Philippians 4:6 tells us, “do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” (ESV) However, I see now in my own heart, how prayer was – in a subtle way – my time to “get mine.”  I had an agenda – right or wrong – I was after something.  And that something was not always joy in the presence of the Lord.

That sense was flipped on its head when I offered only praise and thanksgiving to God.  No longer did I come to God each day seeking something material.  No more did I enter his presence hoping to leave with something I did not arrive with.  Now, instead, I came to God to give him something.  To give him something valuable, to offer him something he treasures.  I entered God’s presence just to give – and it felt good.

I was not expending effort trying to convince God I needed something.  And, I was not stressed about receiving what I wanted.  In God’s presence, I just gave to him.

I found the comparison between my old and new ways to pray was similar to comparing the experience of Christmas as a child versus as an adult.  As children, despite our folks’ best efforts, we spent a lot of time worrying about our Christmas list.  We wrote it out.  It was edited frequently, often after new TV spots appeared.  We made sure it was communicated to Santa and to our folks.  Christmas was about getting what we wanted.

Like little Ralphie and his Red Ryder BB gun from The Christmas Story.  Ralphie’s desire was clear, and it was pervasive.  Christmas for Ralphie was all about getting that BB gun.Years go by, and now as a parent, I have enough stuff.  What I want most is to give my kids presents that they will love and enjoy.  As I move from kid to parent, Christmas moves from stress about what I want to the joy of giving.

Limiting my prayer to praise and thanksgiving had a similar affect on my experience of prayer.

Praise is Uplifting

Only offering praise and thanks to God for a week turned out to be uplifting.  In order to truly praise God for who he is, it was necessary that I spend a fair amount of time understanding and contemplating God’s character and attributes.

It was uplifting to me to be reminded of how awesome God really is.  It was encouraging to remember that this person I spend all of this time praying to is so powerful, caring, holy, wise, kind and so on and on.

Refocused by Praise

Along with the emotional uplift, I found a refocusing occurring in my heart.  As I spent so much time contemplating God’s amazing attributes –  I felt encouraged and uplifted as I said – but I also began to think more about God.  I began to focus more on how able he was to act and about how willing he was to act in our behalf.  To think more about these, in turn, led me to think less about all the things I wanted, all my requests.

It reminded me of a story Tim Keller tells about a woman in his church.  He preached a sermon on the Lord’s prayer and advised his people to praise God before they make their requests.  A few weeks later a woman came to him and relayed how praising first had affected her:

“”Before,” she said, “I would run right to my prayer list and the more I went through all the problems and needs, the more anxious and burdened I would get.  Now I’ve started spending time thinking about how good and wise he is, and how many prayers he’s answered of mine in the past.  And when I get to my own needs – now I find I can put them in his hands and I can feel the burden coming off me rather than on me.”” (Keller, Prayer, 190)

My sentiments exactly.  Placing focus on the greatness of the provider shrunk the size of the needs.  And the corresponding levels of concern.

Limited Time Only

In practicing only praise and thanksgiving for one week, I gained a lot.  I took on the knowledge of how to really praise God.  I also became comfortable with the process.  And, I gained the aforementioned joy of giving, the uplifting, and refocusing.

The practice did seem to have a shelf life however.  For me, after five days things began to change a little.  I still enjoyed praising God.  But I was beginning to miss the other forms of interaction.  Whereas most people who pray are imbalanced away from praise, I could feel the imbalance moving into the direction of praise.  I continued on for the full week, but the best results came in the first five days.

If you want to try this, I would recommend planning to do it for only 3-5 days.  Long enough to actually learn something and to be changed by it; yet not long enough to dig a new rut.  Inserting a single day of praise and thanksgiving into your prayer routine could also be beneficial.

Going Forward

The skills I learned have their place in my normal prayer routine as well.  After completing my week of praise only, I returned to the outline that Jesus taught.  We learned this outline in an earlier post.  That outline opens with praise.  Now when I open with praise, I open the Word.  I read a few verses about God’s attributes, or I read through a Psalm.  As I read I keep the eyes of my heart open to God revealing himself – and I respond in praise.  Then I continue to move through Jesus’ outline of prayer.

I am considering future “Praise Binges” of 3-5 days.  Single days of praise only are also on my radar.  I think they would really have their place on days when I am particularly discouraged or anxious.  When the problems are overwhelming and threating to overrun us, putting all our attention on love and power of God seems a new best-practice.

Praise Only – A Great Place to Restart the Prayer Life

Many have tried prayer in the past.  For whatever reason it did not work out.  We did not receive what we wanted.  What we begged for.  What we sought for over YEARS.  And so, we gave up on prayer.

Yet, now, the desire to pray returns.  It won’t go away.  We want to come back, but we are afraid.  Afraid God will not come through.  Concerned we will once again not receive what we wanted – what we needed.  If we are feeling this draw to pray and at the same time feeling fearful, praise and thanks only is a great way to come back.

Praying in a way that is made up entirely of praise and thanksgiving is totally non-demand.  God can’t fail to receive praise.  He won’t drop the ball on accepting our thanks.  Praying this way transforms prayer from a test of God and his willingness or ability to act and turns it into a space where we can acknowledge the reality of his greatness.  In that space, over time, we can become comfortable in God’s presence again.  Over time, our hearts will refocus.  The focus will move away from the hurt to the felt need.  And over more time, it will hopefully shift from our felt needs, to the good Lord.

As we are focused more on God and his attributes by praising those traits, hopefully our spirits will be lifted and a spark of confidence will ignite.  A tiny little spark that will give us the confidence to once again ask God for something. However small a request it is.

The post Tried It – Only Praising and Thanking God When I Take Time to Pray appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

Praise.

We all have heard the word thrown around.  Often the first thing to come to a Christian’s mind is the time of praise and worship that most American church services open with.  This is a time of singing intended to prepare our hearts to hear the Word of God preached.  But this is not a blog about singing or leading worship.  This is a blog about prayer.

The outline for prayer that Jesus taught us to use opens with the command to praise the Father, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name . . .” (Matthew 6:9, ESV)  Jesus teaches us our experience of prayer should begin should begin with praise.  Yet for many of us, clear praise is absent from our time spent talking to God.  Or it is vastly outweighed by the time spent asking for things.

Offering praise to God brings joy, both to us, and our heavenly father.  It has many other benefits for us as well.  If we are going to learn how to incorporate praise into our prayer lives, we should start at the beginning.

Praise Defined

Before we can start to effectively praise our Father in heaven, we must understand what it means to praise God.  This is how we define praise:

Praise is recognizing God’s character and attributes and in response to them, offering glory and adoration to God.

Let’s work through this definition.

Praise begins with God’s character.  God reveals his attributes to humanity through his inspired Word, the Bible.  He tells us what he is like.  The Bible boldly declares attributes he manifests that we could never show – his incommunicable attributes.  God is all-knowing.  He is all-powerful.  God is present in all places at once.  The Bible also proudly displays other attributes of God that humans can demonstrate – his communicable attributes.  God is love.  The Lord is patient.  The Scriptures paint a clear picture of who God is and what he is like.

We must start with this picture the Bible paints.  Do not start with what we think God is like.  And do not start with what we want God to be like.  Psalm 145:18 says, “The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.”  (ESV)  If we call upon, or offer praise, to God in a way that does not line up with his true character – we lie to God and ourselves.  We waste our time.  No one benefits.  If we respond to God in line with the way he really is – God will be near.

The starting place for praise, then, is God’s true character.  The starting place is the Bible.  Crack open the Bible and read about who God is.  Then we respond. 

Recognizing an attribute about God is not enough.  Intellectual assent is insufficient, insufficient to bring about joy in our hearts or change our lives.  And it fails to fully glorify God.

Instead, we contemplate upon a trait of God and we respond to it from our head and our heart.  We start to respond with wonder and awe.  We realize how amazing it is that a being could be the way he is described.  Pausing, we are filled with wonder as we think about how big the universe really is, and that God sustains it all.  We are overcome with awe when we realize how powerful God really is – and how weak we are in comparison.

Our minds and hearts also respond with the offer of Glory to God.  The more we realize how different, and better, God is from any other being – the more we should be inspired to tell him how much better he is than anything else in all creation.

Ultimately, our response should turn to adoration.  Seeing all of the attributes that are true about God and knowing how superior he is to all things – and then finding out this God if for us . . . Love is an appropriate response.  Praise is an expression of that love and appreciation.

Praise vs Thanksgiving

A point of clarification is in order here.  Discussions of praise will always be incomplete if they do not in some way include thanksgiving.  Praise and thanksgiving are closely related, yet they are different.  There is some overlap in their application, yet they are distinct.

The crucial difference is this:  Praise is to glorify God for who he is.  Thanksgiving is to express gratitude for what he has done.

Praise is concerned with who God is.  God is celebrated because of his unique and perfect attributes.  “Lord, because you are truly omnipotent and in control of everything, you are worthy of fear and respect – you are far above all people!”  “Father, you are a generous God who gives willingly, freely and happily!”

Thanksgiving, on the other hand, is concerned primarily with what God has done in our lives.  It is our expression of gratitude for the ways we have seen God’s hand at work in our lives.  “Thank you Lord, for providing the extra $1,000 we needed to pay the rent.”  “Thanks be to you Father, for giving me the right words to say at that important moment yesterday.”

Being closely related, praise and thanksgiving often blend together.  “God, you are so generous, thanks for being so generous to us and providing a job when we needed it.”  Both are vital.  Since both are vital, it is important that we clearly discern between the two so we can be sure to include them both in our prayer life.

Why We Need to Praise God

There are several good reasons for us to be careful to include the regular practice of praising God.

Praise is the Ultimate Expression of Our Purpose

The Bible is clear on what God’s purpose is.  The prophet Isaiah speaks for God when he says, “For my own sake, for my own sake I do it, for how should my name be profaned?  My glory I will not give to another.” (Isaiah 48:11, ESV)  God is telling his hearers that what he is doing, he is doing only for his sake.  Only for his own glory.  He is not doing it for their sake.  For his.  He will not share the credit, nor the recognition.  The prophet Ezekiel expresses similar words from God in chapter 20 of his book.  Three times in that chapter God says through him that “. . . I acted for the sake of my name . . .”  (Ezekiel 20:9,14,22, ESV)  God’s purpose is his the magnification of his name – his glory.

Everything God does, everything he allows to happen, he does in order to magnify and increase his glory.  John Piper says, “God governs the world with glory precisely that he might be admired, marveled at, exalted and praised.”  (Piper, Desiring God, 46)

If then, God’s purpose is his glory, and if he manages everything in such a way as to increase his glory – one of humanity’s main purposes must be the offering of praise to God.  Piper says, “The climax of his (God’s) happiness is the delight he takes in the echoes of his excellence in the praise of his saints.”  (Piper, Desiring God, 46)

The offer of praise to God fulfills the purpose of two parties.  It makes God happy.  It fulfills his purpose – he receives glory.  Praise also fulfills our purpose – as creatures made to praise the creator.

Praise Roots us in Reality

In our culture it is not that hard to get disconnected from reality.  Our pride, our hurts, our preconceptions and our ignorance – can all color the glasses we use to look at our world.  It is easy to carry inside of us a picture of reality that does not truly, or completely, line up with reality.  This is particularly true of spiritual reality.

The practice of praise forces us to recognize many realities we may me ignorant of, or realities we may be suppressing.  For example, as we recognize the fact that God is sovereign, we are forced to realize we are not king of our own lives.  We also are forced to acknowledge that we are dependent.  The more we rightly praise God, the more we know him rightly, and the more our sense of reality will conform to the actual reality.

Living life with a correct concept of reality will free us from many frustrations and false hopes.

Praise Completes Our Joy

We have made the point already that one of our main purposes is praise.  If we regularly practice praising God, then the joy and satisfaction that come with fulfilling our purpose will follow.  But there is more to it than this.

Think back to the last time we saw a movie in the theater that we thought was amazing.  A movie we loved.  What happened for the next few days?  We talked about the movie!  We asked our friends if they had seen it.  Excitedly we told them about it, about how entertaining it was, or how about how it moved us in a special way.  We eventually tell our friends they need to go see it.  And if a friend of ours has already seen it, together we extol the virtues of the film.

What is going on in this situation?  We watched a movie and enjoyed it very much.  But the experience of watching the movie was not enough.  Watching the movie again was not enough.  We are so full of excitement and joy that we have to tell someone about it.  Piper perfectly explains this phenomenon when he says, “We praise what we enjoy because the delight is incomplete until it is expressed in praise.”  (Piper, Desiring God, 49)  You see, praise completes joy.  We gain a great amount of pleasure from watching the movie, but we gain more satisfaction when we tell our friends how great the movie is.  And we gain even more when they go see it, enjoy it, come back and praise the movie with us.

This principle works exactly the same with our experience of God.  When we praise God, we experience God’s true self.  The response to such a joyful experience is to share it with someone.  The difference between the experience of God and of the movie is the direction of the praise.  When we glorify the movie, we aim the glory towards others.  The virtues of the movie are directed towards others.  With the experience of God, we express some of the glory towards other people, but primarily we offer the glory right back to the source:  God himself.

Learning who God is and what he is really like should thrill our hearts.  Responding to that by praising God completes that joy.

The Process of Praise

Recognizing the benefits of praise, both to God and to ourselves, the next question is obvious.  How do we effectively praise God?  We offer a simple process.

The first step is to open the Bible.  To praise God, we must know him as he reveals himself.  We have created a PDF that you can find on the PRAYER TOOLBOX PAGE that includes a list of God’s attributes and the verses where they are found.  You can download the guide to guide you on this step.

Second, as you read these verses, pick out one of God’s attributes to focus on.  Then meditate on it by asking yourself these questions as you pray:

1)       Lord, I realize you are ____________.

2)      Lord, because you are ____________ . . . I know . . . I feel . . . I can . . .

3)      Lord, if you were not ____________ . . . I would feel . . . I would think . . . I would do/not do . . .

Finally, because we want to be well rounded, include a time of thanksgiving.  Consider your life and circumstances, and think about specific ways God has expressed this attribute towards us.  Then tell him thank you.

Putting Praise into Practice

As Part of the One Year Prayer Experiment

When something becomes unbalanced, it is often necessary to shift some things around in order to restore balance.  Regardless of what the imbalance is in, be it physical weight, skill, or knowledge, one area must be built up to restore balance.  When the imbalance is found in our skill set, extra effort is often required to fill in the gaps and re-balance our skill set.

I think the practice of praise falls into this category for many of us.  If we started out day one praying like Jesus taught us Matthew 6 – which we talked about in a previous post – we would have a perfectly balanced prayer life.  Many of us, however, did not get off on the perfect first step.  I certainly did not.

Many of our prayer lives end up unbalanced.  The amount of time and effort we spend on offering praise to God pales in comparison to the time and effort we spend asking God for things.

So, we need to really work on praising God in order to build our skill and comfort with offering praise to God.  And, we may need to rebalance an out of whack prayer life.

To jump in with both feet, I am going to do something a little different.  I am going to spend one week spending my daily thirty-minute time of prayer only offering praise and thanksgiving to God.

A Word of Caution

I will not recommend praying this way as a long-term practice.  But to accelerate learning and to restore balance this could be a useful practice.  It also has a place for occasional short periods of just wanting to praise God.

With that said, try this method of prayer.  Just do not do it for more than a week.  Or else we will end up unbalanced in the opposite direction in which we started.

I will give it a try and LET YOU KNOW.

The post Offering Praise to God – A Primer appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

As Christians, we know we should pray.  From listening to sermons and from reading Bible, we have the sense that we should be taking time out to talk to God.  We look around us and we see a few people praying.  Pastors are always praying – but that is their job, right?  And we see the super-spiritual types praying, those people who seem much farther down the road than we are.

But we may not be a pastor.  We may not be one of those super-spiritual types.  Should we be praying too?  Should prayer be a regular habit?  Is prayer something that is required of Christians?  Is talking to God something that all Christians – not just the turbo ones – are commanded to do?

The Bible gives us a few intersecting lines to look at in regards to this question.

The Bible Models Prayer for Us

Old Testament Examples

It seems reasonable that if prayer is something vital to our spiritual health and joy, then Biblical characters would be people of prayer.  If talking to God is important, we will see it demonstrated by those characters so familiar to us.  Let start in the beginning of the Bible and take a look.

In Genesis 20, Abraham has lied to King Abimelech about his wife by saying she was her sister.  Abimelech takes her as a wife.  The whole issue gets sorted out after some angst, and the story ends with Abraham praying for Abimelech, “Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelech, and also healed his wife and female slaves so they bore children.  For the Lord had closed all the wombs of the house of Abimelech because of Sarah, Abraham’s wife.” (Genesis20:17-18, ESV) Shortly thereafter, Abraham’s son Isaac prayed, “And Isaac prayed to the LORD for his wife, because she was barren.  And the LORD granted his prayer, and Rebekah his wife conceived.”  (Genesis 25:21, ESV)

The great Moses, of the Red Sea fame, was no stranger to prayer.  Pharaoh, surrounded by the plague of flies, pleads with Moses to take them away.  “So Moses went out from Pharaoh and prayed to the LORD.” (Exodus 8:30, ESV) When the nation of Israel angered God yet again, Moses interceded, “Then the people cried out to Moses, and Moses prayed to the Lord, and the fire died down.”  (Numbers 11:2, ESV) Then take a look at Psalm 90. We are told in the opening notes that Moses wrote this Psalm.

Hannah was a woman deeply distressed by her inability to have children.  Not only a personal tragedy, but in that culture, a public humiliation.  Her response was a heartfelt pouring out to God of her feelings and desires, “She was deeply distressed and prayed to the LORD and wept bitterly.”  (1 Samuel 1:10, ESV)

King David, the man described as a man after God’s own heart, was certainly a man of prayer.  As the author of a great many of the Psalms, it is clear he knew how to pray.

The prophets were mouthpieces God used to communicate to his people.  As such, they were well versed in speaking on behalf of God.  Yet, they also spoke to him as well.  Surrounded by an army holding ill intent, “Then Elisha prayed and said, ‘O LORD, please open his (the opposing general’s) eyes that he may see.’  So the LORD opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.”  (2 Kings 6:17, ESV, parenthesis mine)

The prophet Nehemiah was in the presence of King Artaxerxes – his boss – and he was sad.  We all have had moments of sadness, but bringing such melancholy before this king was strictly verboten.  The king noticed, and confronted Nehemiah with it.  Nehemiah confesses he is bothered by the condition of Jerusalem, the home of his people.  Nehemiah relates what happens next when he says “. . . the king said to me, ‘What are you requesting?’  So I prayed to the God of heaven.” (Nehemiah 2:4, ESV) Nehemiah asks God for help in a moment of crisis and confrontation.

Daniel was in the habit of praying.  His friends knew it.  His enemies knew it.  He was so committed to his habit, and to his God, that his enemies convinced the king to ban prayer to anything except himself for thirty days.  “When Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem.  He got down on his knees and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously.” (Daniel 6:10, ESV)

New Testament Examples

Our Lord and savior Jesus Christ was himself a man of prayer.  Luke tells us, “. . . he would withdraw to desolate places and pray.”  (Luke 5:16, ESV) Several times we are told of Jesus going up mountain to pray.  The night before he goes to the cross, he prays in Gethsemane.  Jesus talked often with his Father.

Like his mentor, Peter had picked up the habit of going off by himself to pray.  “The next day, as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the housetop about the sixth hour to pray.”  (Acts 10:9)

Paul was another person who conversed frequently with the Lord.  In many of his letters he speaks of his prayers for his readers.  He tells the Roman believers, “For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his son, that without ceasing I mention you always in my prayers . . .” (Romans 1:9-10a, ESV)  To the Ephesian church he writes, “. . . I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers  . . .” (Ephesians 1:16, ESV)  In a touching letter to his protégé Timothy, Paul tells him, “I thank God whom I serve, as did my ancestors, with a clear conscience, as I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day.” (2 Timothy 1:3, ESV)

We could speak of numerous other examples of believers praying to the heavenly Father.  This list is by no means exhaustive.  The Bible records in its pages many other characters who converse with God.

Looking at the example of all of these men and women, spanning thousands of years and throughout the story of the Bible, it is becoming clear that the example God’s people set for us is that God’s people pray.  If your bracelet says WWJD – What Would Jesus Do? – it is clear that at least one of the things he would do is pray.  If you had a bracelet that read WWMPBD – What Would Most People in the Bible Do? – the answer remains the same.

God’s people pray.

Example is not enough

The pages of scripture contain a great many examples of people who pray.  We have examined some of them.  But, some of us might advise caution.  An example cannot always be a command.  After all, for many of these characters, the Bible also records their major failures.  Failures which include adultery and murder.  No one looks at the presence of these actions in the Bible and construes a command.

This gets us down to brass tacks.  Does the Bible actually command believers to converse with God?

The Bible’s Commands to Pray

As it turns out, the Bible does command Christians to pray.

Paul closes his first letter to the Thessalonian church with a list of things they need to remember to do.  On that list is a short sentence on prayer, “. . . pray without ceasing . . .” (1 Thessalonians 5:17, ESV) This command is pretty clear.  Pray.  We must pray.  Occasional prayer is not enough.  Prayer during just times of crisis is insufficient.  We must pray without ceasing.  We must be constant and fervent in our prayer.  The God of the universe wants you talk to him – regularly.

Jesus also issues a directive to pray.  He prefaces one of his parables by saying, “And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.” (Luke 18:1, ESV) The parable he goes on to share helps people understand that they need to pray, and pray a lot.  He proceeds to tell the parable of the persistent widow.

The parable is the story of a widow who is being oppressed and appeals to a judge for justice.  This judge does not fear God or people.  He is not motivated by a love for God, and he does not care what other will think about him for ignoring the widow.  So, he ignores her at first.  But the widow keeps coming to him seeking justice.  He resists for a while, but ultimately gives in – only to get her to go away.  Jesus implies we need to be like the widow.  We must pray.  And we must pray frequently.  We should pray so much that God could identify with the judge.

For good measure, Paul adds a few more commands to pray.  To the Colossians he says, “Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving.” (Colossians 4:2, ESV) Clearly an imperative: pray.  Pray faithfully.  Be sure to be grateful and give thanks as well.

To the church in Philippi he pens one of the more familiar passages on prayer, “. . . do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”  (Philippians 4:6, ESV)  A word of encouragement to many.  Great hope comes from being told to not worry and ask God for your requests.  Make no mistake though, the word in the original Greek for “let your requests be made known” is in the imperative.  This is an encouragement, but also a command.

At a fundamental level then, prayer is a matter of obedience.  The Word of God commands us to pray.  We must strive to become people of prayer.

The Command is Paired with a Promise

For some people, reading the above may have just been a “bad news first” moment.  Already stretched by life’s demands, we are now adding something else to the to-do list.  We might feel like our burden just got a little heavier.

This is a normal response.  Theologian John Calvin knows this is a common response, and in his Institutes of the Christian Religion he points us to hope.  He acknowledges the command to pray.  He Calvin also points out that the command to pray is paired with promise.

Preaching his sermon on the mount, Jesus tells his disciples, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.  Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?  Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?  If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:7-11, ESV)

What an amazing promise.  Especially for someone who has just been ordered to pray.  Yes, we have to pray, but we are also promised that God will answer our prayers.  Prayer is not intended to be some empty ritual that we do simply because we must.  It is intended to be powerful experince.  And it is intended to be effective.  What we seek in God’s presence – we will find!  What we ask for – we will get!  Our time conversing with God will have meaning far beyond rote ritual.

Jesus’ promise is a broad overarching promise to make our prayer effective.  God’s Word reveals many other, more specific promises in regards to prayer.  In the Psalms, Asaph tells us of God’s promise to hear our prayers: “I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, and he will hear me.” (Psalm 77:1, ESV)

The apostle Paul reminds the church in Philippi, “And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.”  (Philippians 4:19) This verse appears on a lot of coffee mugs, but it is still true.  God promises to meet our needs.

The pages of God’s word include other promise in regards to our prayer life.  One is God’s promise to guide us (Psalm 31:3).  Another is his promise to give us wisdom when we ask (James 1:5).  One of the most comforting to me is the promise to always forgive us when we confess our sins (1 John 1:9).

These promises change everything.

Promises and Lottery Tickets

Imagine I had the power to order people around.  Then imagine that I ordered people to purchase lottery tickets every day.  Most peoples’ response would be negative.  Why?  People’s response would be negative because they know they are not going to win.  The odds are too great.  Any normal person would be angered by a command to waste significant time, effort, and money pursuing something that would not benefit them in any way.

Many people think about prayer in the same way.

But imagine that along with the power to order people to purchase lottery tickets I also had the power to guarantee that you would win a large amount of money every time you played.  Purchasing our lottery tickets would jump straight to the top of our daily to-do list.  Why? – because we now expect the time, effort and money expended to be richly rewarded.

God’s promises in regards to prayer are just like the guarantee for the lottery tickets.  These promises mean that we will attain what we are seeking.  We will not be wasting our time or efforts – because God promises to hear and answer.

Exchange Our Lottery Tickets for Plane Tickets

These promises are great news to us who don’t have a consistent prayer life up and running.  This pairing of command and promise allows us change our whole conception of prayer.  Gone is the idea that we must endure drudgery and rote ritual.  In its place we have the idea of hopeful expectation.  Praying is not buying a lottery ticket.  It is buying a plane ticket.  We buy plane tickets with the expectation of getting somewhere.  We can now pray with the same expectation.

So, let’s embrace our responsibility to pray.  Embrace it with hope.  And start praying.  Or start again.

The post Do We Have to Pray? Is Prayer Recommended – or Commanded? appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

In the first week, we have already learned some important lessons.

Commitment Requires Adaptability

I started on this experiment with great excitement.  Eagerly I planned out my preliminary posts, and I picked November 20th as a start date.  As a typical guy however, who has no awareness of birthdates, holidays and anniversaries – I picked the week of Thanksgiving to start my experiment.

The first week of the experiment brought me an important lesson:  Be adaptable.  A fixed time and place to pray are crucial to creating a habit of prayer.  And they help sustain a habit of regular prayer.

But we cannot always control our circumstances.

I cannot always control mine.  Our family had plans to go out of town to visit family for Thanksgiving.  It was impossible to cancel our plans.  I considered pushing back the start date a week, but that is not real life.  If we are going to build consistent prayer lives, we are going to have to learn how to pray during vacations and during holidays.  So, I kept the start date, packed up the van and departed.

The smart play in this situation is to be proactive.  Get the lay of the land.  After unpacking the van and sketching out our schedule for the weekend, I knew what times were available and what places were free for me to be in.  Knowing this, I picked a new time and place to be my prayer times.  I, essentially, went through the process of selecting a consistent time and place that we talked about in a previous post.  If it will help, feel free to go to our Prayer Tool Box page and find our PDF guide to picking a place to pray.  Print it out and take it with you when you travel.

In my situation, it turned out that early morning was the best time to pray.  In a house full of kids, I find it is best to pray before they get up.  I set my alarm for 6:30 am.  With so many kids in the house, our youngest slept in the room with us.  In the mornings he is a light sleeper.  The chances of turning off an alarm, getting changed, and getting out without waking him were slim.  The place to pray became sitting up in the bed.  Normally I would not recommend this, but we must be adaptable right?  Part of adapting my prayer times to this new time and place also required a nod to bedtime.  To get up early and pray in bed meant that I had to be well rested enough to stay awake.  That meant no late nights watching cheesy holiday movies with the family.  I made sure I went to bed earlier than I usually do while on vacation.

These adaptations worked.  I managed to not miss a day of praying 30 minutes every day over the entire holiday weekend.

Praying For a Full 30 Minutes?

Thirty minutes seems like a long time to pray.  Holidays or not.

In our culture thirty minutes is a long time to do anything, much less sit still and quiet.  This thirty minutes figure I am sure intimidates many of us.  Our understanding of prayer, however, can greatly shape our view of the thirty-minute figure.

Thirty minutes is a long time to pray if all you are doing is making requests.  We pray for ourselves first, asking for our needs and desires.  Then we pray for our family.  Next we make requests for our friends.  We check our watch and see only twelve minutes have passed.  The rest of the time is then spent trying to think of everyone we have ever known or of every world situation we can think of.  That is not fun.  That is not relationship building.  This is not the experience we are after.

The outline for prayer that Jesus provides for us presents a very different idea of prayer.  We talked about Jesus’ teaching on prayer in more detail in an earlier post.  To summarize, Jesus taught us that to have a healthy and balanced prayer life, we must include five elements of prayer:  praise, justice and unity, requests and thanksgiving, confession, and protection from the enemy.

This is a picture of prayer that is not just asking God for things.  It is a picture of talking to God about several different topics in different ways.  A give and take.  Never having prayed this way, I set out faithfully to give it a try.  I hoped the variety offered by this outline would make it easier to last thirty minutes.

What I Found Trying to Pray for Thirty Minutes

To my surprise, I had no trouble making it for thirty minutes.  In fact, I found that my timer was usually going off when I was finishing confessing or starting to pray for protection.  And this is not because I am a babbler.

I had to think about why this was happening.  Then it occurred to me.  I was not just making requests, I was not sitting around desperately trying to think of things to ask for.  As I had hoped, using Jesus’ outline, I was praying for a variety of things in a variety of ways.

For many, our outline for prayer looks like this:

Make requests                 :30

Praying like that is hard, and it is not enjoyable.  But what I was beginning to experience looked more like this:

Praise                                                     :05

Justice & Unity                                      :05

Requests & Thanksgiving                   :10

Confession                                            :05

Protection                                              :05

Total                                                       :30

Thinking of prayer – and the thirty-minute figure – in this way is groundbreaking.  This method of prayer breaks that thirty minutes in smaller, more user-friendly pieces.  Pieces that are much less intimidating than the big thirty-minute number.  I am not recommending you set a series of five minute timers, but I am suggesting we think of our prayer time in this way.  It eases the intimidation of such a long time frame, and it unloads the burden of expectation.

Praying this was refreshing, and stretching at the same time.

Being Stretched in Two New Ways

Praying consistently with this new outline stretched me in other ways I did not expect.  Two of these components of Jesus’ outline have never been a consistent feature of my prayer times.  Adding them to my daily practice of prayer forced me to grow and stretch.

Praying for Justice and Unity

Jesus instructs us how to pray with his Lord’s prayer.  In it, he tells us to pray for, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  (Matthew 6:10, ESV)  We are to pray that people here do God’s will, that they live the way he wants them to.  To put this in a nutshell, we are to pray for justice and unity.  Two crucial markers of life in the Kingdom.

I will admit, starting on this prayer experiment, I never have spent much time or effort praying for justice and unity.  I have given the practice lip service.  In times of great enough social upheaval that it makes the news I prayed for it.  When peace and calm returned, these prayers would go by the wayside.  I quickly came to realize I had a major gap in my prayer life.

Working my way through the Jesus’ outline for prayer, I came to this portion each day.  That moment was like hitting the brakes.  Not knowing what else to do, my first attempts came out vague and broad.  “Uh, Lord, please take away the injustice in the world.”  Well, it’s a start.

So as part of my time of praying for justice and unity, I went to God for help.  I admitted I was not doing very well, and asked God to start showing me more specific ways to pray for this.  God revealed to me, as the week went on, two ways.

Praying for Justice and Unity:  Pray for Peoples’ Eyes

First, God challenged me to pray for people’s eyes.  Their spiritual eyes that is.  Particularly as Americans, we have trained our eyes to tune out many of the injustices we see around us.  We have also trained our minds to dismiss them, to excuse them, or to turn it into an occasion for blame.

So, I was challenged to pray that peoples’ eyes would be opened to the injustices that surround them – my own eyes included.  I started to pray that people would start to see how people on earth are not doing God’s will, as they do in heaven.

Only two days later, my son came to me with questions about abortion.  If you want to think about a topic that is interwoven with multiple layers of injustice – that is it.  And it was great fodder for my time with prayer.

We will see what else God brings to the forefront as we continue our prayer experiment.

Praying for Justice and Unity:  Pray for Peoples’ Hearts

God challenged me in a second way to pray for justice and unity.  God challenged me to pray for peoples’ hearts.  It is one thing for people to start seeing and realizing what goes on in the world around us.  It is a totally different thing for them to care.  An incident years ago in New York City perfectly illustrates this.  A woman was attacked one night.  She screamed in the alley repeatedly, but no one came to help.  No one even alerted the authorities.  During the subsequent investigation, the police interviewed numerous people who lived nearby.  Dozens of people reported hearing the screams – but not one of them went to help or called the police.  They all knew what was going on, but none of them cared.  Or they assumed someone else was doing something about it.  Knowledge is not the antidote to apathy.

So, I began to pray that once people began to see what was going on around them, they would be moved.  That they would care.

This is clearly not the only way to pray for injustice, but it is a start.  And it is encouraging because people who see and who care – become people who act.

If we have trouble praying for justice and unity, start with these two requests.  Make sure we pray for our own eyes and hearts – not just those of others.  And then pay attention.

Praying for Protection

Praying for protection from temptation and from the enemy were also new ways to pray for me.

In his Screwtape Letters, one of C.S. Lewis’ antagonists describes the two most common errors people make in thinking about spiritual warfare and the activity of the demonic.  The first error is to see demonic attack everywhere.  Every unfortunate event that happens to us is because we are under attack.  If we don’t feel well, it’s because we are under attack.  If we are tired, it’s because we are being oppressed.  Every single temptation comes from the devil or one of his minions.  “The devil made me do it – or at least tried to make me do it” is their slogan.

The other common error is a pendulum swing in the other direction.  The error is to completely ignore the reality that there is a spiritual war raging around us.  If we are sick, it is because we spent time around sick people.  If we are tired, we are tired because we binge watched Netflix all night.  Christians in this error do not realize, or acknowledge, that they are involved in a war.  Or at the very least, they think they are a safe distance from the front lines, immune from any real danger.

I must confess that while not totally in that category, I lean toward the latter.  I will readily grant that a war is going on around us, but I never considered myself an important enough target to worry about any attack.  It was easy for me to explain away much of the negative events in my life as being the result of my own choices.  Doing so left me with the feeling of some control over my life.  If the bad in my life is due to my poor decisions, I can bring good into it by making good decisions.  Circumstances were under my control – not the enemy’s.

I also harbored a little fear about getting swallowed up in the whole spiritual warfare thing and drifting into the first category of error.  But a balanced and Biblical worldview must prevail.  There is a war going on.  The forces of the devil do not have free reign to do as they wish, but they do have some powers to attack.  Some struggle in life is due to their efforts.  Some temptations do come from their lies.  There is an enemy, and Jesus says to pray for protection from them.

So, I began to pray for this protection.  Like my experiences with praying for justice and unity, my prayers to start with are rather vague and general.  They are becoming a little more focused as I practice though.  I recognize that I have areas I struggle in.  It makes sense then to ask for extra protection from temptation in those areas.  I pray for protection for my family.  At the end of the week, it still feels a little odd, but I will press on with this.

After my first week of praying for protection, I can’t say I recognize any major changes in regards to spiritual warfare.  Many of those more practiced in spiritual warfare warn, however, to expect spiritual attack if you decide to take up arms this battle.  We will see.  And I will let you know.

A Great Start to the Experiment

The first week of the experiment is in the books.  I learned a ton.  I am being forced to grow in several different areas at once.  And that is exciting.

The post Tried It – Praying Regularly appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

Starting today, I commit to pray:

• Everyday
• For 30 minutes at a time
• For 1 year

Why would I commit to such a thing?

I have gone through quite a process to get to this point.  It all started not long ago when I came to the startling realization that I needed to pray.  I realized I had a huge gap in my relationship with God, and it became clear that prayer was the solution.  Because I did not pray, I was missing out on something.

You can read all about this process in my post titled “The Funk – Conviction – A Challenge.”

I invite you along on this experiment to keep me accountable and to maybe inspire you to begin a prayer experiment of your own.

A Swirl of thoughts and Emotions

As I begin this journey quite a few thoughts and emotions are swirling about.

Fear

One of them is fear.  I am not the most disciplined guy in the world.  I am afraid that I simply will not keep this commitment – that I will get all excited, get week in, and then flounder.  I harbor fears that my experiment will all come to naught because I just won’t follow through.

There is also a little fear that nothing will change.  I have experienced periods of greatly satisfying prayer.  And I have endured dry times.  Admittedly, I am to blame for most of these dry times.  It’s my fault my devotional life is lousy when I am the one not showing up.  It’s also a built-in excuse.  Can’t blame God for not showing up if I don’t.  But when I do show up, there is the fear he might not.

But I choose to trust he will.

Excitement

In the swirl is also a lot of excitement.  All those periods of satisfying prayer – and great intimacy with God – have all been times when my prayer life was consistent.  Others I know have had similar experiences.  I hope to get back to that.  Or to something different, but better.

Curiosity

And to be honest, there is also quite a bit of good old curiosity in the mix.  I just want to see what happens when both God and I show up for our time together.

The post The One Year Prayer Experiment Begins Today! appeared first on One Year Prayer Experiment.

The first form of prayer I am going to experiment with will, however, seem rather mundane.  The first form of prayer I am going to practice is simply going to be regular, daily prayer.

I am not currently in the habit of praying daily.  I will send up a short distress call when I am stressed, or I may send up a wish list when I want something.  But daily prayer that has no other goal than relationally connecting to God is not currently a part of my life.  Step one it seems, is simply to start praying, and start the process of making it a habit.

Discipline Required

A healthy dose of self-discipline is going to be required since daily prayer is not already a habit.  I think of people who want to lose weight and get in shape.  It is really no secret what it takes to accomplish this.  A person simply needs to eat fewer calories and exercise more.  We could spend hours figuring out what exactly that looks like in our lives and create detailed plans for our fitness journey.

But, nothing about our health will change until we actually start eating less and exercising more.  Lasting change will only come about when these two things are done regularly.  Making this a part of our lives, especially in the beginning, may not feel natural.  It may not even be fun.  Over time, momentum will build and it will become easier.  It will become fun.  A habit will be formed.

The habit will not form, however, without good old self-discipline.  I wish I could spiritualize it for us.  Create some kind of formula we could work through that would instantly change our desires and make this feel natural – or more “spiritual.”  But that is just not how it is.

Make it Easier on Ourselves

So, we need to be disciplined to create a habit of prayer.  At some point we need to make the decision to pray and then just do it.  We would be prudent however, to help ourselves out and make the process as easy on us as we can.  There are two significant strategies we can use to make this process easier.

Pick a Regular Time

There is a major difference between saying, “I will work out more” and saying, “I will work out on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 5 AM for 30 minutes.”  One statement is a wish.  The other statement is a plan.

For a prayer life to become a habit we need a plan.  We will never “just have” or “just find” time for meaningful prayer.  We must plan it into our lives by intentionally setting aside a regular time everyday to do nothing but pray.

Stop and think about your schedule and routines.  Try to find a time in which you are consistently free.  We must find a time when we do not regularly have appointments, phone calls, or other pressing responsibilities.  You must be available to pray.  Make sure this time we are trying to set aside will be a time when other events won’t spill over into your time.  This is the classic problem with lunch time prayer.  Long meetings, working lunches, or similar things often push lunch around.  Make sure to find a time that will not be subject to the intrusion of other events.

Also, make sure to pick out a time when you can truly be “disengaged from your day.”  This means we are able to stop our mind from running in a thousand directions and are able set aside the to-do list long enough to focus on talking with our Father.  I have found it difficult when I am in work mode to slow down my mind enough to thoughtfully engage in prayer.  It has been equally difficult for me spin my mind back up to work speed some days after I pray.

Be aware of how your mind works and how your day flows.  Pick out a time and if you need to, write it in your calendar.

Pick a Regular Place

The second part of a successful prayer plan is to pick a regular place to pray.  Just like a consistent time will make forming a habit of prayer easier, so will having a consistent place.

An ideal place to pray will have several characteristics.  All of them involve reducing distraction.  The first characteristic of a great place to pray is that it is a place where you can be alone.

Whether they intend to or not, people can be a distraction.  With just their presence, people can force us to be relationally “on,” meaning we are diverting attention towards them to be able to respond to them if the need arises.  Being by ourselves allows us to completely focus on God.

The second characteristic of a great place to pray is that it is quiet.  This one sounds obvious, but it bears repeating.  Trying to formulate a praise to God while taking heads debate the news on TV is going to be tough.  Resisting the urge to sing along with the radio makes it hard to listen for God’s guidance.  A place of quiet is a place free from distraction.

A third characteristic of a great place to pray is that the place is not inherently stressful to you.  This is a more subjective trait and will vary from person to person.  But in essence, if being in a place causes you stress, it will be prudent to find a different place to pray.  For example, don’t pray in a playroom cluttered with toys if the mess stresses you out.  Or, don’t pray at your desk if you are unable to temporarily put out of your mind the pile of work sitting in front of you.

Removing the Biggest Distraction of All

Our cell phones are amazing tools.  They allow incredible amounts of productivity and connectivity.  Our phones are also incredible distractions.  With constants ringing and alerts, they demand constant attention.  In addition, the ability to respond almost instantly seems to have created the expectation that we react almost instantly to anything our phone alerts us to.  In the pursuit of a distraction free environment, I will challenge all of us to put the phones away while we pray.  Turn it off.  Leave it in the other room.  We are on a more important call.

What (I Hope) Works for Me

For me, the time that works best is going to be in the morning.  I currently wake up early in the morning and work out in my garage.  When I begin the experiment, I will get up a little earlier, perform my workout, and then settle down and pray for 30 minutes.

This time meets all the criteria for me.  I am consistently free at 5:30 am.  Meetings or appointments never happen this early for me.  The phone is not ringing and the work emails are not rolling in yet.  The kids are all still asleep.  It is quiet, and I can be free from distraction.

Some of you might ask why I don’t pray first, then work out?  If prayer is so important – a priority – it seems that I should pray first, and then work out.  The answer goes back to knowing how my mind works.  My mind does not wake up so fast in the morning.  I have tried praying first thing in the morning in the past.  What usually happens is that after I crawl out of bed and go find a place to be still and quiet, my mind just wants to go back to sleep.  So, often after trying to pray in the morning I would be double frustrated.  First, I was frustrated because I did not actually spend 30 minutes connecting to God, I just wasted 30 minutes trying to stay awake.  Secondly, I accomplished nothing, and gave up 30 minutes of sleep.  I had neither slept nor connected to God.  Lose, lose situation.

What I have found, however, is that if I get up and do a short workout, it wakes my mind and my body.  The grogginess is gone.  My mind is fresh and alert.  I am able to focus on God and give Him my full attention.  So, I work out first and then pray second because it works for me.  It may take a few tries, but with a little effort, we will all find what works for us.

For me, the place to pray is going to be in the garage.  It meets all the criteria.  In the morning I have the garage all to myself.  I have tried to come inside in the mornings,

but our youngest is a light sleeper.  There is no distraction free prayer if there is a four-year-old boy awake and wanting to play.  So, I will simply stay in the garage after I work out.

The garage is also quiet in the mornings.  And it is a place free of inherent stress.  The garage is my place to pray.

Be Adaptable

It is vital to remind ourselves as we try to pick a time and place to pray to not get married to our first chosen time and place.  There is no Biblically correct time and place to pray.  We are simply commanded to pray.  The time and place are flexible and they are up to us.

Pick a time and place.  Give it a good try of at least a week.  After a week of consistently praying at the same time and place, we will know if it is working for us or not.  Be honest in our analysis.  If our chosen time and place are not working because we are simply being undisciplined and not doing it – that is not the fault of the time or the place.  Keep at it.

We may, however, after a good try, find that our chosen time and place are not working for us.  If that is the case, reassess and pick a new time and place to pray.  The answer is not always try harder.  The point of choosing a time and place is to make it easier for us to pray.  As you can tell from my experience, I have tried several different times and places in the past.

Keep trying until you find a time and place that works for you.  Then stick with it.  Until it doesn’t.  Then pick a new time and place.  Life happens.  Circumstances change.  Just keep adapting.  Just keep praying.

How I Will Pray

To start my fledgling daily prayer habit, I am going to start by praying in the way I wrote about in my post “How to Pray.”

In that post, we read the well-known Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6:9-13 and learned that Jesus was teaching us the essential components of a balanced and healthy prayer life:  praise, justice & unity, requests & thanks, confession, and protection from the enemy.

It is challenging, and instructive, to see how asking for things is only one part of proper prayer.  According to this outline, only one-fifth of my time in prayer should be spent running through my list.  I’ll bet that praying this way will be a lot more relational.

I am exited to start and find out.

Check out our PDF guide on choosing a time and place to place pray on our Toolbox Page.

It is a simple one-page guide that you can print out and use to help you when you are off line.

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