'Lord, teach us how to pray!'

Looking round my congregation recently, I was disturbed to realise that I had never prayed about many of the most pressing needs in the church at present. How could that have happened, I wondered? I've been taught, as perhaps you have too, to use the ACTS mnemonic  and to keep lists of items for prayer.  So what was going wrong?

I came to the conclusion that the danger of these methods is that our prayer times are no longer Spirit-led but driven by our lists and agendas. We rush into it all before God gets chance to say a word.  We need to get it all prayed for in time to jump into the car and rush off to work. So, sorry God I haven’t got time to listen to you!

Is there any wonder we have problems? Let’s face it. We would never take that approach with our friends – leastways, our friendships wouldn’t last long if we did! I’ve no doubt that our rushed modern lifestyles don’t help here but I think something else is wrong too – a tendency to rely on ourselves and our lists, rather than waiting on God’s guidance in our praying – a failure to ‘pray in the Spirit’.

I can’t offer you a ‘method’ to get over this problem – in fact, I think it is the use of ‘methods’ in devotional prayer that is the problem. I’m afraid that we have carried the same agenda-driven mentality that we take to work into our time with God.  The Bible says that ‘we do not know what we ought to pray’. (Romans 8:26) We are sinful, self-centred, worldly people who have wrong priorities for others, just as we do for ourselves. Our praying, like so many other things, is skewed if we rely on our own sense of spiritual direction because we are fallen creatures. We need the Holy Spirit to guide us in what and who to pray for. We must come to prayer, not full of our own agendas, but quietly waiting on God and asking him, by his Spirit, to guide our minds to those things he would have us pray about.

This is now what I am trying to do; I encourage you also to remember that in prayer, as in every other aspect of the Christian life, you are entirely dependent on God’s help. Otherwise you and I will be wasting time on the wrong priorities and in this, as in every battle, we need to make every moment spent in prayer count. May our prayer be more ‘powerful and effective’ as we pray with the Spirit’s guiding.