Day 42: Pray with your eyes open

I have just started reading a book, Pray with your eyes open, by Richard Pratt, Jr., and it is my hope to write a post on every chapter I read.

At times praying can become frustrating, it feels as though our prayers never seem to go anywhere. Or we find that we are always distracted, or falling asleep before we finish our prayers. Prayer has dropped down the priority list in our lives, and although we pray it just seems like we do get anywhere with it.

So what can we do? How can we improve our prayer life?

In the opening chapter of his book Richard Pratt reminds his readers that for prayer to actually 'work', you need three components. You need God, yourself, and communication. Without all these three you cannot have prayer, and you also don't need more than these, such as a quiet room, friends to help, or lots of time. You just need God, yourself, and communication.

God is the recipient of our prayers. The way that we understand God has a direct influence on the way we pray to Him. If you see God as your best mate, or if you view Him as your heavenly King, will determine if your prayers are informal and casual or reverent and more formal. Another mistake we tend to make in our prayers, is that we lose interest in prayer because we are bored praying the same things over and over again. However, this need not be so. We lose interest because our perception of God is so narrow. If we broaden our understanding of God and His attributes, then depending on our circumstances, we can draw upon the different dimensions of God's character. In this way we avoid having a one sided conception of God, and our prayers will be filled with more life and vitality, as we strive to deepen our awareness of God in all the ways He has revealed in Scripture.

Taking a look at the psalms we see how the psalmists mention the many attributes of God.
To you I call, O LORD my Rock, (Ps 28:1)
I love you, O LORD, my Strength, (Ps 18:1)

We also need to consider ourselves in our prayers. That is, after all the source of our prayer. Although we acknowledge that God ultimately gives us the ability to pray, it is still us who have to pray and provide the communication with God. In so doing we must be deeply aware of our own thoughts and attitudes so that we may know what it is that we must pray about, and how we should do it. Our prayers must not be superficial. Consider for a moment: I a close friend asks, how are you, when clearly you are not well, and you reply fine, do you think that that would suffice between close friends. Would you only talk in such a superficial manner? Of course you wouldn't; so then this applies to how we speak to God. Do we say, please for give all my sins, or do we go in depth, review those sins that we did during the day and ask for specific forgiveness and the strength to fight against specific sins?

God is ready to hear us when we pray, so we must examine and express ourselves as honestly and completely as possible.

And lastly, we still need communication to make prayer possible. How do you pray? What words do you use. The structure and format of prayer differs for all individuals, however, one thing we all must know is that prayer is not at all restricted to a few given formats. Some people like to use acronyms such as JOY (Jesus, Others, Yourself), or ACTS (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication), or even following the format of the Lords Prayer. The problem with this is that our prayers tend to be the same; we always pray for the same things, in the same order, and because we are human this gets boring.  Consider again the psalmists: they do not always begin prayers with praise or adoration. Sometimes one's situation does not lend to doing so.

The psalmists lift up praises:
Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, His love endures forever (Ps 136:1)
They offer laments:
We are consumed by Your anger, and terrified by your indignation. (Ps 90:7)
They express statements:
Then will I go to the altar of God, to God, my joy and my delight. I will praise you with the harp, O God, my God. (Ps 43:4)
They ask questions:
Will the Lord reject us forever? Will He never show His favour again? (Ps 77:7)

There are many different things to say in prayer, we just have to realise this, and think about them all. If we learn from the psalmists in this respect, that our prayers will become more fulfilling, and we can begin to overcome our frustrating problems with prayer and experience more fully the rich blessings of talking with God.