Welcome to the Servants of Grace podcast hosted by Dave Jenkins. Our podcast exists to provide trustworthy, expository messages through the Bible and faithful answers to your theology questions. Now, for today's episode, let's join our host, Dave Jenkins. Well, welcome back to the Servants Grace Theology segment. My name is Dave and I'm the host for this show. And on today's episode, a listener writes in and they have a great question. And the question is this, why are there times when I don't feel like praying? Well, I've never met a Christian who said, I think I pray enough. Most of us struggle with prayer. And there may be many reasons for this, but sometimes it's simply that we don't feel like praying. Our lack of desire isn't just due to laziness either, it's rooted in a much deeper unbelief. Many times we don't desire to pray because we don't truly believe that prayer will help us. We're faithless, as often demonstrated by the fact that we typically don't begin praying except as a sort of last resort. And yet, before we can even cultivate a passion for prayer, we must be reminded of the power of prayer. Prayer is one of the primary means by which we discover God's sovereign plan for our lives. We will not always feel like praying, but the things are happening when we do. In Matthew 17 20 Jesus says this, For truly I say unto you, if you have faith like a grain of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, move from here to there, and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you. Now note the relationship between faith and prayer. Faith gives birth to prayer. Just as a newborn baby begins to coo, the born again person Christian is granted a new desire for communion with God through prayer. And yet, the weakness of our flesh, the same weakness that kept Jesus' disciples from prayer in Matthew 26, 41, often dampens the desire to pray. That weakness, together with the downpour of life's circumstances, can extinguish our prayer lives altogether. You see, we need to learn to fan and to flame the embers of prayer within. And these embers are kindled by faithful preaching on the Lord's Day and in our private reading and studying of the Word of God throughout the week. Faith gives birth to prayer, but the Word of God by His Spirit gives birth to faith, as we see in Romans 10.17. In my own life, I found that there's a direct correlation between being filled with the Word of Christ and having the desire to commune with God in prayer. A lack of prayer comes from a lack of faith, which too often means we've taken our eyes off of God's glory revealed in the Word. And so the Christian who says, I just don't ever feel like praying the kind I meet all the time. My encouragement is this, discipline yourself for prayer anyway. Accept that the power of prayer comes not from whether you feel like praying but from faith in the promises of God. Immerse yourself in those promises and you're going to find that there are moments in your life when prayer breaks out like a fire. You may even find that sometimes praying is like starting a car in winter. It takes time for the engine to warm up, that's okay. Just don't quit when things feel cold but dig deeper into the treasures of the gospel revealed in the word. That gospel begets faith and that faith will ignite a heart of prayer. Now, we could talk about this for a long time. There are many answers to the question that we're considering today. But we have to start by admitting that one of the reasons we don't often feel like praying sometimes in our lives is because we're sinful. And being sinful, we have hearts that can sometimes deceive us and even feelings that can sometimes deceive us. Feelings are oftentimes the greatest liars. And too often, we give in to our feelings. Too often, we rely too heavily upon our feelings, and sometimes we need to reckon with our feelings and admit that we have those feelings, but then get up and do something, act, do what we ought to do, do what is our duty, and do what is our responsibility. But we need to think more deeply than that because one of the reasons we sometimes don't feel like praying is because, well, quite honestly, in some ways praying can be difficult. You see, because when we pray, we're humbling ourselves before the Lord God, the one who made us, the one who created us, and the one who sustained us. And we, as human beings in our natural sinful state, are not naturally humble. We ought to be, but we're not. We're naturally prideful, and praying to the Lord is essentially admitting that we're not God, and that He is, and that He is the only Sovereign, and humbling ourselves before Him, and expressing that we're in need of the Lord. Now, we like to pretend that we're not really in need of anything. As human beings, our natural way of thinking is to think that we're self-sufficient. We can take care of ourselves. I'm good on my own. We're not in need of anyone or anything. And so, when we pray, we're admitting that we're in need. And when we pray, and when we confess our sin, when we repent to the Lord, when we ask the Lord for things, all of those things have different aspects of making it difficult to pray. But fundamentally, when we pray, we know that we are really humbling ourselves. And when we humble ourselves, we feel it in our flesh. Because when we humble ourselves, it's really death to self. It's really taking up our cross and dying to self. And when we pray, it kills the flesh. It works against the flesh. It fights against our flesh. And our flesh doesn't like that. Now, sometimes when I wake up, I just want to go. I want to start going. I just want to start working. I want to start producing. I want to get things done. The last thing I sometimes feel like I'm doing is getting on my knees, pausing and being patient and praying. And sometimes a lot of Christians, they don't make prayer a priority in their lives. They make other things a priority, whether it's making coffee, whether it's letting the dog out, whatever it is, all good things. But sometimes, well, let's be honest, we have our priorities wrong. Well, and I think another reason along those lines that a lot of us struggle to pray is because some of us who are productive and we like to work hard, we like to do and be diligent in our work and to use every minute of our day as like good stewards. I think sometimes we don't feel that prayer is productive. I think sometimes we don't feel that prayer is actually accomplishing anything, that it's not doing anything. At least we don't feel it's doing anything immediate, like, you know, going through McDonald's or fast food joint and getting our meal. We don't see the effects of it immediately. And that's because we're thinking with materialistic, strictly physical, earthly, temporal thinking. Our mindset is on the things of this earth rather than on the things of God and on the kingdom of God. And we forget that even humbling ourselves, even going to the Lord, is having an immediate effect because prayer not only affects us and changes us, but prayer is also an end in and of itself. It is not only a means to another end, it is an end. that we are coming to God, we are worshiping God, we are communing and fellowshipping with our Lord. And one of the reasons that we really sometimes don't feel like doing this is because when we pray it's going to hurt. We're going to need to repent of our sins or all of our sins. We're going to need to be real with God. And we also know, and this is I think one of the things that we don't talk about very often, it's important to talk about, that especially if we're going to talk to the Lord to ask him to do something, like save one of our friends, or save our father or our mother, or that God would save our child, our son, or our daughter, or that maybe we've gone so far, we've prayed so long and so long for a particular thing that has not happened, that sometimes prayer can feel as if God's not listening to us, or He's just not responding to us in the way that we want, and the timing that we think that He should. And so I think sometimes we struggle to pray for a lot of these reasons, but that's what we must do, is we must strive to humble ourselves like little children and come to the Lord knowing that we need to commune with the Lord and not having to commit to a particular time or a particular place or even that our prayers will have a particular length. I think sometimes people don't pray because they've been raised with a sort of legalism that almost requires a certain length of prayer that if you're not praying for however many minutes or however many hours or however long it is for your pastor or parents sometimes set for people that they don't feel that they're really praying properly because they're not praying long enough. And I think, in fact, that legalism leads people to run away from prayer and to stop praying sometimes or to think, I just associate prayer with legalism. Now, when Jesus taught his disciples the Lord prayer, it took about 25 to 30 seconds, depending on if you're praying in the Greek, in the Hebrew, or the English. And sometimes we have to remember that. Prayer doesn't have to be long. Prayer doesn't have to follow a particular formula. And we can pray not only in the mornings or the evenings, we can pray throughout the day wherever we are. We don't have to have a particular position, a particular direction, we don't even have to have beads or a certain hat or carpet. We can go to God and pray to Him and commune with Him and fellowship with Him and ask Him things and thank Him for things and repent for things all day long. And so our prayer ought to become, for the Christian, something as freeing and routine as inhaling and exhaling. Inhaling praises, exhaling petitions. Inhaling words of confession and repentance, exhaling Thanksgiving. And so let us, when we don't feel like praying, let us preach the Word of God to our feelings and say, I know I need to commune with my Lord. I know I need that for my life, so Lord, help me pray. And sometimes we forget that. So we can ask and we can pray for the Lord to help us, and we should also have our prayer lives grounded in and shaped by the rich tradition of what the church has taught about prayer, especially in the Reformed and the Puritan tradition. There is so much good teaching in the Reformed and the Puritan tradition that you should read guys like You know, Jonathan Edwards and Charles Spurgeon, John Owen, John Bunyan, and the list goes on and on and on. There's so much good teaching on prayer and spiritual warfare and that kind of teaching can even help and enhance your understanding of prayer as coming from God's Word. Well, I want to thank you for listening or watching today's episode of the Servants of Grace theology segment. Until next time, may the Lord richly bless you and keep you. Thank you for listening to the Servants of Grace podcast today. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe, leave a rating on the app, and share our episode with your friends and family. If you'd like to, you can follow us on Instagram at Servants of Grace, on Twitter at Servants of Grace, or by searching Servants of Grace on Facebook. You can also find this podcast on the front page of our website at servantsofgrace.org.