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But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith; praying in the Holy Spirit; keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting anxiously for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life.
(Jude 1:20-21)
Let's face it, before we know Christ we have no prayer life at all. If we even use the word "prayer" we do so as a figure of speech. For example, if we were to say "I pray this works", we do not really mean that we are pausing to pray. It is like vainly saying "Thank God" and not really meaning that we actually do thank God or that we will pause to thank Him. We see no need for prayer. We see no value in prayer. We know no God to pray to. We don't believe that God would hear us if we did pray. So, our lives are without prayer, which means that we do not spend time with Jesus in this most intimate form of fellowship. We do not share the concerns we have with the Lord and we do not seek to know about the concerns that the Lord would like to share with us. Perhaps some of us are exposed to prayer, but we never learn to pray ourselves. Maybe grace is said at the dinner table for example, but it does not have meaning to us. Nor does it develop in us a desire to spend time with Christ.
In our coming to know Christ, we are likely to be encounter people who pray. In fact, it is very likely that there will be people in our lives and maybe even people who have never met us who are praying that we would come to know Jesus. But at this point, we have not taken the first step of prayer for ourselves. But then there comes a point in our lives where we take that first step towards Jesus. Perhaps the first time we pray is in a church in response to an invitation to accept Jesus as savior. Maybe we sit down with someone and they offer to pray with us and encourage us to speak to God about what is on our heart and in our mind. For some of us, maybe more that we realize, we encounter a crisis situation and in a moment of desperation we call out to the God we have been hearing about without quite understanding as of yet who God is and that He hears the prayers of those who are seeking Him. However it happens, we take that first step of prayer, encountering Christ for the first time. Whether we come to salvation in Christ with that first prayer or it is the beginning of our seeking God, our first step of prayer is evidence of God's grace. We wouldn't be able to call out to God or even have a glimmer of hope of possibly being heard unless God in His grace choose to meet with us where we are. This first step of prayer opens the door for us to become more aware of prayer.
If we are to grow in Christ, we will be growing through. Let's be honest here, as we start to grow and spend time with Christ in prayer, we will encounter challenges. Prayer is not something that had been natural to us. In fact, it still isn't a natural part of our lives. For us to grow in prayer we will have to be intentional about it. We will have to learn from others. It is said that prayer is more caught than taught. The way we are taught will vary from person to person, but make no mistake, the better we are taught to pray, the more integrated it will be in our lives. The most likely place that we will be taught to pray will be in church. It may be in the service itself through times of prayer. It may be through sermons preached and classes taught. Hopefully it will happen in the context of meeting in a group or one-on-one with someone. We will see others modeling prayer. Perhaps we will even be connected with a church that has a time of prayer where we can be prayed for or learn to pray for others. We may start asking people to pray for us. We will come to recognize that the mature Christians are the one who not only say they will pray for us, but who right then and there pray with us. We will also be encouraged to pray in these various settings. Tips and methods to help us learn to pray will be offered and tried. We may even read a book or two about prayer. But growth in prayer will only truly occur as we begin the practice of praying ourselves. We may not yet see it, but as we learn to pray, we are learning to spend time with Jesus. But for now, though our prayers are more self-focused than Christ-focused, we are learning to pray. We are beginning to fellowship with Jesus.
As we mature in Christ, we spend more time with Christ. Fellowship with Christ through times of prayer is one area in which we spend our time. Our growth is connected to a deepening interest and practice of prayer. To be sure, we may not "feel" like we are praying enough, whatever "enough" actually is. We may wonder why prayer appears to be so easy for others whom we have the privilege to encounter. There may even be times when we think that our prayer life is not effective. But if we are seeking after Christ in times of prayer and growing in our love and knowledge, then our prayer life is being stretched and transformed as we are being stretched and transformed. We may only see it if we look back at ourselves over the span of a few years, but prayer has been becoming a regular part of our life. We may not feel it or even see it in the present moment, but when seen next to our past, we start to realize that we have been changing from the inside out. We may wrestle with a sense of inadequacy, but if the evidence is examined, it is most likely not the Lord telling us that we are falling short. There may well be room for growth, but the one whispering in our ear is not the Lord. We may still have some misconceptions about prayer and things to learn, but the Lord is not telling us that we don't measure up. Our own opinions of ourselves that stem from unrealistic expectations or even a desire to be like the prayer warriors we see could be giving us the impression that we just don't know how to pray. But prayer is not about living up to some standard. It is about being in an intimate relationship with God. As Dallas Willard describes it The Divine Conspiracy, in prayer we engage in an "intelligent conversation about matters of mutual concern" with our Lord and Creator. The desire and practice of conversing with God increases as we spend time in prayer. Eventually we come to realize that we are not seeking to measure up to some imaginary prayer standard, but seeking to draw near to God. Thus, we spend time in prayer and our prayer life deepens. Our goal is not a deeper prayer life; our goal is the Lord Himself.
As we spend time in prayer we draw closer to Christ. Then one day, without any conscious effort on our part and without us really understanding when the change took place in us, we realize that we are praying without ceasing. Praying without ceasing doesn't mean that we bow in prayer and never get up. Rather it means that in all we do, prayer flows naturally between us and our heavenly Father. We are in constant communication with our Father. We set aside times for focused prayer in our daily life, but throughout the day every day we are speaking with our Father, sharing our concerns and sharing His concerns. What once struck us as impossible when we were first told about or read Paul's letter to the Thessalonians where he says to pray continuously, now seems so obvious and natural to us. We are living in constant communion with our Lord through the practice of prayer. In fact, we don't even think of it in terms of a practice or even a spiritual discipline, but as the normal way of life of a mature Christian.
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