The Battle of Prayer…

“…the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us…” (Romans 826, NIV)

Prayer is simple but not easy.  Prayer is as easy as lifting up our thoughts to God and speaking to him from our hearts.  Anyone can do it; we simply have to choose it.

Yet it is also hard: hard to find the words to speak; hard to persevere in it; hard sometimes even to want to pray.  Distractions, disruptions and discouragements abound, for the enemy of our souls wants to keep us from praying consistently and wholeheartedly with genuine trust that God hears us and will surely answer us in his own time and his own way.

We give up too soon, measuring our “wait time” by our own standards and not God’s, for whom a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years as like a day (2 Peter 3:8).  We can even start thinking that since we haven’t seen an answer to our prayer in a long time, perhaps we should just stop asking.  We end up killing our desire in order not to feel the pain of waiting any longer.  

Yet it is our Heavenly Father who has placed these desires in our hearts.  The wait time is there for his wise and loving purpose: to purify our desire of  selfishness, simplifying and streamlining it so that it transforms into a desire for that which God desires and waits for us to ask him for:  himself.  

For Jesus is a Lover, a Bridegroom, and he desires above all that we his Bride desire him, that we long for his presence, hang onto every word he speaks, await his coming to us.  We are to be like the wise virgins who are well-supplied with the oil of prayer, of the Spirit, eagerly awaiting the least indication that he is on his way.   His coming to us is so often unhearalded, subtle, the still, small voice.  We’re perhaps looking for something more noticeable, something that aligns with the way we think he ought to come, and so we’re asleep and unprepared. 

Being a “prayer warrior” on behalf of those whom God puts on our hearts is likewise challenging.  We can pray for change for years – decades even – yet see no alteration of hearts.  We become weary of prayer.  Sometimes, our  prayer for others is tinged with a desire for our own comfort, the wish for closure in uncertain circumstances.  Yes, we pray and ask God to move in the lives and hearts of our loved ones for their benefit, but also perhaps so that we can rest easier instead of continuing to be worried and fearful about how these dear ones are living their lives.  Our prayer for them is tinged with a desire for God to “fix them” because we fear that too much will be required of us if they persist in how they are living.   Sometimes, we even try to play Holy Spirit and “manage them” into a better place.  This unfortunately is like trying to steer a car from the backseat; it leads only to frustration and sometimes even disrupted relationships.

Fortunately, we have help.  More accurately, we have the Helper, the Holy Spirit, God himself, praying within us with his wisdom, his fortitude, his perfect love, compassion and mercy.  It is He who inspires us to pray in the first place.  And as soon as we desire to pray – however imperfectly – we are heard, for God reads our hearts and comes to our aid.