Sermon from August 20, 2006
Throughout the Bible, God calls us to pray. Philippians 4:6 says, Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. The simple phrase "in everything" holds enormous implications.

But how many of you have ever felt guilty that you don't pray more? That your "prayer-life" was not what it should be? C.S. Lewis confessed: "Let's come clean. Prayer is irksome ... We are reluctant to begin. We are delighted to finish," (Letters to Malcom, p. 113).

There are many things that keep us from praying. "I don't pray because..."
- my motives are divided or mixed.
- my life isn't all straightened out.
- it's been a long time since I prayed.
- so many requests I don't know where to start or couldn't get through them all.
- I'm not sure that prayer even "works."

We feel guilty or unfocused or confused or distant or distrated and then assume those negative feelings disqualify us from God's attention – as if God only listens to "good people." We go through all kinds of mental gymnastics and emotional gyrations when it comes to pray. We can complicate prayer. But I have some good news this morning: Prayer is not as complicated as we make it. It is possible to simplify prayer.

Now, when I say "simplify" prayer, I'm not suggesting that we can remove the mystery from prayer. There will always be many things we do not and can not understand about prayer. But I believe that it is more important to "do it" than to understand it.

The first step in "doing it" is to practice a type of prayer that Richard Foster calls "simple prayer." You just pray about whatever is on your heart – the ordinary things of life. Pray about your family, work, frustrations, problems. You just pray about what is on your heart. The idea is to talk to God about what you're really concerned about.

A typical obstacle to prayer is that we try to be "too spiritual." We can use special "prayer voices" or patterns, unnatural to our normal manner of speech. We can pray for things that "sound" spiritual" but we don't really care about. If you only pray for things that you think sound good, or spiritual, but you are not genuinely interested in them, it will negatively affect prayer-life.

Simple prayer (ordinary prayer) means that you come to God as you are. The main requirement of prayer is honesty. C.S. Lewis said, "We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us," (Letters to Malcolm).

We can take comfort that many, if not most, of the prayers in the Bible, are "simple prayers." Some of the main characters in the Bible, people who accomplished great things for God, prayed prayers of raw humanity (such as short-fused Moses, irresponsible Samson, rascally Jacob and frustrated Jonah).

We're also bothered by mixed motives and this hampers our prayer-lives. But God already knows your heart – He knows what you really want. He already knows all about you. If you wait until your motives are pure, you'll never pray. So, bring it all before God.

There is no pretense in Simple Prayer. We do not pretend to be more holy, pure, saintly than we actually are. We do not try to conceal our conflicting and contradictory motives from God or from ourselves. In this posture, we pour out our heart to the God who is greater than our hearts and who knows all things (1 John 3:20) (Foster, Prayer, p. 10).

Some will object, saying that simple prayer is too "self-centered." But the only true way to grow in prayer and spiritual maturity, the only way we move beyond "self-centered prayer" is by going through it, not by making a detour around it. The alternative to simple prayer is that we worry and obsess and isolate ourselves from God. So pray the real and raw concerns of your heart. This is what children do.

Children make requests of parents on a regular basis. Have you ever heard of a child making a selfish request? Children come to parents with all kinds of requests. Some requests are wonderful and some are foolish and some are self-centered. But what matters to the parent is that the child comes and comes with what's really on the child's heart.

You can tell the intimacy and affection level of a relationship by how the other person is interested in the small, even mundane, details of your life. If you don't like a person, it's just a burden to you if they share details.

As you wake in the morning, drive to work, go through your day, pray about whatever concerns you. Starting today, pray what is in you, not what you wish was in you. Whether your request is large or small, wise or foolish, mixed motives or pure – God can sort all of that out.

You can trust him to respond wisely. He's not going to give you something foolishly.

Prayer is not magic, where you just say the right words and you get what you ask. Part of what this means is you've got to learn to hold your prayer loosely and trust that if God doesn't answer it the way that you want it answered, He has very good reasons. He's a very wise parent. But your job is to talk to God about what is really on your heart. 

"In everything, present your requests known to God."
- Don't wait to clean up your motives first.
- Dont' try to sound more spiritual than you are.
- Don't pray what you think ought to be in you or just what you think God wants to hear.

Just pray what's really in you. That's the first component of prayer.

There's another way of simplifying prayer. How many of you have ever had your mind wander when praying? I have a suggestion: instead of always trying to fight the distracting thought, incorporate it into your prayer – let it become your prayer.

When you are with a friend or your spouse, don't you talk about whatever is on your mind without always following a formal agenda? Likewise, distractions can become the substance of your prayer. If your mind is consistently wandering toward a particular subject, you probably ought to be praying about that subject. That subject is probably the reality about you.

British theologian Herbert McCabe wrote, "People often complain of 'distractions' during prayer. Their mind goes wandering off on to other things. This is nearly always due to praying for something you do not really much want; you just think it would be proper and respectable and 'religious' to want it. So you pray high-mindedly for big but distant things like peace in Northern Ireland or you pray that your aunt will get better from the flu – when in fact you do not much care about those things; perhaps you ought to, but you don't. And so your prayer is rapidly invaded by distractions arising from what you really do want – promotion at work, let us say. Distractions are nearly always your real wants breaking in on your prayer for edifying but bogus wants. If you are distracted, trace your distraction back to the real desires it comes from and pray about these. When you are praying for what you really want you will not be distracted. People on sinking ships do not complain of distractions during their prayer," (God, Christ, and Us).

We also need the balance of having some type of "form" or "structure" occasionally in our prayers as well. Structured prayers remind us of things we "ought to ask" and keep us from praying only the "crisis of the moment" or solely self-preoccupied prayers. Bo will speak next Sunday on the importance of "written prayers" and how to use them.

Another way to simplify prayer is to use "Prayer Prompts." Use common things to remind you to pray for specific people or situations to turn your thoughts heavenward. The Apostle Paul mentions that he did this in Philippians 1:3,4: I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy. Every time he thought of the church in Philippi, he used that memory as a reminder to pray for those brothers and sisters.

A prayer prompt can be a sight, smell, sound, event, experience, or thought. You can find these cues all around you – at home, work, on the drive to work. Author Anne Lamott says her favorite prayers are "Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!" and "Help me! Help me! Help me!" The words of prayer are less important than the act of remembering to look to God and reach for Him.

Look for the spaces in life, the opportunities to breathe as spirit men and women. Turn ordinary and oftentimes wasted moments into prayer. The more we pray, the more time we spend with God. The more time we spend with God, the more we begin to think His thoughts and see things from His point of view.

So pray. Pray from who you are to who God is. Pray honestly, spontaneously, and passionately. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. So just pray.