Passionate Prayer
Passionate Prayer
When I was a child, my family would pray at meals, and my mom would pray with us when she tucked us into bed. In church, we would all close our eyes and listen while someone prayed and thanked God for the day and asked God to be near the sick.
Prayer was a reflex. Mealtime. Pray. Bedtime. Pray. Church service. Pray. I could recite prayers like you would recite a nursery rhyme. I went through the motions out of habit like I brushed my teeth twice a day out of habit. Prayer was routine, and it had a tidy box where we kept it.
Those prayers were not wrong, or bad or even shallow but they lacked, well, passion. I discovered passionate prayer at the bottom of a deep hole that I dug for myself. Years of alcoholism and drug abuse and bad decision making left me incapable helping myself and I knew it. I needed help so I began to pray, passionately.
Through the years since I still have roadblocks to passionate praying that I struggle with.
Eggshells or Enthusiasm: When we’re passionate about something, it shows. Ever listen to sports fans at a football game? Their passion is rarely expressed in constrained whispers.
Approaching God timidly might seem like a good thing, but His Word tells us otherwise. “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace” (Heb. 4:16), and “we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus” (Heb. 10:19).
Discouragement: When God doesn’t answer my prayers the way I want, I can become discouraged. But discouragement in prayer is another way of saying that I don’t believe God really knows best. Looking back, however, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve asked God for things I’m now grateful He’s answered with a resounding “no.”
Guilt: Guilt has also been a passion-killer in my prayer life. Guilt over failing to spend enough time with the Lord. Guilt over failing to spend consistent time with Him. And guilt over breaking my promises to do better. So I stopped making elaborate promises to double and triple my quiet time. Slow and steady changes resulted in successes that renewed my passion for the time I spend with the Lord.
As Christians, we have been given the incredible privilege of coming into the presence of God due to the salvation granted through Jesus. We can speak with Him, praise, worship, and adore Him, and thank Him for all He’s done and continues to do for us. We can intercede for others. We can bring our requests to Him and ask for His help. When we’ve done wrong and have sinned, we can confess, ask for, and receive His forgiveness. We can speak with Him when we’re joyful or sad, in good health or bad, whether we’re rich or poor, for we have a relationship with the One who not only created us, but who loves us deeply and wants to participate in every aspect of our lives. That is worth being passionate about.