Is Prayer a Must?

God’s command and promise is our sole motive for prayer. Nothing could be commanded more precisely than what is stated in the Psalm, ‘Call upon me in the day of tribulation’ (50:15). Those who try to wriggle out of coming directly to God are not only rebellious and stubborn, but are also convicted of unbelief because they distrust the promises. John Calvin1

Prayer is the sincere, sensible, affectionate pouring out of the heart or soul to God through Christ in the strength and assistance of the Holy Spirit, for such things as God hath promised, or according to the Word for the good of the church, with submission and faith to the will of God.
John Bunyan2

What drives us to prayer? One pastor said, “It’s a little bit like loving your wife: you love her for a variety of reasons, and different reasons predominate at different times. Sometimes you pray out of sheer desperation. Sometimes out of unhappiness with yourself. Sometimes because you love the Lord. Sometimes it’s a sense of feeling utterly overwhelmed—a feeling of inadequacy. A person will call on the phone and say, ‘My wife just kicked me out of the house. Can I come over and talk with you?’ So you’ll say, ‘Sure, come on over and we’ll talk.’ You hang up the phone, and say to yourself, What in the world do I say to this person? That’s when you pray.”

That kind of pressure can drive the Christian leader in one of two directions: toward spiritual arrogance or toward total dependence on God. When the pressure is handled with simplistic authoritarianism (“I’m the only one who can handle this situation”), the leader is susceptible to arrogance. The road to that extreme leads to burnout or becoming hardened by spiritual callousness.

The road to total dependence, however, is a difficult one. It is relatively easy to drop to one’s knees in emergency situations; it is much more difficult to depend on God when things are going well. The prayers of contrition uttered when things are going well, however, are the signs of true dependence on God. What are the forces that should drive us to our knees in the good times?

There are many good reasons to pray, but only one rises above the vicissitudes of life, above the vagaries of the emotional roller coaster we ride daily. That primary reason should head the list.

Obedience

God commands us to pray. Faithful followers obey that command. Unfortunately, obedience is not the most popular motivation today. It is certainly not an act that men and women in leadership positions are accustomed to performing. Obedience requires a loss of freedom. In human situations it means entrusting part of our will to someone else. In the divine situation it means entrusting our total will to God.

Leaders do not feel comfortable entrusting their wills to someone else. Ordinarily, leaders rise to their positions of responsibility because they make good decisions. Whether their skills are entrepreneurial or managerial, the levers of decision making feel good in their hands. A certain level of independence is required of those who shoulder the loneliness of leadership. Used to the freedom, leaders are usually reluctant obeyers.

This does not mean Christian leaders are bad Christians. On the contrary, they are often very effective because they choose to operate on the basis of another command of God, the Great Commandment, which says to love God totally and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Effective leaders do not submit to self-destructive employees, power-grabbing associates, or advisers of limited vision. Effective leaders do, however, constantly put the welfare of each of these groups above en their own welfare, and make decisions accordingly—not necessarily giving each group what it wants, but what it needs. That’s operating by the command of love.

If we could consistently operate on the basis of this commandment, both in relation to colleagues and to God, the problem with prayer would be solved. If our love for human beings were perfect, all our personnel decisions would be effective ones. If our love for God were perfect, we would desire constant communion with him. Prayer would be a way of life.

Unfortunately, few of us are able to claim perfect love. Clouds of one sort or another hide our vision of God far more days than we would like to admit. We want to do the best for those around us, but our pride and self-interest keep tripping us up. We can’t love perfectly because our love for ourselves keeps getting in the way. Thus we are thrown back to depend on the law of obedience. We do what God commands. Given our sinful human natures, it’s a more reliable guide.

The religions of the world have long recognized the need for the law of obedience to compensate for our inability to love perfectly. Judaism, for example, has a tradition regarding the many items of its law code. Rabbis call it the “fence around the law.”3 Only a small percentage of those laws are absolutely essential to avoid apostasy. The others are important, however, because they act as buffers to keep the faithful from breaking the core laws.

In truth, for the average religious person, these peripheral laws become as important as the core laws because they define a lifestyle that should become second nature. They live that way not out of following the law but because they love God. But, life being what it is, very few can live a faithful lifestyle out of love. So God commands it through the law.

Christianity has a similar tradition. We have our “negative” standards about what it means to be a Christian, such as the Ten Commandments. I grew up with an additional Baptist fence around the law: Thou shalt not smoke, drink, dance, play cards, watch television, or play baseball on Sunday. In truth, following these “laws” is not necessary to being a Christian. But I followed them and reflect on them with fondness. The content of those laws did not make me a better Christian; the act of obeying them probably did.

Depending upon our stage of Christian maturity, our obedience can be done out of varying degrees of love or be done strictly mechanically. Christian mystics, such as Theophan the Recluse, valued unquestioning obedience above any ascetic feat: “You have termed unwilling obedience ‘mechanical obedience.’ In actual fact, the only kind of obedience that effectively shapes our character is obedience performed against our own will and our own ideas. If you do something because that is the way your heart is inclined, where is the obedience? You are merely following your own will and tastes. If you recognize your motives, you make such self-willed action slightly better. But in true obedience you obey without seeing the reason for what you are told to do, and in spite of your own reluctance.”4

Although it does risk the danger of mechanical observance, obedience has advantages: It is simple, and there is less chance to subconsciously fail in obeying than in loving. It’s no secret that the minute we try to do something good out of our own efforts, it begins to be mixed with pride and selfishness. Obedience and submission to God minimize that pride, although we can never do away with it completely.

For this reason, obedience is the primary reason we should pray. God commands it, and a command from God implies a relationship with the commander. We obey because we are loyal to our leader, and we want to comply. We pray to obey.

Dissecting Obedience

Our minds being what they are, the simple command of obedience does not satisfy us intellectually. Although it is reason enough to force us on our knees, obedience can leave us cold when the everyday emotions of anger, frustration, depression, and desire seem to control our every move.

Obedience insures that we come to God in prayer, but it cannot prepare us emotionally to seek God. Each time we come we have different feelings about our purpose. We may come with a heart overwhelmed with God’s goodness. We may come angry that his faithful servants are being mistreated. We may come wishing to confess our sin. We may come with requests for ourselves or others. Each of these is a valid motivation for prayer. Each helps determine the content of a particular prayer. Each, if understood, can help us structure our prayer time more effectively.

There is another very practical reason for looking beyond obedience for more specific motivations. Understanding why we pray (or don’t pray) is the first step toward establishing the habit of prayer.5 Understanding motives is important, and we need to check those motives against what God expects of us in prayer. The techniques for developing consistent habits work if the will to use them is present. But the will to adopt them comes from understanding God’s context for prayer.

Richard “Doc” Kirk, youth pastor of River Road Baptist Church in Eugene, Oregon, found that his lifelong desire for understanding and wisdom has been the motive for his prayer life: “My biblical hero has always been Solomon. Ever since I was a teenager, I have asked God for wisdom because that was what Solomon had. I remember a particular incident that convinced me of the importance of understanding. A man came in my dad’s feed and grain store and asked me if I was a Christian. I said I thought so. He looked at me hard and began to explain what he meant when he said Christian, and I realized I didn’t understand. I had always prayed and gone to church because my parents taught me to do it. But it was only when I understood what it meant to have the Spirit of God living in me, giving me the power to live for him, that my prayer life became real. Since then, my prayer life has come alive. And since becoming a pastor I realize that understanding my prayer life is not only important to me but to the people I lead. If they can see me pray, and talk to me about prayer, then there’s a better chance it will become important in their lives, too.”

The fact that we even have to ask the question of what drives us to prayer is, perhaps, symptomatic of our times. In biblical times, extreme circumstances drove people to their knees more often than they do today, not because we have fewer extremes today, but because we are too arrogant (or ignorant) to recognize our helplessness in the face of them. King David took his burden of leadership responsibility seriously. But he recognized his inadequacy to deal with that responsibility alone. His psalms are the result of a leader’s breaking heart over his need for God’s guidance and power.

In our defense, we might say that David lived in a time when the mystery of supernatural help was more easily accepted. The dangers the people of that time faced were more physical; the threat of famine and war were constant, and appealing to God (or gods) was an accepted way of handling the problems.

Today, the threats we face are more psychological than physical. Hunger does not threaten us as much as faceless anxiety. To combat anxiety, we look for solutions in counselors’ offices rather than God’s grace. One Christian leader said, “The problem today is that we understand everything. The knowledge explosion makes prayer anticlimactic. Researchers say that every mystery science solves opens the door to exploring even more profound mysteries. But to the man on the street, the mysteries are all solved or soon will be. Solved mysteries destroy the soil in which prayer grows best. Prayer thrives on mystery. It works best when our knowledge of God is based solely on faith.”

To be sure, cultural conditions do not change the motivations to prayer. But conditions do change the form those motivations take. They also threaten us with disguising our impure motivations as pure. Indeed, it is easy to bring God requests we consider legitimate when they really are thinly disguised sin. The Scriptures teach that even prayer, the language of the Christian heart, can become misguided in subtle ways if not constantly checked against God’s commands.

One particularly interesting example was Jephthah, a great warrior of Gilead. As Jephthah prepared the army for one important battle, he prayed a vow that if victory was given to Israel, he would, upon returning home in peace, sacrifice as a burnt offering to the Lord the first thing coming out of his house to meet him.

God gave Jephthah’s army victory, but as he returned home, who should run out of his house to greet him? His daughter, his only child. When he saw her he tore his clothes in anguish.

Jephthah’s prayer vow is an example of conjuration, an attempt to make a pact with gods and divinities, sometimes devils and other evil spirits. Such prayers arise out of a mistaken impression of what God expects of petitions. God cannot be manipulated into giving gifts. Answers to prayer are grace gifts, not forced responses.

Today we can fall into the same trap. We may not attempt to manipulate God so overtly, perhaps only because we do not recognize God’s activitys widely as biblical characters did. But often our prayers for healing, to make this business deal successful, to improve our public speaking (all of which can be legitimate requests), are offered with a “deal” in mind: our faithfulness and service in return for God’s positive answer. We forget to seek God’s will in the matter.

Other prayers are nothing more than incantations, wishes sent to an unknown god or magic divinity. These prayers come from lack of maturity, from imperfect or nonexistent faith. These kinds of prayers can subtly sneak into our repertoire because of the culture in which we live. A prosperous culture, for example, can set living standards so high that we become consumed with goals of wealth and power. The American dream teaches that wealth is within the grasp of us all. Why should not God grant it to us? Thus it can falsely motivate our prayer under the guise of petition. To protect ourselves against impure motives, we need to understand pure ones.

Pure Motives

There are many good motivations to examine. Listen to the voices of Christian History for a sample:

Humility: “The best disposition for praying is that of being desolate, forsaken, stripped of everything” (Augustine).6

Fellowship: “How am I to meet God? The first thing to do is pray” (Calvin).7

Power: “Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks” (Phillips Brooks).8

Protection, needs, command: “There are three reasons one should pray: because there is a Devil, as a way of obtaining things, and because it’s part of the pattern God established for Christians” (R. A. Torrey).9

We could list many more. Motivations come out of the psychological, physiological, and sociological drives that define our humanity. They may change in intensity, scope, or focus as the conditions of our lives change. But more than anything else, they determine what we say to God and how intensely we say it.

Four motivations to prayer are widely considered fundamental to a good prayer life: Love for God, confession of sin, thanksgiving for blessings, and requests for favors. Each of these is a motivation being challenged by the modern mindset. Each, for one reason or another, is made difficult by the very fact of being a Christian leader. We will look at those challenges and difficulties in the next four chapters.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 2 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 866.

John Bunyan, Prayer (Swengel, Pennsylvania: Reiner Publications, n.d.), 1.

See George Foot Moore, Judaism 1 (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 259.

Igumen Valamo, The Art of Prayer (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 241.

James Mursell, How to Make and Break Habits (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953). The author says breaking bad habits means one needs to first understand oneself and the meaning of habits. Once those are understood then techniques to implement decisions are available.

Augustine, Confessions (New York: Macmillian, New York, 1961).

Quoted in Karl Barth, Prayer and Preaching (Naperville, Illinois: SCM Book Club, 1964).

Phillips Brooks, “Going Up to Jerusalem,” Selected Sermons (New York: Ayer, Salem, Inc., 1949).

R. A. Torrey, How to Pray (Springdale, Pennsylvania: Whitaker House Publishing Company, 1983), 6.