Just as thieves do not lightly attack a place where they see royal weapons prepared against them, so he who has grafted prayer into his heart is not easily robbed by the thieves of the mind.
St. Mark the Monk1
How much prayer is enough? If “total minutes prayed” is not the standard, by what do we measure the quality of our prayer lives?
The question of quality struck me recently while jogging. I realized my nine-minute miles take over twice as long as the ones run by marathoners, and they run twenty-six miles compared to my three. I am not a marathoner and have no immediate intention of becoming one. So their standard means little to me except to remind me of increasing age.
But between gasping breaths, I decided I should be measured against some standard. If not an Olympic standard, an age-graded standard? (Average thirty-eight-year-olds run a mile in so many minutes.) A magazine editor’s standard? A Christian jogger’s standard?
Or should it be a personalized, subjective standard? How I feel afterward? Whether or not I maintain my ideal weight? My heart rate after running?
There are many scales against which I could be measured, but which is the right one? The question occupied me for a few blocks and, because I was working on this book, I transferred the question to the Christian leader’s prayer life. What should we measure our prayer lives against? The time other Christian leaders spend in prayer? An age-graded standard? How we feel after prayer?
I had two problems to solve now, and the hard thinking slowed my jogging even further. Fortunately, the answer to my jogging dilemma came quickly. At what must have been the nadir of my running speed for that day, a mosquito landed on my cheek and bit me. Images heretofore held of me effortlessly flowing down the street, hair swept back by the wind, vanished, and I was left with the awful truth that I was running so slowly that an insect normally cowed by the faintest rustling of air could attack my bloodstream undaunted. My standard for running from that time forward became enough speed to discourage even the fastest flying mosquitoes.
The question of a proper prayer standard, however, remained. What is God’s standard? What does he expect?
He probably doesn’t expect us to compare ourselves against the Jesse Owenses of prayer. It is indeed admirable and inspiring that a few of our spiritual forefathers prayed hours at a time. It is praiseworthy that Martin Luther, for example, sometimes prayed three or four hours a day. But Martin Luther and others were spiritual marathoners, living in a different time and age, and God may or may not be calling us to the same practices.
The standard of our prayer lives in many ways is like two marriage partners getting together and deciding what kind of communication is needed to keep their marriage healthy and growing. That level of communication will vary from couple to couple; the nature of the communication will vary as will the topics discussed, the amount of time needed alone, and the amount of outside help needed to bolster the relationship. In a similar way, the number of minutes we spend in formal prayer is likely to vary from person to person.
But that is not to say a standard of some kind is unnecessary. It is. God expects each of us to fight the sin and apathy that have driven us apart since Eden. He recognizes our weakness in restoring harmony. So he provides us a power source that gives us strength to pray. That source, the Holy Spirit, excises the ulcerating sufferings of our souls and transforms them into God’s language, prayer. “The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness. We do not even know how we ought to pray, but through our inarticulate groans the Spirit himself is pleading for us, and God who searches our inmost being knows what the Spirit means, because he pleads for God’s own people in God’s own way; and in everything, as we know, he cooperates for good with those who love God and are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:26-28, neb).
Our standard of prayer, then, is the degree to which we have opened the sufferings of our souls to the Holy Spirit. Three things tell us if that is happening.
If Faith Is Growing
It is true that the elements of faith can be known intellectually—we can understand what to do and how to do it, and we can understand the way God has operated in the world past and present. But without prayer, that knowledge will be unbalanced and incomplete. Jacques Maritain once said, “Intelligence itself can only develop its highest powers in so far as it is protected and fortified by the peace given by prayer. The closer a soul approaches God by love, the simpler grows the gaze of her intelligence and the clearer her vision.”2
A healthy prayer life gives a sense of completeness to all the disparate elements that make up our lives. For the local church leader, the growth of faith is reflected in ministry itself. The tasks of preaching, counseling, and administration become clearer and more purposeful. They begin to fit, instead of seeming like things-to-do that pile on top of one another in the leader’s daily schedule. It’s the clarity R. A. Torrey was talking about when he said, “Three things happen when ministers pray: they will have a new love for souls, a new faith in the Bible, and a new liberty and power in preaching.”3
Not only do the tasks of ministry take on a new clarity, but they fit together in a whole. Ministry becomes a single-purposed calling instead of a hodge-podge of good works. Sherm Williams notes that his staff prayer times helped keep balance in his ministry: “One of the real dangers for a pastor is spending all his time in one area of ministry: out shepherding the flock, or evangelizing the community, or studying in his office, or whatever else his specialty happens to be. In our accountability group, we would tell one another what we had been doing, and we each checked each other for balance.”
Growing faith means life becomes more and more oriented around our spiritual center. Perhaps no better description of the person of growing faith can be painted than that given by Thomas à Kempis in his classic work, The Imitation of Christ: “He who tastes all things as they are, and not as they are reputed and reckoned to be, this man is wise and instructed more by God than men. He who knows how to walk from within and give small weight to things without, does not wait for places or times, for devout exercises of devotion. The spiritual man quickly gathers himself together, because he never squanders himself wholly on external things. No outward labor, or occupation, at the moment needful, stands in his way but as events turn out, so he adapts to them. He who is rightly organized and ordered within, is not concerned over the wondrous and perverse doings of men. A man is hindered and distracted, as he draws things to himself.”4
A Desire for More Prayer
The cumulative effect of prayer should be to desire more. As a group, Christian leaders reflect this desire. When asked on a survey how many minutes they prayed per day, 50 percent said they averaged fifteen minutes, 20 percent said they averaged thirty minutes, 5 percent said they averaged sixty minutes. When asked, How many minutes a day would you like to pray? those who averaged fifteen minutes a day most often answered they would like to pray thirty minutes, those who said thirty minutes answered sixty, and those who prayed sixty said they’d like even more.5
The desire for more, though, isn’t an indiscriminate desire for quantity. It should be a longing for more time with the Father, but time balanced by the desire for deeper levels of prayer. It’s much like the struggle a local church faces in balancing evangelistic efforts with discipleship. New members must be brought in, but existing members need to be discipled. The resources of the church must be allocated to accomplish both aims. Similarly, the resources of our prayer lives need to be allocated to accomplish the two standards of prayer: more time in formal prayer and the intensity of the time already spent. The desire for more should be controlled by at least two factors:
1. More should not be interpreted strictly in terms of minutes. In some instances, better prayer may come from spending less time at it. High bursts of energy can be sustained for only short periods of time, and if your personality is one that prefers short, high-octane bursts instead of longer, sustained efforts, less time may actually lead to more prayer. It’s up to each of us to find the maximum point of effectiveness by weighing our intensity of prayer. The balance may change also with the circumstances of our lives.
Every once in a while while driving around the streets of a coastal city, you’ll see a small boat on a trailer. The boat is only about twelve feet long and has unusually high gunwales, although at the middle of the boat they drop to approximately rowboat height. To my Midwestern eyes, this kind of boat—a dory—looks odd. It would be impractical on a Minnesota lake where the waves never get higher than a man’s knee. But in the ocean, such height is necessary to keep the long, rolling waters out.
Some boats are built to handle heavy seas, some to skip around shallow lakes. Some prayer practices are designed to handle heavy loads of accumulated problems. Others are made to deal with bite-sized problems throughout the day. We allocate certain periods of prayer time to handle our current needs.
2. There are definite physical limitations to the amount of prayer necessary. One pastor said, “I’m not sure an old man should try and run a marathon. He may kill himself trying. He probably should be satisfied with two miles a day. I realize that God expects as much out of me as I am able or capable of giving. But to make myself sick or to put myself down because of my inability to be a great prayer warrior is counter-productive. Each and every day we run the race with whatever we have to give, as we have strength, knowledge, and ability.
“For me a model that has always felt right was one I copied from a surgeon friend of mine. He got up at 5 a.m. and unhurriedly went down to his front room where he read, meditated, and prayed. Very relaxed, he thought through his surgery schedule and then went upstairs to dress. For him, that quiet time just sitting in his living room was his most productive time of the day. I’ve found it true for me also, but I realize others’ needs may be different.”
The idea of a regular time of dedicating everything to God, and then consistent effort throughout the day to relate everything back to him struck a responsive chord in most Christian leaders. A life of balanced dedication is the surest road to contentment. Perhaps Satan’s favorite tactic is to throw us off balance even in the area of devotional practice. St. Vincent de Paul said, “Be careful to preserve your health. It is a trick of the devil, which he employs to deceive good souls, to incite them to do more than they are able, in order that they may no longer be able to do anything.”
The Joy of Prayer
A friendly old clergyman, meeting Groucho Marx for the first time, remarked, “I want to thank you, Mr. Marx, for all the enjoyment you’ve given the world.” To which Groucho replied, “And I want to thank you for all the enjoyment you’ve taken out of it.”
Like many elements of our spiritual lives, prayer has taken a bad rap as a joyless experience. It should not be viewed so. In fact, one of the standards of effective prayer should be the joy it produces in our souls. Christian leaders are almost unanimous in their desire to somehow see the joy of prayer.
Jeff Ginn said, “I pray because I just like spending time with God quietly. I enjoy the experience of praying. The hardest part is simply getting started. I swim a lot for exercise, and the hardest part is jumping into that cold water. It’s not a good experience at first. But after you’re in and you’re wet, you enjoy it. Prayer is similar. It is difficult to get started sometimes. But I attribute that difficulty to sin. The overall joy I get from prayer is overwhelming. The best thing for me and my ministry is to simply sit home with God and talk with him.”
Jim Danhof said, “The weakest part of my prayer life is the discipline. I’d like to feel it isn’t a discipline. I’d like to feel it’s natural and enjoyable. It’s odd that we call prayer a discipline when it is really a joy. I revel in the delight of prayer, yet recognize that I have to go through the discipline to reach the joy.”
Perhaps we should not wonder that prayer can be difficult. It seems anything good takes an extra effort to accomplish. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, “The act of praying is the very highest energy of which the human mind is capable. Praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties. The great mass of worldly men and of learned men are absolutely incapable of prayer.”6 Perhaps we should expect to pay some price in terms of comfort to expend the energy required. But the essential bedrock of joy should triumph.
The secret, perhaps, lies in viewing the overall relationship being developed with God as a long-range good that far outweighs any temporary difficulties and inconveniences. Gib Martin said, “In the last few years, prayer has become more than a doctrine. It has become a verbalization of a sweet reality. True prayer is built around the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:5: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.’ I can feel that now. I know when my heart isn’t loving God fully, and I know when my soul isn’t loving God fully, and I know when my strength is being sapped by ungodly concerns. When I am in harmony with this verse, I can sense a wholeness; when I am not, I feel fragmented and pulled apart. Joy comes from the harmony prayer gives life.”
The Greek dramatist, Aeschylus, noted one element of Christian prayer: “Pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our despair there comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”7 But there is another overriding element to prayer that supercedes even the despair that drives us to our knees. It is the knowledge that through prayer we are slowly, surely recreating the oneness with God that our impetuous sin eons ago destroyed. It is the knowledge that God wants that oneness, and if we will enter into partnership with him to attain it, the result will be joyous indeed.
There’s a tribe in Kenya, the Masai, who many years ago were moved from their home to a different part of the country many miles away. In order to make the move less traumatic, the Masai took with them the names of their hills and rivers and valleys, and gave them to the hills and rivers and valleys of the new country. And although the new terrain may not have been as lush as the old, the Masai rested easier with the comfort of knowing their new home was in some ways similar to it.8
In prayer, we find ourselves seeking a lost oneness with our old home, the heart of God. We have been wrenched from that home by sin and now know an urge that drives us to reunion. Prayer satisfies that urge, for now at least. It is a renaming of our current longing with the title of the old perfect one. It is recognition that God has renamed hopeless sin. It is now forgiven sin. He has renamed powerlessness: power. Weakness: strength. Despair: joy. We are living on dangerous, foreign ground. The only way to survive is to claim what we can for God, and for the rest seek the peace only prayer can bring.
Igumen Valamo, The Art of Prayer (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 201.
Jacques Maritain, Prayer and Intelligence (London: Sheed and Ward, 1942), 5.
R. A. Torrey, How To Pray (Springdale, Pennsylvania: Whitaker House, 1983), 84-85.
Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 1981), 67.
Terry Muck, “Ten Questions About the Devotional Life,” Leadership (Winter 1982): 34.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1957).
Quoted in Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1982).
From Michael Oakshott, Wisdom of Conservatism Vol. I (Mars Hill, North Carolina: Institute for Western Values, 1971), 93.
Copyright © 1985 by Christianity Today
