I am therefore not really deeply worried that prayer is at present a duty, and even an irksome one. This is humiliating. It is frustrating. It is terribly time wasting. The worse one is praying the longer one’s prayers take, but we are still only at school.
C. S. Lewis1
Our abandonment of one thing is not sufficient to settle us in the habitual practice of the other, but there is need again of some fresh impulse, and of an effort not less than that made in our avoidance of evil dispositions, in order to our acquiring good ones.
John Chrysostom2
Many problems go away if you just leave them alone. Try to fix them and you only make them worse. Most stomach aches, rainstorms, and sour moods, for example, eventually disappear if you ignore them as best you can.
Other problems go away only if you deal with them thoughtfully, thoroughly, and persistently. They need attention. Left alone they slip into the nagging subconscious, but they never go away. The problem of developing a consistent prayer life falls into this category. Without some effort, prayer will not become significant.
Let’s assume, for a moment, you want to work at prayer—whether out of love for or obedience to God, you want to make prayer a regular part of your life. What now?
First we must recognize some dangers in pursuing a habit of prayer. Focusing too heavily on the mechanics of prayer can defeat the very purpose of it. Any time the mechanics of prayer get in the way of loving God, they are useless. Dry, joyless prayer results.
It is somewhat akin to the lack of joy you see in some picture takers. You’ve seen them. They abound at vacation spots and scenic overlooks. They are driven to photograph things even if it means discomfort and distraction to themselves and their loved ones—even if it means they miss seeing the very thing they are trying to photograph.
As a confirmed nonphotographer, I’ve tried to analyze this compulsion. From my sanctimonious perch, I’ve decided these people are trying to package their experiences for future reference even as they are happening. Instead of trusting their own senses to store and process the beautiful scenes and new experiences, they feel they must photograph them so they are stored in a “safe” place, outside their own minds.
An experience approached with blind compulsion can obscure many of its aspects. A photograph, even though perfectly composed, exposed, and developed, will never be able to retain the essence of the experience. Photographers are often left holding in their hands lots of memories but have little to remember. Unless we let our full range of emotions enrich our vision, we have lost something most important.
Focusing too heavily on the mechanics of prayer can produce a similar result. We may pray every day for an hour, and yet the product can be dry, lifeless words sent compulsively heavenward. There is an element to prayer that goes beyond definition, that depends on the mysterious working of the Holy Spirit in the lives of men and women.
A further danger, though, is that we will develop the habit of prayer mindlessly, adopting a prepackaged form without considering how it fits our unique needs. Interestingly, research has shown that habits need to be intensely individualized things. People form them in similar patterns, but the actual content of the habits themselves are unique combinations of the action and the person’s personality.
Knight Dunlap, in his book Habits, illustrates this with a laboratory experiment. Volunteers are given some routine mathematical work to do on adding machines. As they are working, an experimenter sneaks up without warning and discharges a pistol behind them. Predictably, the reaction to this loud noise is almost always violent. But the interesting feature of the experiment is what happens when the process is repeated. Some of the subjects react much less violently, while others react even more violently. In either case, the subject is forming a “habitual” way of responding to the stimulus. But the response itself is quite individualistic and cannot be predicted.3
Forming a prayer habit, at regular times and places, does not mean we conform our prayer life so rigidly to someone else’s pattern that we lose the spontaneity of God working in our lives. It leaves freedom, yet gives form to a lover’s anxious desire for the lover. Or as Proverbs 8:34-36 (tlb) says, “Happy is the man who is so anxious to be with me that he watches for me daily at my gates, or waits for me outside my home! For whoever finds me finds life and wins approval from the Lord. But the one who misses me has injured himself irreparably. Those who refuse me show that they love death.”
One young pastor said, “God is like a father who wants a relationship with his son. I can think of a lot of families that don’t have a good father-son relationship. Usually it’s because they don’t talk—or can’t because of years of poor communication. I think God feels toward me like I feel toward my two-year-old son—I can’t wait until he learns to talk so I can figure out what’s going on inside his head, and he can learn to love me as a friend as well as a father.”
How are regular habits formed? The scientific literature on the subject almost always is prefaced with three questions:4
1. Are you committed to breaking the old habit and forming a new one? One of the most important factors in a commitment to prayer is a positive role model. Paul Rees, lecturer for World Vision, says, “I can still remember my father arising early every morning and going into his study for prayer. I knew what was going on in there, and it had an influence on my prayer life that lasts to this day. My sister-in-law is another. She’s past eighty now, but has been a hard-working woman all her life. She conveys this feeling of how incredibly real the Lord is to her and how easy it is for her to listen and speak to him. I always come away from meeting with her renewed in my resolve to make the Lord that real in me so others see him in what I do.”
Christian leaders continually referred to role models of prayer. Often it was a father, mother, grandfather, or grandmother. Sometimes it was a contemporary. Occasionally it was a biblical hero. One leader mentioned the psalmist as her model: “Psalm 61 recognizes the need for making a commitment to pray, and verses 5-8 have always been an encouragement to my prayer life: ‘For you have heard my vows, O God; to praise you every day, and you have given me the blessings you reserve for those who reverence your name. You will give me added years of life, as rich and full as those of many generations, all packed into one. And I shall live before the Lord forever. Oh send your lovingkindness and truth to guard and watch over me, and I will praise your name continually, fulfilling my vow of praising you each day.'”
2. Are you in control of your life to make the changes necessary? When people feel they can control some conditions, success is more likely. One study showed that when students were given a choice in selecting the classes they took, they performed significantly better on exams and reported greater satisfaction with their classes and instructors than did students who had no choice.5 Rigid insistence that filing, for example, be done in one particular way gave less satisfaction to most secretaries than when they were given an opportunity to work out their own procedures within broad company guidelines.
The implications for prayer are obvious. In order to give yourself the best chance to develop the habit, you need to feel you can control yourself and the form the prayer habit takes. Considering the variety of successful prayer practice we see in those around us, this should be possible if a person is willing to look for the alternatives.
Bill Bump, pastor of the Free Methodist Church of Wheaton, Illinois, said, “The most difficult thing about prayer for me was thinking I had to use someone else’s method and match their expectations. Then I discovered that I work best using short periods of intense concentration; so I matched my prayer practice to that strength by having many short prayer times throughout the day. Once I realized this kind of prayer was all right with God, I found my guilt gone and my prayer much more intense.”
3. Are you willing to make the changes necessary? Willingness to act is the final step. Resolve and opportunity do not mean much if action doesn’t follow. If action doesn’t follow the other two steps, then guilt will result. The psychological principle of evaluative consistency says that we have a basic need for what we think about a subject to match up with what we do about a subject.6
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones in his book, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure, put it a little differently. The central cause of spiritual depression, he said, “is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself.” The right way to do it, he says, is as the psalmist does in Psalm 42 when he says, “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? Why art thou disquieted within me?”7 At some point we must take hold of ourselves and act.
Steps Toward a Habit of Prayer
Are there steps we can take to form the habit of prayer? Stanton Peele, a social psychologist who has been investigating the problem of addiction for over a decade, has concentrated his study on what is required to break a bad habit and start a new one. Most of his work has been done with reformed alcoholics and drug abusers.8
In studying the pattern of these recoveries, Peele has identified four distinct stages. Although his research has been done with extreme cases, the stages seem to apply broadly.
The first stage is recognizing that the life we are now living is not the life we want to live. We finally, through accumulated unhappiness and recognition of our fallen state, realize that we want to do better. In terms of prayer, it would mean finally recognizing the futility of trying to make it without prayer.
The second stage is a flash of insight, a moment of truth when a decision to change is made. It’s the kind of experience Paul had on the Damascus Road. Life takes a 180-degree turn. In a moment of decision an alcoholic vows never to take another drink, a smoker lays down his cigarettes forever, a heroin user throws away the needle. It may not be easy, but he never looks back. It’s at that point a nonpray-er suddenly decides to pray.
The third stage is putting flesh on the moment-of-truth decision by changing life patterns to accommodate the new lifestyle. For the pray-er this means ordering our environment to encourage prayer. Attend prayer meetings, read literature that encourages prayer, associate with friends who pray and will talk about it with us, make a place and time in our life for regular prayer.
The fourth stage is changing one’s self-perception. No longer are we non-prayers; now we are praying persons and identify ourselves thus.
The next four chapters will look at each of these stages in more detail. We will give examples of Christian leaders who decided to become pray-ers, and we will find that they went through stages very much like the four we just described. Some of the stories resemble Damascus Road experiences. Most of them sound more mundane—they would be mundane, in fact, if they weren’t stories of God working in people’s lives.
C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), 116.
John Chrysostom, “Homilies on Ephesians (Homily xvi),” Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers XIII (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1979), 127.
Knight Dunlap, Habits (New York: Liveright Publishing Company, 1947), 186.
Frederick Kanfer, “Self-Management Methods,” Helping People Change (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), 341.
G. R. Liem, “Performance and Satisfaction As Affected by Personal Control over Salient Decisions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 31 (1975): 232-240. Another study showed that when opportunities were available to choose between several alternative ways of doing a complex task, performance improved.T. A. Brigham and A. Stoerzinger, “An Experimental Analysis of Children’s Performance for Self Selected Rewards,” Behavioral Analysis in Education (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall-Hunt Publishing, 1976).
F. Heider, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relationships (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1958).
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1973), 2-21.
Stanton Peele, “Out of the Habit Trap,” American Health (September/October 1983): 42ff.
Copyright © 1985 by Christianity Today
