A soul untried by sorrows is good for nothing.
Theophan the Recluse1
To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. What is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy.
Sun Tzu
There are two perils to be avoided. One is emotional unreality and the other is intellectual preoccupation. There must be truth as well as spirit in all worship, and nowhere is the combination more necessary than in the secret place of prayer. Altar fires are kindled and quickened by truth, but the truth must get to the altar. Samuel Chadwick2
A colleague recently returned from a summer vacation at his in-laws’ farm in central Kansas. In between stints of hoisting bales of hay from baler to flatbed truck, he got a chance to philosophize with his father-in-law.
One of the more profound insights to emerge was on the different outlooks of farm folk and city dwellers. This from a man who both farms and works in a farm-implement factory in town: “The biggest difference I can see is that city people always think that this year has got to be better than last year. If they don’t get a raise, acquire something new, or find themselves somehow better off, they think they’re failures.
“Farm folks look at things a bit differently. We know there are going to be good years and bad years. We can’t control the weather. We can’t prevent a bad crop. We can’t control sickness. So you learn just to work hard and make up your mind to take what comes.”
When it comes to our spiritual lives, most of us are city dwellers. We discourage easily. It doesn’t take too many setbacks before we’re overwhelmed with our failures, and weeks can slip by before we dig our way out to start again. We’d be better off if we accepted slippage as part of the territory.
David has to rank near the top of any list of biblical pray-ers, yet his spiritual journey was anything but smooth. Second Samuel records the roller-coaster ride his development takes. In chapter six, for example, he pleases God by bringing the Ark back to Jerusalem. But then he gets in a fight with his wife, Michal. In chapter seven he approves a plan to build the temple recommended by the prophet Nathan. But then we discover that he failed to check with God to see if it was all right. In chapter eight he subdues the Philistines and the Moabites, and he generously invites Saul’s grandson Mephibosheth to live in the palace. But in chapter ten he commits adultery with Bathsheba and arranges Uriah’s death. God never abandons David, but that’s because David always repents and tries again. We see great growth continue throughout his reign, but it’s growth punctuated with periods of failure and decline.
For any of us, spiritual growth is not a steadily increasing incline but more of a bumpy climb. Overall improvement is visible when seen from a distance—but it’s hard won and uneven. And too often the setbacks dominate us.
Prayer is an important key in this roller-coaster ride. John Piper notes that “prayer is the barometer of your spiritual life. It measures your sense of absolute desperation and dependence on God.” It’s important that we keep a close eye on such an important measuring standard.
Properly watched, prayer can help us anticipate and counteract problems before they get too serious. We should expect down times, but we should also be alert to spot and remedy them before they get the best of us and set our spiritual life back too far.
Fortunately, there seem to be common tipoffs that everything is not going well in one’s prayer life. Following are the eight most common red flags.
When You’re Irritable with People
The most common answer Christian leaders give to the question, How do you know when your prayer life is slipping? is “I get irritable with people.” It’s interesting that the status of the most intimate relationship of our lives, the one we have with God, reflects itself in our relationships with people.
“When I get short with the church secretary, I know I need to pray more.”
“Counseling is always a burden, but when I start to view the problems people bring to me too judgmentally, I know I’m not praying enough.”
“My wife can probably tell you best when my prayer life is getting shortchanged—I begin to shortchange her.”
A sister problem to irritability is insensitivity. When we’re preoccupied with ourselves and our problems, we miss what’s going on in the lives of those around us. People hurt, and we don’t see the pain. The trapped look in our associate’s eye, which betrays a marriage gone sour, is unnoticed. Prayer makes us slow down and notice what’s going on, not only in our own psyches, but in those around us. Pray not, think not; think not, see not. We go on our narrow path, blind to needs we could otherwise help meet.
Paul Rees talked about what his prayer time does for his people contacts: “Frequently while I’m praying, a name will drop into my consciousness that I hadn’t thought of for months. I instantly recognize that I should be praying for that person. I become more aware of needs in those closest to me, also. It’s almost as if God is helping me rehearse what I should be doing for people.”
When You Find Yourself Conforming Not Transforming
Fred Smith, in his book, You and Your Network, notes that one of the dangers of our peer relationships is the pressure to conform to their standards rather than offering them the opportunity to be transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ. His loose paraphrase of Romans 12:2 is “Don’t be molded from the outside but have a set of values that forms you from the inside out.”3
Watch your relationships with people. Are you consistently conforming to their attitudes, or do you see them adopting the Christian attitudes that God is making manifest in your life? If you see more of the former than the latter, chances are you need to pray more. One pastor notes that the by-products of too little prayer are clear in his life: “I have too much preoccupation with what people might think of me rather than what God is thinking of me. I worry about human assessment of my ministry rather than God’s assessment. When my prayer life is solid, I’m able to lock in to God’s will quickly and carry out his intentions, human success notwithstanding.”
When Prayer Lacks Urgency
Prayer is warfare. Sometimes the battle is open conflict. Other times it’s cold war. But we must never lose a sense of the enemy. If Satan is not real to you, that’s a red flag that your prayer life is not what it should be.
Satan is more than a red-caped figure who occasionally inserts himself into human affairs by trying to buy a soul or corrupt a church. The action of Satan is pervasive. Helmut Thielicke has rightly observed that “behind all the dangers in our life and behind all the dark menaces that overshadow it, there is a dark, mysterious, spellbinding figure at work. Behind the temptations stands the tempter, behind the lie stands the liar, behind all the dead and the bloodshed stands the murderer from the beginning.”4
Evelyn Christenson in What Happens When Women Pray, writes that people having trouble with their prayer lives rarely talk about Satan’s opposition. Biblical and historical prayer giants always talked about the war between good and evil. The most active prayer comes out of talking about and resisting Satan.5
If prayer is indeed the quintessential Christian activity, then it stands to reason that it is the one activity Satan abhors most, and he will attack it with utmost effort. Satan’s strategy in attacking the kingdom of God is to discourage prayer. We can lose battles in this war—in an imperfect world, Satan will win many. But we must be extremely active in the warfare over our own spiritual lives.
One pastor said, “My struggle in ministry is to preserve and maintain a wartime mentality. The threat to my church and my own spiritual well-being is a deceptive sense of peace and prosperity and comfort. We’re in a war, and the stakes are eternal. I want my people to feel the crisis. The front lines are bloody; Satan is winning massive victories all over the world. I pray daily that the Lord will keep me alert—with all my weapons poised—so I never come to a Sunday feeling dulled about what I have to do.”
When You Don’t Feel Your Prayers Are Being Answered
Christian leaders believe in answered prayer. Few leaders would deny the positive activity of God in their ministries. But sometimes the feeling that God isn’t listening starts to creep into our minds. That can be the beginning of skeptical, and thus ineffective, prayer.
The problem can be accentuated by an inability to accept a negative answer. Too many of us see negative answers as no answer at all. In this scheme, a positive answer is a real answer, the only answer. A negative answer is a mistake.
God’s answers, however, are answers—whether positive or negative.
The Bible is full of instances where God answered prayers in the negative. Moses prayed to see the Promised Land. God answered no (Deut. 3:23-29). The army of Israel prayed fervently for victory over the army of Benjamin in Judges 20:19-28 and God gave the Benjaminites a bloody, awesome victory—a negative answer, according to God’s unknown wisdom.
One pastor remembered his experience as a boy: “I always wanted to be a major league baseball player. I prayed daily that God would grant this deepest desire of my heart. A lot of kids have that dream, I guess, but I carried it further than most; I was good enough to play minor league baseball and kept at it until I was twenty-eight years old, when I realized I wasn’t going to make the majors. In some ways, I felt like God didn’t answer my prayer. But as I continued to pray, I realized he was just answering my request negatively, and was leading me to seminary and eventually into the ministry.”
Child-rearing experts say that children thrive in an atmosphere where they know where they stand. Tell them yes, tell them no, but tell them. The poisonous effects of uncertainty are far more damaging than the temporary sting of disappointment.
Prayer is similar. We need answers, but we should be able to accept negative ones. The question is how. One possible help toward accepting is to keep records of all the positive answers we receive. God does provide and remembering those provisions salves disappointment. Warren McFarlan in Computer Decisions writes that when a major blunder is committed in a well-run business, one way to protect against the fallout is to keep records and other concrete evidence of past achievements.6 This puts the failure in perspective. Without proof of day-in-day-out excellence, those stung by the mistake are too likely to focus on the negative. This bit of boardroom advice, translated to our prayer lives, is a good rationale for keeping answer books, either mental or written, of our prayer requests.
Jim Danhof of First Covenant Church, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said one of the red flags of his prayer life was failure without reason: “There’s failure with reason. You look back and say, ‘I see what I did wrong.’ But if I hit a stretch where there’s failure and no obvious cause, that means I had better get my prayer life going. The power for ministry is in prayer.
“I’ve just gone through a period of failure without apparent reason. For a couple of years now we’ve done some exciting things: moved into a new building, doubled our budget, grown by 20 percent, and written a doctrinal statement. But the last six months everything I touched turned to disaster, and I couldn’t figure out why. I became introspective and depressed. I realized I had to return to prayer, and soon the answer came. I was developing a martyr leadership style where I wanted everyone to feel sorry for me, and I’m convinced it was due to lack of prayer.”
When You Are Dry
All of us in ministry face dry times, the times when we have nothing to say and five pressing engagements where we must say something. We sit down to prepare and the Lord doesn’t speak. The Bible may as well be written in Chinese, and prepackaged sermons seem a worse alternative than ever. Even prayer, if we have enough discipline and resolve to see to it, provides little relief.
It’s at these times we learn the meaning of the word duty. We accomplish out of duty. The perfectionistic motors our hovering mothers started in us at age three come in handy. Or it may be our sense of call. For some it may be the simple commitment to a task, or guilt about accepting a paycheck. Whatever it is, we carry on somehow. But the words come from preaching engines that seem not to have been oiled.
Perhaps these dry periods are payment for the lack of prayer six months ago … or six days ago.
Often our dryness comes from what C. S. Lewis called the “error of Stoicism,” by which he means that because some days we have intense, spiritually rewarding experiences with prayer, we come to think that we should feel that way every day.
But when dryness comes, our prayer life is the first place to look. One pastor said, “I discovered early as a preacher that if I didn’t keep up my prayer, I lost the attention of the people. If you don’t pray and get blessed, then you don’t have that mysterious something that makes people listen. Prayer makes Scripture come alive for other people as they listen to you.”
During the dry periods, it’s important to remember that God continues to work through us even though we don’t feel like he is. Andrew Murray said that the Holy Spirit works through us most powerfully when we feel the worst about our prayer life.
When Your Work Is in Disarray
Consistent prayer brings order to life. It gives us a sense of priorities. Without prayer we find ourselves deluged with many unrelated demands. Prayer orders those demands; it gives us direction.
When prayer is slighted, we find ourselves floundering. Priorities become unclear. Efficiency dips and we begin to doubt our skill and competency. One Christian leader said, “When I let prayer slip, I find a lot of emotional garbage begins to accumulate that I’m not aware of. It slips below the surface, and before I know it, I’m depressed.”
What to do? One pastor recommended that this is the time for a sermon on prayer: “For some reason, when I feel my prayer life getting away from me, preaching on it helps bring me back. And of course, it’s good for the congregation also.”
When Apathy Strikes
The most obvious red flag is when you feel apathetic toward things spiritual. Older writers on prayer often called this “leanness of soul.” We don’t feel close to God, but don’t feel any particular need to be close either. We feel slightly depressed, out of touch with God, out of sorts with the world.
In evaluating the cause for apathy, the first thing to consider is health. Is there a physical reason why discouragement has set in? Another factor recently being studied is the influence of the body’s biological clock. The body has a natural way of adjusting its internal clocks, which order the daily peaks and troughs in a variety of bodily functions. For example, the body reacts differently at six a.m. in the winter than it does at six a.m. in the summer.7 A preset time for prayer may find the pray-er approaching quiet time with different emotions than at another season. Expectations and prayer methods may need to be altered or else the different feelings may be interpreted as apathy.
If physical causes are eliminated, the spiritual cause can be considered. One pastor who occasionally has suffered with apathy says, “Nothing happens externally. My preaching is OK. People in the congregation don’t notice anything. I get to work on time. My wife notices a kind of disengagement; I sense an enormous loss of joy. I know what the problem is: I have shifted over from God’s power to my power. It happens subtly, but once I rely on my power system, I get drained fast, and that’s when apathy sets in. I ought to be more sensitive and catch it sooner, but I’m not. The only way I can break out of it is to get away and do some concentrated praying.”
When You Feel Good About Your Spiritual Progress
This may seem like an odd red flag. Why should I be cautious when I feel good about the way my prayer life is going? The answer is that grace works secretly in our lives. The closer we draw to Christ, the more work we see that needs to be done in our lives. This should not be cause for discouragement—God’s grace is sufficient. But neither should it be a cause for an unbalanced euphoria. Our pride is sufficient to tip us over just when we find ourselves walking too tall. We don’t have good enough vision to see our own progress. We are far too prejudiced.
Paul Toms, pastor of Park Street Church in Boston, has said, “There is great danger in strength. The Scriptures are full of warnings: Beware when you have eaten and are full (Deut. 8:10-14). ‘After Rehoboam’s position as king was established and he had become strong, he and all Israel with him abandoned the law of the Lord’ (2 Chron. 12:1). ‘After Uzziah became powerful, his pride led to his downfall’ (2 Chron. 26:15-16). There are many more references to the danger.”
There is one fail-safe method to measure our prayers: to ask continually the question, “Am I doing this to please God or to please myself?” The minute we feel pride about our prayer life, we have ceased to be motivated by the proper source.
These red flags are warnings that our prayer life needs attention. Once a red flag is waved, our work may involve painful intervention, but it’s better than letting the condition deteriorate further.
Gregory Wiens, pastor of Salem Church of God in Clayton, Ohio, tells the story of his five-year-old son, Jordon. “One day he ran a splinter into his finger and came sobbing to me. I asked him what he wanted done. ‘I want God to remove the splinter.’
“‘But I can remove it,’ I told him.
“‘No, when you do it it hurts,’ Jordon explained. ‘God can do it without hurting.'”
Jordon didn’t realize that sometimes God entrusts responsibilities to human beings, and sometimes our treatment involves pain.
There’s no avoiding the pain of being human, of being fallen. Discipline and obedience help us come to God in prayer. When we don’t want to pray, we must recognize the rebellion as Satan’s work. We must come before God and wait, saying, You are my grace; you are my mercy.
In his own time, God will speak. Until he does there will be some pain.
Igumen Valamo, The Art of Prayer (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 231.
Samuel Chadwick, God Listens (Westchester, Illinois: Good News Publishers, 1973), 26.
Fred Smith, You and Your Network (Waco, Texas: Word, Inc., 1984), 121.
Helmut Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1960), 132.
Evelyn Christenson and Viola Blake, What Happens When Women Pray (Wheaton, Illinois: Victor Books, 1975), 132.
Warren McFarlan quoted in Computer Decisions (May 1983).
Julie Fitzpatrick Rafferty, “Watching the Biological Clock,” Harvard Magazine (March/April 1983): 26-29.
Copyright © 1985 by Christianity Today
