Too Busy (Not) To Pray

Prayer is something that we have been thinking a lot about at Heartland Church over
the last several months. It has been a great blessing to work through “A Praying Life” by
Paul Miller and to focus for 5 weeks on the subject of relational prayer in our weekend
gathering. I have become more convinced than ever of the overwhelming necessity of
prayer in all things, especially in the building up of God’s people and the advance of His
Kingdom through us. To put it simply, everything that happens in and through us is
God’s work and prayer is the language of our great dependence upon Him. If we are
being honest, all of us have likely been frustrated with our prayer lives in one way or
another. There seem to be countless excuses that we give as we avoid consistent
communion with the Lord through prayer. But perhaps the most common excuse given
in our hurried culture is that we are too busy to pray. I would like to suggest that we are
too busy not to pray!

Martin Luther famously said, “I have so much to do in a day that I shall spend the first
three hours in prayer.” Luther understood an important principle that we would all do
well to remember and apply: God can do more in a millisecond than we can do in a
millennia of our best efforts. The One who spoke all of creation into being by the word of
His power, the One who is currently upholding the universe by that same word of power,
is not reliant on our efforts to get things done. What God wants from us is relational
intimacy. His desire is that we would be with Him and that we would enjoy Him as He
enjoys us. And one of the primary ways that we enjoy relational intimacy is through
ongoing conversation. Much like a couple who has just “fallen in love” cannot stand to
go without talking to each other for even a short period of time, we are called into deep
and meaningful fellowship with the Lord.

So why is it that so many Christians seem to have such little time to talk to God? I really
think that we are far more busy than we ought to be as we live in a fast-paced, noisy
culture that is dominated by entertainment and comfort seeking. Because we often
focus on the wrong things, we end up short-timed on the things that actually warrant our
attention. In other words, there are things that we need to learn to say no to in order to
focus on the things that matter the most. Dwight L. Moody famously said this about
prayer and the competing business of the day: “If you have so much business to attend
to that you have no time to pray, depend upon it that you have more business on hand
than God ever intended you should have.” This is such an important observation that
Moody makes. If we are too busy to pray, then we are far more busy than God has
intended us to be. God’s intention is that we would be fully dependent upon Him as we
walk in the things that He has laid out before us in advance. This is precisely what Paul
wrote in Ephesians 2:10: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for
good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” We must
be consistently reminded that God has already established what we are to walk in each
day and that He supplies us the grace to walk in those things.

I can’t help but think that the reason that many of us don’t experience joy in the Lord
and a peace that comes only from Him is because we are busying ourselves and aren’t
experiencing well-paced, abiding prayer. I believe this is the connection that the Apostle
Paul makes in Philippians chapter 4 when he writes, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I
will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand;
do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with
thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which
surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
(Philippians 4:4-7) The calling on our lives is to find rest and contentment in the
presence of the Lord through abiding prayer. Instead of trying to control things and do
more than we ought to do, we are called to bring everything to the Lord in prayer and
allow Him to guard our hearts and minds. This means that we must be consistent in
prayer!

If you are like me, you might feel a sense of failure when it comes to this kind of prayer.
The good news is that God’s grace covers even our lack of vibrant, consistent prayer.
God knows that this is a struggle for us. In fact, He has known about our failures before
the foundation of the world. His grace is sufficient for us to keep coming back to Him —
even and especially in our weakness and frailty — to experience His sufficiency. Let’s
ask God to do a work in us to stir up belief and to help us joyfully grasp the necessity of
relational, dependent, consistent, persistent and expectant prayer!

Because of Christ,
Jeff Neville