14 Ways to Sabotage Your Prayer Life
January 04 2019
January 04 2019
The beginning of a new year is a great time to take stock of where we stand in terms of prayer. So, in keeping with C. S. Lewis's inverted approach in The Screwtape Letters (click here for a sampling of quotations from Screwtape), allow me to recommend fourteen ways to sabotage your prayer life:
- Pray only when you feel like it. Disregard any fanatic ideas of praying “day and night” or “without ceasing.”
- Try to impress God with pious prayer performances so that you can win maximum spiritual credit.
- Pray publicly with an eye to exhibiting your “spiritual maturity” for others to admire.
- Let your prayers degenerate into mindless repetitions. Recycle the same old phrases even when your mind is far away.
- Imagine that it taxes God’s ability to meet your needs and respond in the best possible way to your prayers.
- Convince yourself that God doesn’t really care about you and your silly little struggles and trials and tears anyhow.
- Pretend that God doesn’t like to be bothered, and that he’s “put out” by your numerous cries and appeals.
- View prayer as a way of putting God’s arm behind his back.
- Demand instant results. Dismiss the idea that God would have you persevere in prayer, or that your loving Heavenly Father might be free to answer, “No.”
- Imagine that prayer won’t make any difference.
- Shrink prayer by equating it with asking. So bypass all that fluff (like praise, confession, lament, thanksgiving) and go straight to the real thing: your wish list.
- Reserve the worst hours of your day for prayer. This way you can give to God what has the least value to you.
- Think of prayer as doing God a favor.
- Reduce prayer to a mental exercise, a sort of self-therapy to put the mind at ease, and in this way remove God from the picture entirely. How about that, prayer without God!
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