How To Ruin Prayer

Here are several ways Satan tries to sabotage prayer in your life and our church.  How to ruin prayer:

1. Pray only when you feel like it.  Disregard any biblical talk of praying “day and night” or “without ceasing”—that’s just for fanatics; don’t want to be accused of being a radical, or an extremist!
2. Try to impress God with pious performances so you can win max­imum spiritual credit.
3. Pray publicly with an eye to exhibiting your “spiritual maturity” for others to admire.
4. Let your prayers degenerate into mindless repetitions.  Recycle those same old phrases even when your mind is far away.
5. Imagine that it taxes God’s ability to hear your prayers and meet your needs—imagine a frantic God struggling to sort out all those requests.
6. Pretend that God doesn’t like to be bothered, and that he’s “put out” by your numerous cries and appeals.
7. Convince yourself that God doesn’t really care about you and your silly little struggles and trials and tears anyhow.
8. Think of prayer as a way of putting God’s arm behind his back so you can have your way.
9. Demand speedy results.  Dismiss the idea that God would have you persevere in prayer for years, or that he might be free to answer, “No.”
10. Imagine that prayer won’t make any difference anyhow.
11. Shrink prayer by reducing it to asking.  Bypass all that praise, confession, and thanksgiving, and go straight to important stuff:  your various requests.
12. Reserve the worst hours of your day for prayer.  This way you can give to God what has the least value to you.
13. Think of prayer as doing God a favor.
14. Reduce prayer to a mental exercise, a kind of self-therapy to put the mind at ease thru positive thoughts, and in this way remove God from the picture entirely.  How about that, prayer without God!