The English priest John Chapman is credited with this quote; “Pray as you can, not as you can’t”. His message is clear, bother not yourself with the trivial matters of methods, or how or when, and just pray!
We’ve all heard the adage, “Practice makes perfect”. I believe this is especially true with prayer. As we practice the habit of prayer, we are repeatedly turning ourselves toward God, inviting Him to work within us, uniting our being with his being, fusing our love with His own. Ultimately it is God who must reveal Himself to us. We cannot enter heaven, but He can enter our world. Therefore, our effectiveness in prayer is always modulated by our personal desire and deliberate effort to touch His holiness.
How we choose to put forth our “prayer effort” is critical. If we hold a belief that effective prayers are entirely our choice alone, then we will fail. We will likely find ourselves praying out of selfish ambition and duty instead of communion with Jesus. Our effort must be sincere and open to the leading of the holy spirit within. We must genuinely desire His presence above His power, His face more than His hand, and His whispered words of love spoken in our hearts more than anything else life has to offer.
Living in this constant state of communion with the Lord is not attainable through religious activity. It is only experienced through grace, God’s deliberate choice to draw near and make Himself known to us in prayer.
We must first concede that we need help, and that help comes via the gift of holy spirit which is given to us when we were born again. Through it our hearts can be enlightened, encouraged, comforted and directed. (Here would be a good place to read and reflect on Jesus’ teachings at the last supper; especially his comments about “the comforter”).
Jesus so exhibited oneness with God that he declared “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Jesus’s life was one of intimacy with the Father through one distinguishing practice – PRAYER. Prayer separated Jesus from all other Rabbis of his time. He prayed often. He prayed privately. He prayed publicly. He prayed early, late, with others and alone. His was a life anchored in prayer. Jesus was a man of prayer.
Prayer is neither mystical nor magical; it does not possess an elusive or arcane quality that only a select few can harness. There is no hidden code or formula that, when deciphered, guarantees responses to our petitions. It is not a mathematical equation, with numbers and variables to manipulate until we achieve a desirable outcome, nor is it a chemical formula that requires precise measurements and reactions to yield a specific result. Prayer is the act of a pleading heart seeking help from One greater than myself. It is a blending of emotions and thoughts with our heavenly Father and our big brother Jesus Christ. It is first and foremost a complete surrender of “my will” for “His will”.
There are no set methods or prescribed times of day to pray. The Apostle Paul expressed it most eloquently when he wrote, “pray without ceasing”. Prayer needs to become as common and frequent as breathing itself. The perfect prayer is the one which continually orients my thoughts and hope toward God and away from myself. Pray as you can, not as you can’t.
It is said that there is no greater revelation of God to man than to know the magnitude of His love. Try as we might, we simply cannot fully absorb the fullness of God’s great love. But prayer opens the door and invites us to experience intimacy with the Almighty.
Please consider Paul’s prayer from Ephesians 3:14-19:
“For this reason, I bow my knees to the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he would grant you to be strengthened with power in the inner self by means of his spirit so that Christ would live in your hearts through trust; and that you, having been rooted and grounded in love, are fully able to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the width and length and height and depth, and thus to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you are filled with all the fullness of God.”
May we each give ourselves to prayer, praying as we can and not as we can’t. To the end that we can come to an experiential knowledge of the love of Christ which has been given to us and is for us and for all who call upon his name.
Your Brother in Christ,
