When I was a child, I learned to pray from watching my Dad. Dear heavenly Father, thank you for this day, thank you for this food. In Jesus’ name, Amen. That was the standard blessing he offered at supper, nightly, sometimes mumbling it into his beard after a long, exhausting day. He meant every word of it, no matter how routinely identical the words were.
As I matured into adolescent immaturity, I began to notice how he prayed at other times. Our Father, in the name of Jesus we come to you humbly… He prayed sitting in church, standing in Bible studies, hunched over on the edge of my bed. Those prayers were longer, more fleshed out, and much more, shall we say, verbose than the one he offered at supper.
When I finally decided to do something with the life God had given me, I knew I had to fix my prayers. Gone were the …and be with Vicki today…and be with Joe…and give me a job….and be with Ethel… I, too, fleshed out my prayers with a thousand words designed to solidify a public image as a Spiritual Man. After all, if my father (a man of so few words that he likely sealed his wedding vows with a shrug, a nod, and a heavy sigh) could summon up a torrent of vocabulary to express his spiritual concerns, surely that was the standard for which I should strive.
Twenty years of water has flowed by since then, and I’ve altered my view of prayer. As I look back at the verbal diarrhea that accompanied so many of my heaven-ward missives, I realize that brevity was a better friend than loquacity. I could have jettisoned so many useless words without sacrificing the depth of meaning I truly needed to convey. It would have made things so much clearer; not for Him, but for me.
What could I have said instead?
God:
Yes.
For when I knew the answer, but wanted to couch it in phrases that would allow me to hedge my bets, to give me a needed escape. In my life, I could have avoided weeks of delays by simply agreeing to what I already knew was true.
Father, you know that thing I want?
What is it?
For when I wanted to have the desires of my heart, yet knew not what they should have been. I could have admitted my ignorance, and simply asked Him what I, as His child, really wanted. Instead, I asked for this and that; or worse, I hemmed and hawed and ended up asking for nothing.
Turn your face from me, that I might have rest.
But please don’t ignore me.
For those moments when He was speaking to me and I just couldn’t take another lesson, another reminder of my disobedience or another call to do something difficult. I just wanted Him to stop, yet I knew I could not function in His absence.
Dear God:
You love me, but I don’t.
For those days when I had to admit my disgust with myself and my sins, yet needed to acknowledge that He would never stop loving me. Admitting our own self-loathing without also seeing His eternal grace is a path towards despair.
Dear God:
That makes no sense…but I get it.
For times when His commands flew in the face of every shred of common sense and contradicted every speck of intelligence I could summon. I could have moved onwards, understanding that my path led towards obedience despite the fact that His ways were so inscrutably not my ways.
Dear God
I’m so useless
So, won’t You please use me?
For those days when I have to set aside my arrogance, my assumptions that I am inherently needed in the Kingdom. I could have seen my co-dependence and yet still begged to be allowed to serve Him as He saw fit.
God:
That hurts. A lot.
But thank you.
For those times when I wanted to learn deep lessons without the attendant difficulty that usually comes with it. I could have faced the hardships that usually teach us so much without losing my gratitude, my thankfulness that He had helped me grow.
What prayers did you miss out on praying?
Brother Jeremy, I read your article and I am kind of disappointed by what you SEEM to be suggesting. Correct me if I’m wrong but in stating that as you ‘look back at the verbal diarrhea that accompanied so many of my heaven-ward missives, I realize that brevity was a better friend than loquacity,’ are you saying that long prayers may be useless; or at least suggesting, that long prayers might be just words that are really not true prayer? Perhaps I might be missing your meaning; or it is just for you that you feel long prayers are ‘verbal diarrhea.’
Now I know, long prayers can become tedious because the flesh is weak; nevertheless, I know in my life long prayers, as imperfect that they are, spending long time with the Father, are not just words. In fact, I’ve never been comfortable with just praying “Hi, God, how are you? I’m okay but I’d like to ask you to do….. Thank You; and until next time. Amen.” Although it’s true that publicly, when lot of people are involved in hearing my prayer, but still in reverence and in worship of Him Who “hearest prayers,” I do make my prayers brief.
Yet, when my prayers are long, many times I feel guilty (?) in that there is so much to pour out of my heart to God, I still stop for one reason and another. Perhaps someone will say that I’m overdoing it; because I remember that in growing in the Lord, I’ve heard many teach on the subject of prayer, I don’t believe there was any mention of long praying for the believers. In fact, the kind of prayer they suggested was ‘pray while you get dressed for work or school;’ ‘pray while you are going to your destination;’ or ‘pray whenever you have some free time;’ etc.
In my studies, I’ve read that the ones that God has use for the good of people around the world throughout the years, have been men and women that were used to praying long. John Knox, George Whitefield, Martin Luther; and I could name quite a few, not only prayed for a long time, but I read that they prayed for hours, i.e.for two, three, four hours at a time. And as history confirms, these were men that change history because they did not faint in praying long.
Anyway, brother Jeremy, I apologize if I misunderstood your intention in what you wrote. God bless you in Christ Jesus; and “pray without ceasing.” Amen.
Lasaro, thank you for interacting here.
I am not attempting to formulate a general rule about prayer length here. I am not making the pronouncement that God hates long prayers, or that people who offer short prayer have weak flesh. My point is that I (me personally, jeremy parks) have erred in the way in which I approached prayer.
The key passage in all of this was “I, too, fleshed out my prayers with a thousand words designed to solidify a public image as a Spiritual Man.” My long prayers were not time with God, or pouring out more and more of my heart before the throne. Instead, my long prayers were designed to be long. That’s it. Just at attempt to pray the right kind of prayers, i.e., long-winded stuff.
The examples I’ve offered of brief prayers were drawn from specific kinds of moments, incidents in which I would have been better served to have stopped trying to pray the “right” prayer and instead, simply say to God what I knew in my heart was correct.
Long prayers have their place; indeed, when we approach the Father’s throne, it is impossible to stay too long. However, there are moments when we need to set aside meaningless words or prayers that say everything except what is needed.
Is this any clearer?
Thanks again.
Jeremy,
I am currently in a season where prayer is really the water that is floating my boat. Most (except my wife) do not even know the great struggle that I am engaged in during this season of my life.
For conspiracy theorists: it has nothing to do with “moral struggles or ethical struggles in any way.”
As I seek to pray more and pray better I’ve come to realize just how little I know about “praying.” Sometimes the whole matter of prayer becomes so confusing and even discouraging.
Thanks, for your post. It was a cool breeze in my otherwise hot day.
Frank, I’m sorry that times are tough, and yet I’m thrilled to know that prayer is your life raft of choice. You seem to be on the same sort of journey we all take, doing what we know is right even though we’re not sure why we are doing it nor why it is right.
I’m glad to have helped; I nearly didn’t submit this post for publishing because it seemed too egocentric. You know, “I learned…I decided….my prayers…ad infinitum, ad nauseum.”
Jeremy, I think you were pretty clear the first time.
Excellent work, again, Jeremy.
I love self-reflective posts such as this.
is a story about a poor Jewish man, rather simple-minded, but very devout who had happened to hear his rabbi say that it is best to pray in Hebrew, in the ‘language of the covenant’, in order to honor God
now this simple man wanted to please the Lord, but all he knew of Hebrew was the letters of its alphabet . . . and when the rabbi came to temple, he heard this man slowly saying each letter aloud while he davened (swayed in prayer)
the rabbi stopped him and asked why? why just say the letters?
and the simple man told him that God could take from him his Hebrew letters and make of them the most wondrous of all prayers, so great was their good God
the lesson? it’s okay to bring to God in prayer what you have and give it to Him. . .
He will know what to do with it
He will know.
Prayer is work, hard work, exhausting work, at times. At other times, it is as easy as falling off of a log backwards. I think I have some 50-60 volumes on prayer alone, not counting the sermons on that subject. God answers all of my prayers, and His answers are: Yes. No. Wait.
Jeremy:
Excellent post! Reminds me of the praying Jesus did in the Garden–“Nevertheless, not my will but Yours be done.” Short, to the point, and as powerful as they come. Scripture says that Jesus agonized in a longer time of praying, but those few words are what we have recorded for us. They were the conclusion to His struggle, I think, and the ultimate conclusion that all of us must come to in any of our praying. I need to come to that conclusion more often and quicker in my own life……