My Weak Prayer Life Exposes My Arrogance

Erik Raymond at Irish Calvinist hit me with a load of conviction today. He is right, when we don’t pray it is a declaration that we think we don’t need God. I am gonna go do some repenting now.

“Devote yourselves to prayer…” (Col. 4.2a)

I suspect that a chief reason for our apathy in prayer is not our lack of need but in our perceived lack of need. Many of our prayer lives reflect shallowness and irregularity because we somehow have bought the lie that we are sovereign and not in need of help, glorious and not required to worship, and too busy and so not in need of the discipline of bending our hearts in submission to God through prayer.

Prayer is a humbling thing. And failure to pray reveals as much about our prideful self-consumption as our misconceptions about self-sovereignty, divine power, and the glory of Christ.

We need a simple jagged command like this here to puncture our imaginations, flood our hearts with sacred truth and bring us into the reality of God-centered dependence.