Understanding Prayer

“When you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites
who love to pray publicly on street corners
and in the synagogues where everyone can see them.
I tell you the truth, that is all the reward they will ever get.”
Matthew 6:5

Understanding any spiritual discipline begins with a good definition. Put succinctly, prayer is communicating with God. A conversation that can be spoken or silent and even expressed in song. Many of the psalms are prayers set to music. A primary purpose of prayer is connecting with God in order to transfer His will into your life. It’s collaborating with God to accomplish His goals.

Prayer is a vital expression of trust in the Lord that emerges from our devotion and commitment. E.M. Bounds put it this way: “When the angel of devotion has gone, the angel of prayer has lost its wings, and it becomes a deformed and loveless thing.”¹

Prayer often involves other disciplines, such as meditation, worship, silence, solitude, and surrender—always surrender.

Effective prayer will have a believer deliberately seeking the mind of God on a particular matter that’s on his or her heart. Whether it’s confessing a sin or praising His name or pursuing His will or interceding for a friend or petitioning for our own needs, prayer must be God-centred, never self-centred.

Sincere prayer comes from a heart that longs for God to reveal what He desires. So prayer must also allow adequate time for listening, waiting intently before the Father.

God never hides His will. If we seek direction, He delights in providing it.

Since prayer is one of the most powerful of all spiritual disciplines, we shouldn’t be surprised that it is among the most misunderstood as well. Christian prayer has some important distinctions from the discipline in other religions, yet it’s a temptation for Christians—even those who have known the Lord for years—to make prayer complicated.

To reduce prayer to a cheap marketing scheme insults God’s character. He is holy and righteous, and He will always act in your best interests whether you behave correctly or not.

Prayer is not presenting God with a wish list as though He were a genie. Neither is prayer a laborious, painful marathon of monotonous misery entered into for hours each day to prove one’s piety to God. It is not the repetition of the same religious words. Remember? Jesus condemned “meaningless repetition.” On the contrary, rather than trying to motivate or impress God to gain what we want, prayer is an authentic seeking of His plan as we willingly adjust our will to match His.