“Pastor, sometimes I enjoy my prayer time, and some other times it’s just very difficult connecting and I’d feel like stopping. Why is it like that?”
Actually, I’ve also experienced that situation until I learnt that lack of feeling or ease during prayer doesn’t mean your prayer didn’t ascend to God.
As much as the feeling and ease makes praying enjoyable, our focus while praying shouldn’t be to enjoy it, rather it should be the prayer content and the knowledge we have about God’s word. So even though you don’t feel anything or even though the prayer time wasn’t easy, you’d know you’ve prayed because of the content of your prayer and the knowledge of God’s word you applied during the prayer.
Dr Isaiah Wealth taught about two types of prayer that we mostly practice and experience but do not really understand. Let me share them with you:
IRREGULAR PRAYER:
Just as the name, this type of prayer isn’t regular, it happens spontaneously. Have you ever felt a burden in your heart and suddenly found yourself praying, especially in tongues? You’re not sure what it is but whatever it is put a strong feeling in your heart to pray. And most times, you won’t be able to stop that prayer until the feeling or burden fades from your heart.
Some other times you’d just suddenly feel love in your heart for God and before you know it, you’d begin to pray and speak in tongues.
This type of prayer is good, but it’s neither scheduled, planned or consistent. You can’t build your spiritual life on something that is not planned and consistent. Ofcourse you’d get that temporal feeling within you as you pray, but you’d need more than feelings to grow your spiritual life.
Some of you haven’t felt like praying since the last feeling you got 3 months ago. Is that what you plan to build your spiritual life on? Breakthrough happens whenever you engage in spontaneous prayers, but there’s more to your life than waiting for that precious moment when a burden will come upon you.
REGULAR PRAYER
This is the type of prayer that builds our spiritual life. It’s a deliberate, consistent and scheduled type of prayer. That prayer you wake up to pray for one hour every night, that’s a regular prayer. And that’s the type of prayer that will build you up.
Ofcourse you might sometimes feel a burden as you engage in regular prayer, but that’s just a spur of the moment, it may not happen again for a long time. And the way you’d know you were praying about a burden is that you’d have no previous knowledge about the situation. And even as you pray, it will be difficult to change the prayer focus to something you intended to pray, until the burden leaves you.
Now that you know the difference between those two, let me show some prayer secrets that can make your regular prayer life enjoyable.
Psalm 100:
1 Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all ye lands.
2 Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing.
3 Know ye that the LORD he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
4 Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.
5 For the LORD is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations.
The summary of verses 1 to 3 is that your prayer life should be considered a service to God, and if that’s the case, you must approach prayer joyfully. Any service that is rendered to God without joy won’t produce result. Don’t approach your prayer altar as though God is putting you under pressure, and then you’d just struggle through it for one hour and get back to bed. No, that’s not how it’s done.
You must prepare yourself to render effective service to God. God is always looking for intercessors, so the moment you subscribe as an intercessor, He begins to pay attention to you. But before He listens to your intercession, He listens to your heart. Every time we pray, we draw God closer to victory against the forces of wickedness in this world. That thought alone should stir joy in your heart as you pray. But the moment you handle prayer as though God is stressing you, then you don’t understand what you’re doing.
Verse 4 tells us how to secure God’s presence, it says with thanksgiving and praise. This part of prayer alone can last for hours. I laugh when people say it’s hard to pray for one hour, meanwhile, if they itemize all the things that God has done for them and begin to thank and praise God for those things, they’d surely need more than one hour.
One beautiful thing about thanksgiving is that it engages your mind. You’re thinking about the faithfulness of God and thanking Him for it. That act alone can stir up a prayer fire within you. Any thanksgiving that doesn’t engage your mind isn’t thanksgiving. And if it doesn’t get to your mind, it won’t get to God. The reason why thanksgiving is required to enter into God’s presence is because it would open up your mind and heart, and once that happens, God can easily pass through.
Please note that this process may not be required when your prayer is spontaneous, because the burden would have opened your heart and God would have come in already. But if the prayer isn’t spontaneous, then you have to connect your heart through intense thanksgiving and praise.
While thanksgiving is simply appreciating God for the good things He has done, not necessarily in your life, praise hallows His name for the details and creativity He put into doing those good things. So if God gave you a house, you can thank Him for giving you a house. But when it comes to praising Him for that house, you have to magnify His name for the creativity He put into building every section of that house. And believe me, you can spend hours doing this. Thanksgiving may be a single like, but praise would definitely require more than a thousand lines. Those who know how to thank and praise God well never miss His glory and presence during their regular prayers, He’d surely visit them.
Finally, when you’re sure that you’ve secured His presence, then you can commence praying for whatever you planned to pray about. The main prayer doesn’t even have to take long, it’s entering the presence that does.
I hope this has brought enlightenment to someone.
Remain ever blessed!
#EmekaAnslem