Most of us wouldn’t ever think of prayer as hard work. When the main problem isn’t falling asleep in the middle of our prayers, we’d hardly classify prayer as a demanding physical effort.
I think Jesus would disagree. The Gospel writers told us Jesus was sometimes exhausted after praying. And once, in Gethsemane, Jesus prayed so intensely that He sweat blood. If I ever sweat during my prayers, something must be wrong with the air conditioner.
We pray at different levels.
The first level is to pray about what we do. We want:
- Help not to do something;
- Help to do something;
- Or Jesus to tell us what to do.
That’s where most of us stop. We keep our prayers on our behavior:
- If we’re doing well, we’re grateful.
- If we’re being bad, we’re sorry.
Jesus sounds more like Santa Claus, rewarding good little girls and boys or punishing bad little girls and boys.
The Christian faith is more than just behavior modification. Christ desires to transform the whole individual—not just to change our outward behavior.
This is where prayer gets hard—when we get past the surface issues of our lives and drill down into the bedrock foundation of who we are.
When we recognize that our behavior is nothing more than the expression of our being, then prayer gets a little tougher.
When we understand that the goal is to live like Christ because we are like Christ, well, then you can see the challenge.
Prayer at this level is hard because it deals with the essence of who we are. The more time we spend with Christ at this level, the more we become like Him.
No, it’s not easy—but nothing worth having ever is.
