Here are several ways Satan tries to sabotage prayer in your life and our church. How to ruin prayer:
- Pray only when you feel like it. Disregard any biblical talk of praying “day and night” or “without ceasing”—that’s just for fanatics; don’t want to be accused of being a radical, or an extremist!
- Try to impress God with pious performances so you can win maximum spiritual credit.
- Pray publicly with an eye to exhibiting your “spiritual maturity” for others to admire.
- Let your prayers degenerate into mindless repetitions. Recycle those same old phrases even when your mind is far away.
- Imagine that it taxes God’s ability to hear your prayers and meet your needs—imagine a frantic God struggling to sort out all those requests.
- Pretend that God doesn’t like to be bothered, and that he’s “put out” by your numerous cries and appeals.
- Convince yourself that God doesn’t really care about you and your silly little struggles and trials and tears anyhow.
- Think of prayer as a way of putting God’s arm behind his back so you can have your way.
- Demand speedy results. Dismiss the idea that God would have you persevere in prayer for years, or that he might be free to answer, “No.”
- Imagine that prayer won’t make any difference anyhow.
- Shrink prayer by reducing it to asking. Bypass all that praise, confession, and thanksgiving, and go straight to important stuff: your various requests.
- Reserve the worst hours of your day for prayer. This way you can give to God what has the least value to you.
- Think of prayer as doing God a favor.
- Reduce prayer to a mental exercise, a kind of self-therapy to put the mind at ease thru positive thoughts, and in this way remove God from the picture entirely. How about that, prayer without God!
