“I was awake for 4 hours last night with my child – I can barely string a sentence together, never mind formulate a prayer.”
“I yelled at them again – I just feel too guilty to pray.”
“I’ve been asking God to change my child’s behaviour in that area for so long, I no longer feel it’s worthwhile to pray.”
“Pray? When do you expect me to do that? I haven’t even got time to brush my teeth!”
Praying for our children can sometimes feel far from easy. The obstacles to prayer seem to just keep building up. Whether it’s busyness, guilt, tiredness, disappointment, or even something else, it’s often easy to feel that prayer is off the cards for us as parents.
But all of these things tell us that we’re forgetting something crucial about prayer. All of these feelings show us that we’re forgetting that:
Prayer isn’t a job to do.
Getting the hearing from God in prayer isn’t a right we earn through our good works.
Prayer isn’t a performance that must be eloquent and articulate.
Prayer doesn’t need to be something that we only do in a set aside time of quiet, with a lit candle on our knees in the quiet of a special place.
Fundamentally, we’re forgetting this:
God is our Father.
He’s our Dad. He loves us. He wants to hear from us. Like any good parent, he doesn’t expect a polished statement when we come to him – incoherent mutterings will do – he just wants to hear from us. Jesus makes our prayers acceptable.
God is our Father.
He’s our Dad. He loves us. He doesn’t want us to make ourselves good enough to come before him – somehow showing we’re worthy enough to gain a hearing (as if we could!). Jesus gives us all the goodness we need.
God is our Father.
He’s our Dad. He loves us. And as such, he knows what’s right for us. So even though we may have prayed about this thing a hundred times before, he wants to hear from us again, because he knows the perfect timing to answer our prayers. Jesus is in the business of bringing glory to our Dad – it might be through answering our prayer this time, or it might be through the patience and compassion he’s developing in us by making us wait.
God is our Father.
He’s our Dad. He loves us. Though he loves it when we set aside time devoted to him, he also loves it when we remember him in the middle of our frantic lives and chat to him as we go. Jesus has torn down the barrier to our Dad so that we can approach his throne with confidence, whether we’re in a quiet place, a playgroup, on the toilet or cooking dinner.
When we remember who we’re praying to – our Father who loves us – then prayer is easy. It’s a delight. Because we know we can come to him wherever we are, whatever is going on. We can come to him, knowing that he’s for us, that his goal is our good, which is for his glory.
This post was inspired by the first chapter of Tim Chester’s book, “You can pray
“, which Scott is reading at the moment. If you want to think more about prayer, we can recommend it so far!*