What should we pray about? Whole books have been written on that subject, but this chapter is for beginners, so I want to focus on what Richard Foster calls “simple prayer.”
The problem is that my mind has a steady stream of thoughts: will I get a year-end bonus, will the meeting I’m supposed to lead come off all right, what’s for dinner — but none of these things seem spiritual. So I force myself to pray for things that seem nobler — missionaries and world peace. But there is a gap between what I am supposed to pray for and what I am really thinking about.
Removing this gap is what simple prayer is about. In simple prayer, I pray about what is really on my heart, not what I wish was on my heart. As Foster put it, “We bring ourselves before God just as we are, warts and all. Like children before a loving father, we open our hearts and make our requests. We do not try to sort out the good from the bad. … We tell God, for example, how frustrated we are with the co-worker at the office or the neighbor down the street. We ask for food, favorable weather, and good health.”
You may wonder at offering God prayer that seems so trivial — even selfish. However, nothing kills prayer faster than when I pretend in prayer to be more noble than I really am. Dallas Willard sees this:
Prayer simply dies from efforts to pray about “good things” that honestly do not matter to us. The way to get to meaningful prayer for those good things is to start by praying for what we are truly interested in. The circles of our interests will inevitably grow in the largeness of God’s love. … Many people have found prayer impossible because they thought they should only pray for wonderful but remote needs they actually had little or no interest in or even knowledge of.
Simple prayer is the most common type of prayer in Scripture. Jesus himself teaches it when he tells us to pray for our daily bread. Sometimes it looks amazingly non-spiritual, as when Gideon asks God to give a few more reasons why he should trust him or when Moses complains about his job description. (“Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child,’ to the land that you promised on oath to their ancestors?”) Or, in a truly remarkable example, when Elijah prays to complain about a group of youths calling him “baldy” (take a look at 2 Kings 2:24). This doesn’t seem like the prayer of a spiritual giant.
Simple prayer is the most common type of prayer in Scripture.
Of course, I’d like to grow so that my concerns become increasingly less selfish. But prayer — like any other relationship — must begin in honesty if it is to grow. C. S. Lewis wrote that in prayer we must “lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”
John Ortberg, The Life You’ve Always Wanted: Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary People (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009), 100–101.
Check out the new Bible Study, The Life You’ve Always Wanted. It is available on Amazon, as well as part of the Good Questions Have Groups Talking subscription service. (Like Netflix for Bible lessons.)
