I need to deepen my prayer life this year. I do! I need to deepen my prayer life every year.
Most of us think we’re doing okay with our spiritual disciplines. “What I’m doing is not perfect, but it’s good enough.”
Good enough for whom? For yourself? Do your spiritual disciplines measure up to a holy God? Are you living a life pleasing to Him? Do you want to draw nearer to Him? Or is your relationship with Him “good enough?”
New Year’s usher in times of reflection, introspection, and sometimes even resolutions. What about this year?
Okay, I need to deepen my prayer life, but how do I do it?
We have access to all kinds of plans for that, don’t we? We have “read through the Bible in one year” plans. We have the ACTS method (A-adoration, C-confession, T-thanksgiving, S-supplication). We have a 12-point guide for How to Spend an Hour in Prayer by Dick Eastman. We have Don Whitney’s encouragement for us to read a proverb a day for a month.
Will any of those things deepen our prayer lives? Probably. They’re all good suggestions.
But I’m after something even deeper. I want our prayer lives to reflect a greater devotion and love for our Lord. I want to feel closer to Him. I want to sense His presence with me. Don’t you? How do we do that?
“Be Still and Know that I am God”
What I need to do is simple, but it’s not easy. What I need to do is to sit still.
I don’t know why sitting still is so hard for me. Even when I’m on the phone having a conversation, I’m fiddling with something. I’m playing a computer game, or watching the birds from my porch, or something. It’s so hard to just sit still and listen.
The same is true for a conversation with the Lord. It’s so hard to just sit still and listen.
Don’t get me wrong. I have quiet time every morning. During this time, I study the scriptures, I write notes of encouragement to people, I pray for people in our prayer guide from church, I read a daily devotional and write in a prayer journal.
Good enough? I don’t think so. Because sometimes, even after doing all that, my spirit is not quickened with devotion to the Lord.
Oh, I pray. I do what I call stream-of-consciousness prayers. Stream of consciousness is defined as “a literary style in which a character’s thoughts, feelings, and reactions are depicted in a continuous flow uninterrupted by objective description or conventional dialogue.”
What that means to me is that I speak to the Lord all through the day, thought by thought. I’m always aware of His presence with me. I’m always commenting to Him about everything that happens in a day. But where I fail (and I suspect this is true of more than just me) is that I don’t stop long enough to just sit. To pray more “formal” prayers that start with, “Dear God” and end in “Amen.” I mean, I do that sometimes, but not nearly often enough. I’m just in such a hurry all the time, it seems. And that takes time! And after I exhaust my prayers to Him, I also need to sit still and listen. And know. And I don’t do it enough.
I’m reexamining my own priorities in thinking about this. What is more important than that sweet, restful time in dialogue with the Master I claim to love so much? The answer is “nothing!” Yet it’s one thing to acknowledge that and another to do something about it. Right?
We live is such uncertain times. If 2024 is not the time to start investing that time in spending more quality time with my Father, then when? What about you? What limits the time you spend sitting and listening? What keeps you from being still and knowing that the Lord is God?
I can’t answer that for you, but I can tell you, I’m certainly going to try to change that this year. And you know what? If I do that with greater faithfulness, I believe my relationship with Him will grow sweeter, dearer, closer and you know what will happen then? I’ll find that my prayer life has indeed deepened.
We can’t do it perfectly. But the blessing is in the striving. Let’s all strive to do better in 2024.
Deborah Howard and her husband, Theron, live outside Little Rock, Arkansas. Deborah’s writing and speaking ministry serves to comfort the hurting, to instruct, and to write for Him. As a former hospice nurse, her experience lends itself to this ministry. Her fiction work is designed to entertain while demonstrating that living according to biblical principles is indeed possible.