Blog
“Cultivating a Habit of Prayer”
Categories: Monday Morning MeditationStretching Sunday’s Sermon:
We have endeavored this year to become a mission minded people. A people with a culture of speaking, showing and sharing the truth in love. Our mission is to bear witness to God’s work in this world and in our lives and testify to others the work He wants to accomplish in their lives as well. We mentor and model what it means to be a follower of Jesus. We call this process discipling. The heart of discipling however, is discipleship. We must first be people who are following after Jesus ourselves, learning from Him, coming to know Him and becoming more like Him in the process. The Apostle Paul gives a great insight into what discipleship looks like in Phil. 3:3-16, a never ending quest to know Jesus intimately, relationally, and experientially, never being satisfied with where he was and always longing to know him more. May that be our goal as disciples as well. Discipleship is not a destination, it is a direction. A never ending journey with Jesus to new heights of glory and awe. Our personal journey with Jesus is the platform from which we can invite others to travel with us and thus, discipleship is the heart and engine of discipling done well.
So how do we continue to grow in this relationship and become more and more like Jesus? One point we made yesterday was that relationships don’t grow when there’s no communication. If we want to know Him more we must be in constant contact and communication with Jesus. Part of how we do this is poring over the Word. When I see Jesus/God at work in Scripture I come to understand, to appreciate, and to love Him more. This is the primary reason why God has given us His word, not to prove ourselves right and others wrong, not to learn some facts of Biblical trivium, but to see God at work in this world and to be drawn in to Him. And so we must be in the Word to see the God who is behind it, in it, through it, and its end or goal. This is what we looked at primarily yesterday, particularly with a view towards creating a habit of Bible reading. To do this we applied some well-worn principles and wisdom about habit formation and behavior modification from James Clear, someone who has become something of an expert in this field, and who has aggregated the best ideas about habit formation in a book called Atomic Habits.
Every behavior we do is trying to solve some problem, fix some issue, fill some void. Many of these become habits whether consciously developed or not. Focusing on the cycle of behavior of “cue, craving, response, and reward,” Clear suggests one overriding principle and four laws of habit formation. The principle is that we must shape our identity. Who are we? Who are we trying to become? What type of person do we want our habits to reflect? Similar to Paul’s approach, in 1 Corinthians and some of his other writings, the gist is “become who you are.” Set your identity, and then form your habits in light of that. So for instance, “I am a disciple, someone who is in relationship with Jesus therefore, I will read to grow closer to Him each day.” The four laws that correspond to the cycle of behavior are: 1) Make it obvious 2) Make it appealing 3) Make it easy 4) Make it satisfying.
This morning I want us to apply these things to prayer. Not only must we as disciples pore over the Word, we must also pour ourselves out in prayer. Prayer is the other side of the communication bridge and a necessary part of developing our discipleship. Prayer helps us to be dependent on God (Matt. 6:11-13), helps shape our will to His (Matt. 6:10; 26:42), and if done right, gives us a window into our own hearts (consider the right way and the wrong way to pray in Lk. 18:9-14). All of this helps us to build our relationship and become more like Him.
So how can we applies the information about habit formation to prayer?
First, we must shape our identity. We are in a relationship with Jesus, we have come to know Him and He certainly knows us. Because of that we will regularly communicate to Him. We will share with Him our joy, our thanks, our love, our passion, our wants, our fears, our doubts, our anxieties, our days, our plans, and so much more. Try not talking with some people with whom you are in relationship. See what happens. (Entirely rhetorical, do not try this at home unless you want your relationships to fade/falter). I for one need to develop a more robust prayer life. It not that I never pray, but I could certainly do it more. Let’s grow in this together!
Applying the Laws:
1. Make it obvious: Have a specific and regular time and a place where you pray. “At X time I will pray,” “when I enter into Y location I will begin to pray.” This could be when you wake up, when you get in your car, as you’re walking from your car to your office. The possibilities are endless and determined ultimately by your context and circumstances. To that end we must shape our environment to fit our habit. If your plan is to pray while you drink your morning coffee, make sure you are doing that in a quiet place where you can focus. Don’t choose a time or place where you will have lots of distractions. One helpful way to make it obvious is to tie it to an obvious cue, like getting your coffee. “When I get my morning coffee I will pray,” “when I start my car I will begin to talk to God,” “when I turn on the shower I will bow my head,” etc. By tying it to a habit we are already doing we create an obvious space and cue that will help us to preform the habit on a regular basis.
2. Make it appealing: We might have a million and one reasons why we are too busy to pray right now. Too much to be concerned, with too busy, too much going on. Each of those is actually a reason to pray. I know it can be overwhelming at times to add one more thing to the plate. And when prayer becomes just something else in the long list of the things we have to get done today, it becomes a stressor rather than something we look forward to. We need to reframe the situation, instead of “I have to pray today…,” our disposition should be, “I get to talk to God today!” Instead of one more thing to get done our approach to prayer should be, “this is the one thing that sets up everything else I do today.” Instead of it being a source of stress, we should view it as an opportunity to release.
3. Make it easy: Well formed habits enable us to do difficult things easily and automatically. When something becomes habitual to us, it does not require near the amount of effort as trying to accomplish the same task by sheer willpower. Having said that however, hard habits must be formed. This takes intentional time and dedicated effort. Too often we start with where we’d like to end and get overwhelmed. If you have a goal of doing 100 pushups a day but haven’t done 100 pushups in your life time, you are going to need to start somewhere much lower and build up. Perhaps that means doing one pushup a day well until you’ve mastered the form. Perhaps that means starting on your knees. Doing one pushup every hour for 10 hours. We’ve all got to start somewhere. The same is true of prayer. We see Jesus praying all night, for hours and hours at a time. That’s where we’d like to be, but it’s not where we should start when we are trying to build a consistent habit. Start with 2 minutes of thought out, intentional prayer each day. Again this will vary from person to person depending on where you are at in your own prayer journey. Besides starting smaller there are are a couple of other things we can do. We can prime our environment. This takes it one step further from the point we made about shaping earlier. For prayer this likely means getting mentally prepared. Perhaps we could use a prayer journal with some notes about the things we’d like to pray for, or writing out our prayers to make sure we say what we want to say. This should be an aid not a hinderance and so if the journal adds a level of difficulty that keeps you from the habit you are trying to form abandon it. The last way to make a habit easy that we will mention here is find a community where your habit is a normal and celebrated behavior. We are more likely to do something, if it is integrated in the culture we are a part of. This gives us accountability, identity and thus motivation to keep on doing it. Find a brother or sister that has an active prayer life and ask if you can pray together on occasion (not that I have arrived in this arena in any sense but I am certainly open to those who would like to get together over phone, FaceTime, Zoom, etc. and pray on occasion).
4. Make it rewarding: We are likely to repeat the habits from which we derive some reward and likewise to avoid those for which we are punished. With most good habits, the ultimate reward is in the distant future. When it comes to working out, dieting, studying, writing, etc. the ultimate payoff is often not immediate. The same can be true with prayer, especially if it is a prayer where we are asking for something. God’s timing is not ours nor is our want always in line with His will. There are prayers we pray where we will never see the payoff we desire. Is prayer then a worthless pursuit? Absolutely not! First of all, there actually is an immediate reward of knowing that we have laid it at God’s feet. The process of pouring ourselves out can be cathartic because we know God is in control and is just, merciful, and cares deeply for us and our needs. We are calmer and more at peace, without even receiving the thing that caused us to pray in the first place. Additionally, we might want to add the habit of tracking our prayers. When we have accomplished our task, and have checked it off, we feel a sense of triumph and our brains actually reward us with dopamine (the reward chemical). It is the same thing that keeps you scrolling on Facebook for 20 minutes when you intended only to spend two, eat 10 Oreos (I can’t be the only one who has done this) when you purposed to eat just 1, etc. Having a streak going that you visible and tangibly check off can be a powerful motivator. These “little” rewards can go a long way into forming a life long habit.
Finally what do you do on a terrible, no-good, very bad day where everything goes wrong and the habit doesn’t get done? These days will happen, and the point is not to overreact and take an all or nothing approach and quit or to let days begin to string together. Your streak ended but you haven’t lost all that you gained. You are much closer to God because of the progress you’ve made. Further you are the type of person who prays regularly, and so you get back on the proverbial horse the next day, and start a new streak.
I hope these thoughts are helpful as we seek to grow in our prayer life, and in our journey with Jesus.
