To tell you the truth as my journey with Jesus went forward many years ago I eventually began to struggle with petitioning prayer to God (this lasted for decades). My interior life became more and more dry and bland, giving less and less excitement, joy, connection, peace and consolation as time went by.
I slowly began to find my prayer life boring and hard, requiring huge efforts to say a few words, and becoming a BIGGER burden as time went by. So I disliked petitionary prayer more and more. I just felt dry. This dryness I would later learn was apart of my spiritual state at the time that Jesus want me to be aware of. It is our spiritual hunger and thirst not being fully met if we are dry within. These can only be met when we humble ourselves before God and become more teachable by Jesus which requires refocusing on what is going wrong in our decisions and actions so we can repent and grow in love with God’s grace.
Then as I continued to slowly renew my mind, I realized I wanted prayer to be exciting and beautiful (just like when I first met Jesus). This unfortunately led to the temptation of trying to impress God with the beauty of my words and to win Him over somehow to grant me my petitions. I was also tempted to try to impress those I prayed with in community prayer. But this came to an end when prayer just became uncomfortably dry and my attempts to make beautiful prayers got too difficult because there was little or no grace to make such prayers possible at the time.
I used to try to be creative in prayer hoping that what I said would be beautiful and would win God over to the stated causes.
Over time this methodology and goal became more of a burden making me more reluctant to pray this way in private or when gathered together in the name of Jesus.
Not everything is exciting in healthy prayer and accepting this has helped me to start praying in simplicity again. To focus on God, people in need, with requests as they are: important, boring or exciting is healthier and more fitting than trying to entertain and gain favor.
As a result, prayer doesn’t seem like a burden like it used to be: so heavy. Things became more healthier as I abandoned trying to impress God and others with my words.
Then the Spirit showed me that my prayers were also lawyer-like. Looking back I could see me trying to get God to act in very precise ways either trying to get me out of a loophole or into one through certain precise prayers, forgetting that I’m God’s child and that He loves me and has my back. He already knows what I need. He already cares for each of us. He is trustworthy!
There are places for precise prayers though.
Precise prayers’ places comes in handy when we need to repent from putting things into boxes or under carpets within our hearts and minds. Not being connected to unhealthiness in our hearts and minds means we are not being serious and are only interested in good times and coasting by in a useless posture.
The more we seek consolation the more it can elude us.
When hearing sermons… aiming for and wanting things to be exciting so we are entertained leads to missing out on learning all the new lessons in the sermons we hear. If all we care about is being entertained by sermons, then we won’t remember much or anything about the rest of the sermons. Not all maxims are exciting. We live by every word God speaks.
Putting “love is patient” into practice requires Jesus’ grace and practical wisdom, like: not moving spiritual boundaries, not minimizing trespasses, giving up unhealthy pride, giving up fears, giving up judgments, giving up condemning thoughts and sins that ruin friendships. Being precise about our guilt and how we hurt others is important and God wants us confess and repent precisely in faith with Jesus’ help in prayer for us to grow in love when it comes to growing in patience.
The healthy excitement comes when we see such strongholds as impatience replaced with love, compassion, caring and peace, so God is glorified. God is the excitement in our prayers and lives. Focusing on our wealth and ingenuity is unhealthy. Focusing on God, His glory, His wisdom (not so much ours) and learning from Jesus is the healthy path to take in prayer and living our lives to the full by Jesus’ Grace so God is glorified.
For more practical advice on growing in love through acts of repentance check out my book on Amazon called, “Dismantling the Tree of Knowledge of Good and evil Within So Love Can Thrive”.
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