Prayer Secrets

How to Make Prayer Exciting
And Fall More in Love with God

How to improve your prayer life
Get more answers to prayer and enjoy praying

It’s easy ! Simple, practical help for all Christians

Your wonderful God wants you to have the lot. So if you want more answers to prayer, this series should take you there, but we will commence by exploring still greater joys among the breathtaking wonders of prayer.

Prayer is Spiritual Surfing

When surfing the sea, times of clumsy human effort (paddling) are interspersed by exhilarating times of being moved by a wave of power far beyond anything human. The same is true of prayer.

Most of us have heard of, or even had a taste of, the exhilaration that prayer can produce. There are times when prayer is effortless and thrilling and you are moved by a power beyond your own. Nevertheless, many of us end up drifting in the shallows because we have not understood the necessity of the prayer equivalent of paddling in order to catch a spiritual wave.

Riding a wave is cool, but paddling seems like something for nerds. Paddling looks awkward and is hard work. No one in the prime of manhood would want to be seen paddling, except that it is essential for experiencing the ultimate in surfing. Surfers discover that riding a wave is worth all sorts of hardship. What motivates them is not duty but the thrill of catching a wave.

The same applies to those who discover prayer’s unique spiritual highs. It can take effort to catch a wave but those who understand spiritual surfing don’t endure prayer’s hard times out of grim duty; they are drawn by the excitement awaiting them.

This webpage is about the spiritual equivalent of paddling – the lumbering human effort needed to position oneself for the adrenalin rush of being swept along by supernatural waves. Just as there is no comparison between paddling and surfing – they seem almost opposites – so many of the secrets I will share seem superficial and artificial and nothing like the pinnacles of prayer. But as paddling is an essential part of surfing, so this page deals with an essential aspect of supernatural prayer. I have no desire to imply, however, that there is only one way to paddle, nor that you must follow my practical suggestions to the letter. Nevertheless, I believe you will find here helpful hints that you might not find elsewhere.

The Height of Intimacy

As thrilling as being in love is, any counselor will tell you that the quality of communication is a vital key to the health of a marriage. And we all know that Christianity is not a ritual but a relationship that is so dynamic that Scripture likens it to marriage. In fact, to be a Christian is to have the most intimate relationship that any human can ever enjoy. This renders prayer – communication with God – of such critical importance that it is virtually a Christian’s life-blood.

It’s fine to ask others to help you pray for a particular need but to leave prayer primarily to others is like asking them to go on a luxury cruise for you, or eat a gourmet meal for you. It is not quite like asking a friend to make love to your marriage partner (since that would be sin), but it comes uncomfortably close if you relinquish your right to pray. If you find communication with the most exciting Person in the universe a little dull, then for some unfortunate reason, you are missing something exquisitely beautiful and wondrous.

Sadly, for many married couples, talking with each other degenerates into a chore. Making the effort to communicate despite it being boring or difficult suggests there is considerable hope for the relationship. Likewise, it is good for us to make the effort to pray. Nevertheless, if a couple perpetually find communicating a hard slog, they are in danger of spending less and less time doing it and gradually drifting apart. What they really need is not just dedicated effort – as important and loving as that is – but to discover how to make their chats exciting and fulfilling. This might seem an impossible dream to many couples but most of them achieved it when they were dating each other, and by revisiting what made their former conversations zing, they can recapture what they have lost.

There are many factors that made a couple’s early communication exciting, and each factor has surprisingly practical applications for turning prayer into the highlight of each day. But perhaps this connection should not surprise us, since marriage is perhaps the closest thing in the universe to our intimacy with God.

We will examine many of the extras that dating couples use to enhance their times together. These externals seem minor and take a little effort. That’s why married couples tend to use them less and less as the years roll on. It is better for couples to put effort into these externals, however, than end up finding it an effort to enjoy sharing their hearts with each other. And the same applies to our relationship with God.

Passion

The time when a now-bored couple found talking easy was when they didn’t take each other for granted. They cherished and valued each other. There was tenderness and respect. And there was passion. They believed they had found the most wonderful person on the planet.

In God, we have truly found the most loving, fascinating, knowledgeable, intelligent, gifted, unselfish, patient, good and faultless Person in the entire universe. Who else fully understands us, is never moody or tired, will never let us down, can always help, and is always eager to hear from us no matter what the time of night or the occasion? To what extent do we shake ourselves out of complacency, stir up our emotions and delight in the breath-taking privilege of being on intimate terms with this astounding Person?

When you take delivery of a new car that you will use everyday, you know that despite it being fully within your ability, it would take exceptional effort and care to keep the vehicle year after year looking and operating like that gleaming new car. Everything in this life has a natural tendency to slowly lose its sparkle, and to resist this tendency takes continual effort. Relationships are no exception. The natural tendency of every relationship, even one with our perfect Lord, is for it to lose its gloss. So although relationships can actually grow richer through the years, it takes continual effort to fight the downward trend.

The Lord of glory will never lose his gloss. We will never discover hidden weaknesses or character flaws or bad habits in God. He never grows old or gets boring. His strength and beauty and power to amaze never fade. With our boundless Lord, the more wonders we discover, the more there is to discover. He remains as fresh and as perfect and exciting as ever. In this tendency for our relationship with God to cool, the problem is never God. The problem is our perception of God. And unless we actively and persistently keep resisting it, our perception of God will keep deteriorating, not merely for natural reasons, but for supernatural reasons.

The Supernatural

I am staggered that some people can believe in a supernatural God and maybe even good spirits (angels) and perhaps even intelligent life in other worlds (aliens – who might not necessarily be benevolent) and they can believe that humans have messed up their gift of freewill, and yet they insist that there can be no spiritual beings that have evil intent. If such people suppose biblical revelation and Jesus’ teaching are primitive because they mention evil spirits, I have a rather different view as to whose spiritual understanding is primitive and naive.

We are not the only created beings in the universe that have rebelled against their loving God. And whenever we get interested in God, his spiritual opponents get jealous. Like termites, they keep as far from sight as they can, while continually and insidiously gnawing away at our opinion of God and trying their hardest to undermine our belief in our Savior’s mind-boggling love for us. Forces with ugly agendas are forever trying to whisper doubts into our minds and false accusations against God and against ourselves. Often subtly, but always relentlessly, they keep trying to erode our view of God and our certainty that the Lord of the universe delights in us.

Most of us know that condemnation is of the devil, but have you ever wondered why such an evil, sin-loving being would act so seemingly righteous in making us feel guilty about our sins? The simple answer is that if we can be conned into thinking God is displeased with us, it will undermine our enjoyment of God.

Who of us wants to spend time alone with someone we think is angry with us? We would go to such a person with the enthusiasm of a naughty schoolboy told to go to the principal’s office. Even if we are sure the person is not angry, merely thinking someone is critical of us is enough to drain us of all enthusiasm for being with him.

Talkative lovers delight in spending ages looking into each other’s eyes because they see love and delight in those eyes. If you could physically see God looking at you, would you expect to see his eyes sparkling with delight at what he sees? If not, it’s no wonder if you find times alone with him less than exciting.

The problem cannot be with God. He is the perfect partner, and his infinite love means he is more in love with us than any human has ever loved anyone. The problem is our distorted view of God.

Years ago, when most cars had front bench seats and men were almost exclusively the designated drivers, a married couple were out driving. They could see in the car ahead that despite there being lots of space, the young woman was squeezed up tight against the male driver, for no reason other than the obvious fact that they found each other exciting. Suddenly missing her romantic past, the woman in the car behind said to her husband a little accusingly, “Do you remember when we used to drive like that?”

“Well I haven’t moved,” replied the driver.

If the spark has gone from our relationship with God, it’s not because God has withdrawn. His passion hasn’t waned. He’s pining for us to move closer. “Draw near to God,” pleads Scripture, “and he’ll draw near to you” (James 4:8, NKJ).

Does God Play Chess?

Have you ever been momentarily distracted when playing chess and found yourself waiting for ages for the other person to make a move, only to discover that your wait was in vain because it is your turn? Because our crucified Lord has already taken the initiative, the next step must be ours. This is why Scripture puts the onus on us drawing near.

“We love because he first loved us,” says 1 John 4:19. God loved us before we were even born. Isn’t it time we began to catch up with God and love him back?

Just as it isn’t right for a chess player to move when it is the other person’s turn, so God reaches a point where it is inappropriate for him to make another move until we make ours. When we make a move, the stalemate is shattered. As you keep edging closer to him, your Lord will rush to make yet another move.

If God is to walk with you, he must let you set the pace. He’s forced to wait for you, or you will be left behind. He is powerful enough to forcibly drag you along, but what sort of friendship would that be?

Too often we find ourselves getting annoyed at the Lord for keeping us waiting, when he is actually waiting for us. The problem is that we have not trusted God to have already done what is necessary. We mistakenly think he should do more, when his love compels him to seek our partnership and graciously wait for us. For example, we might get frustrated thinking we are waiting for God to build our faith by quickly answering our prayers, when he is actually waiting for us to build our faith to the point where we will keep believing no matter how long the delay. We are waiting for God to baby us; he is waiting for us to grow. His dream for us is to rule with him; not to be his eternal babies. The Lord waiting for us is our opportunity for glory (Scriptures). It is our opportunity to do something for which God will praise us forever.

In my attempts to spend more time in prayer, I’ve found it easy to feel offended, thinking that if God really wanted me to chat with him he would make it easier. As much as I try to suppress it, the nagging thought keeps surfacing that if God really loved me and wanted me to talk with him, he would give me a mind that didn’t wander and he would make prayer a breeze. That’s like saying if God really wanted me to stop sinning he would remove all temptation, or if God had really wanted Jesus to die for our sins he would have made it easier for his Son to go to the cross, instead of Jesus being in such turmoil that his sweat was like blood before he was even arrested. The Almighty wants us as his treasured companions, not his robots. He longs to partner with us, not squash us. He wants to coax us to our full potential, not reduce us to mindless tools.

It can seem – not just to observers but even to me – that what is holding me back from a great prayer life is such things as my laziness, busyness and inability to concentrate. The real culprit, however, is me feeling hurt over God not magically making prayer easier. Theologically, I might know all the right answers but inwardly I feel rejected. I feel God cannot be too desperate to hear from me, or he would make it easier. It is this feeling of rejection that deflates my efforts, sapping my motivation to persist in prayer.

But the majestic Lord is the only one with a right to feel unloved. He has invested far more into the relationship than I have. It was Jesus, not me, who let himself be publicly humiliated, tortured and executed so that I could have this relationship with him. My Savior has no doubt already babied me much more than I suppose in my relationship with him. It’s about time I grew up. It’s time I started proving I truly want this relationship by putting in more effort. Otherwise, the Lord and I are in danger of a stand-off, with him waiting for me, and me waiting for him to make the next move.

How Thin is God’s Love?

Being continually aware of the reality and intensity of God’s personal love for us is central not only to prayer but to every aspect of the Christian life. For this reason I’ve written much on this subject. There’s a link to it further on in this web series. Here’s a sample:

I can easily believe the atom-holding, earth-spinning, galaxy-sustaining, life-giving Source of everything wonderful can do whatever he likes. Even the devil believes God’s power.

My difficulty is believing that God’s special love for me makes him long to use that power on my behalf.

Few of us doubt that God can do amazing things. The weak link in our faith is believing that he would do such things for ordinary, inconsequential you and me. We suspect we are not sufficiently special in the Almighty’s eyes to warrant such attention. Oh yes, “God loves everyone,” but we have a hunch that by the time that love reaches us it has spread pretty thin. I’m just one of millions. Why would God want to focus his omnipotence on me?

If we could grasp the enormity of God’s love for us, our faith would sky-rocket. Pray for a revelation. (Ephesians 3:17-19 highlights the necessity of such prayer. “ . . . I pray that you. . . may have power. . . to know this love that surpasses knowledge . . .”)

Awareness of how much we are loved is forever slipping from our consciousness. Partially in sight for a few days, it begins to fade again.

Are You Royalty?

For almost all of us, Jesus defending Mary over Martha is so contrary to our understanding of God as to be unintelligible. Here’s my attempt to paint the picture, taken from a web book of mine:

They had just brought in the washing when there was a knock on the door. “Oh no! The house is in a mess! And just look at me . . . !” exclaimed Martha.

“I’ll get it,” called Mary. She opened the door and her heart skipped a beat. There was Jesus and all his disciples.

“Come in!” she gushed excitedly. “Martha! It’s Jesus!”

Martha was in a panic. How was she going to feed them all? If only she’d had more warning. She had wanted everything to be so nice for Jesus. “Where’s Mary? She’s taking her time!”

She ran next door to borrow some food. Still no Mary. She stoked the oven and got out the plates. Still no Mary. She peered out and there was Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet with not a care in the world! Martha exploded. Yet it was Mary that the Savior defended.

More than anything, the King of kings simply wants us to enjoy being with him. That thought clashes so wildly with our self-image that nothing we do can make it fit our presumptions about how God feels about us. It is like the embarrassment of putting a machine back together and finding we have a piece left over. That God would treasure us doing nothing but enjoy him seems so out of place that we feel we have no choice but to ignore the thought.

We feel compelled to slip out of God’s embrace and whip ourselves into running errands for him. To sit with the King in the drawing room might be acceptable for royalty, but slaving in the kitchen seems more appropriate for the class of people we see ourselves as.

That mentality breaks the heart of the One who shed his last drop of blood so that you could become divine royalty. And though we feel guilty about not praying more, what really kills our desire for prayer is not laziness but our failure to grasp how special we are to God.

Do You Thrill God?

When a married couple who are mystified as to why they are no longer talk much, look back on the time when things were different, they will discover that even the less talkative of the two felt inspired to talk because he/she knew the other person was vitally interested and excited over every little thing about him/her. New lovers draw torrents of words out of each other because each is certain that the other is hanging on to every word and thinks his/her beloved is witty, stimulating and fascinating. We need to maintain the consciousness that God is likewise thrilled to hear from us. He is sitting on the edge of his throne, leaning down from heaven, anxious to catch our every whisper.

Our problem is that we rarely manage to believe this for long. We keep degrading God by thinking of him as having human weaknesses. We insult him by expecting him to treat us the way fickle, self-centered humans do. And so the excitement of communing with him begins to evaporate; not because of God but because of our low opinion of God’s passion for us.

Does Almighty God ever get tired? We are rightly convinced that he doesn’t. But the significant implication often eludes us: he never grows tired of us. We never bore him. A God so devoted to us and in love with us that he keeps track of every hair on our head is a God who hangs on to our every word as if he had not heard from anyone for ten thousand years and you were the most fascinating person alive. Unlike humans, his interest in you remains as fresh and as intense as ever. God’s love doesn’t wilt.

A wife might tire of hearing her husband’s same old jokes, but she is not someone who counts every hair on her husband’s head. If she had a mere one percent of God’s love, she would never tire of her husband’s voice. Even if her human frailty causes the average loving wife to tire of her husband’s jokes, however, she never tires of her husband’s genuine expressions of love. To God, your efforts to talk to him – even if you think of it as trivia you’ve recounted thousands times – is precious to him because you bothering to share it with him makes it a genuine expression of love.

The Almighty occasionally babies some people by giving them goose bumps and a torrent of words with which to effortlessly pray. But Father God wants us to grow up. He longs for us to get excited, not because we cannot help ourselves but because we love him enough to make the effort to get excited and express our love to him. There aren’t many women who, after waiting in vain for their husband to buy them flowers, buy flowers for themselves, write a loving note on them, sign their husband’s name and find it deeply moving. Neither is God impressed when he always has to give us gooey feelings and personal invitations before we bother to spend long in prayer. He aches for your love.

How Risky is Love?

One of the riskiest things in the universe is to love anyone other than God. Any human can let us down or suddenly die, leaving us heart-broken. We have all been hurt and left with varying degrees of fear about loving. Caving into the fear and backing off from love is understandable but it not only cuts us off from the possibility of temporary hurt, it cuts us off from fulfillment and from becoming Godlike. This fear often dominates us more than we realize. We harden our hearts, steeling ourselves lest we love and again get hurt.

One of the insidious things about fear is its tendency to generalize. For example, after suffering a serious fall from a height, someone can end up fearing heights not just when there is genuine danger but even in situations where netting or safety glass makes it impossible to fall. Likewise, many of us fear falling in love with God, even though loving God is the ultimate security. Unlike humans, God can never die or be cruel or mistaken or unfaithful. People hurt us by acting contrary to God’s ways and then we fear the only Person who cannot act contrary to God’s ways.

Often without us even realizing what is happening, this fear of getting hurt makes us tighten our grip on our emotions, preventing us from “feeling” almost anything associated with God. It is understandable that fear causes us to tense up and stop feeling. The peculiar thing, however, is that when our (groundless) fear of rejection hinders us from feeling anything we are tempted to interpret this lack of feeling not as the natural consequence of our own fear but as rejection by God. We worry that our failure to “feel” God indicates that he is closing his heart toward us when it is actually our fear unconsciously causing us to close our own hearts. The more we learn to trust God, the more we will relax and be better able to warm to him and sense him moving in our lives.

Writes a widow in response to an early draft of this webpage:

If I try to stir up warm feelings toward God I almost immediately decide that God is not going to respond to me since he never has in the past. So I immediately close off and turn my attention to something secular. I’ve suddenly realized that I have this attitude not because of how God treats me but because of how my husband used to treat me.

My husband was faithful to me and a loyal family man, but he never caused me to feel that I was loved and wanted and accepted. Although he was keen to gratify his own desires, I continually longed for non-sexual displays of warmth and affection during my long marriage but I never received them. I came to expect that my feelings toward my husband would never be reciprocated, so I gradually cooled off toward him. Trying to stir up my own feelings would lead only to painful disappointment. It is better not to hope than to hope and be continually disappointed. As the book of Proverbs says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.”

I have just realized that I have transferred this attitude to God; presuming that there is no point in me trying to stir up warm, loving feelings toward God because, like my husband, he won’t respond.

At last I have discovered my mistake. May God forgive me and change me!

Instead of excitedly drawing near to God, confident that he would fulfill the Bible’s promise by drawing near to her, this dear woman would only briefly draw near and then quickly withdraw for fear of being emotionally hurt like her husband used to hurt her. She had let her experience with humans so strongly color her beliefs about God’s love that she unconsciously forced her whole spiritual experience to conform to her expectations.

Her failure to trust God’s love was not stopping God from loving her but it was stopping her from thinking warmly toward God for long enough to sense his love. Instead of understanding the real cause, she interpreted her failure to sense God’s love as proof that he was just like her husband.

Talk of returning to one’s first love is applicable to some Christians who have had a relatively easy emotional life. As we have already hinted, however, in stark contrast to some, there are those – especially people who suffered trauma in their impressionable years or had a love-starved family life – for whom warm, loving feelings are highly elusive in any situation. For these dear people, it takes mountain-moving faith and enormous effort to attain even half the feelings that others experience on their spiritual honeymoon.

Feeling Loved

Because feeling loved is so critical to one’s prayer life, I’ll dwell here a little longer.

Any genuine expression of love is open to an endless number of interpretations. If a man gives a woman flowers, for instance, she could conclude:

* He’s besotted with me
* He’s trying to manipulate me
* He thinks of me as a sister
* He must have been unfaithful and is riddled with guilt
* He’s treating me as a harlot; trying to buy me for sex
* He’s trying to give me hay fever
* The flowers were for someone else who has turned him down
* He wrongly thinks it’s my birthday
* He thinks I’m a pushover
* He must have stolen the flowers
* He thinks I’m old-fashioned
* He wants to borrow money from me
* He’s going to dump me and wants to soften the blow

The list could go on and on.

Whether she is flattered or insulted by the man’s action depends more on her than on him. Her own self-image and how others have treated her is critical in influencing her interpretation of a loving act.

My friend, whom I’ll call Ruth, is an example of many who find it hard to feel loved. She suffered hostile rejection from her father from the day she was born premature – and hence unattractive – and the “wrong” gender. Ruth was ten when he formally ended the marriage. Knowing how much he despised Ruth, her mother openly blamed her for the divorce and maintained that belief until her dying day. When her mother re-married, Ruth’s alcoholic stepfather mistreated them both.

Brainwashed by her mother into thinking no decent man would want her, Ruth married more in desperation that by choice. I believe her husband loved her in his own way but he was unskilled in expressing love and understood little about how to treat a woman.

With her past convincing her that she was unlovable, Ruth had little hope of interpreting anything her husband did as an act of love. If he got physical with her, it must have been for his own lust, not because he found her attractive. If he was always home when not at work, it couldn’t be because he liked her company.

Until eventually widowed, Ruth endured thirty-eight years of what she considered a loveless marriage, with each year adding to her conviction that she was unloved. Her children, too, did and said things that she mistakenly interpreted as indicating that they thought lowly of her. Only in the last year or so, after undergoing a significant change of mindset, is Ruth beginning to discover that her children regard her much higher than she had imagined.

Can you see how such a person would find it so hard to feel loved by anyone, even if that Person were God, the most loving Person in existence?

Ruth became a Christian as a child and faithfully served him, even though she felt largely rejected by him.

Many dear people suffer this sort of tragedy. I deeply admire them for clinging on to God despite having little awareness of his fervent love for them. It is so sad that they feel this way, and although it is dishonoring to God for them to have a low opinion of his love, it is deeply honoring to him that they still hold on to him despite feeling so unloved by him.

For people like Ruth it takes great courage to edge closer to God, release the iron grip on their emotions, and begin to feel.

Things are at last changing for Ruth. I’ll explain later how this came about.

Warming to God

For some of us, feeling loved comes so much easier than for those like Ruth afflicted with a long history of feeling rejected by people. Regardless of whether we can look back to spiritual feelings of love, however, the time will come for each of us when we have no positive feelings when praying. The Lord engineers this so that we all finally learn that we are not meant to sit around waiting for God to give us feelings. We are each meant to stir up our own affections.

You might object, saying that young lovers don’t consciously arouse their own passions. Not deliberately, perhaps, but when people are falling in love there are huge gaps in their knowledge of each other and they inevitably fill in those gaps with rose-tinted presumptions and daydreams. Moreover, after the honeymoon they either learn to intentionally stir up their own feelings or their relationship is doomed. I have a lengthy, Scripturally-based webpage on the importance of married couples deliberately arousing their personal feelings and purposely getting excited about their partners. This subject is too little understood, and the consequences of this ignorance are tragic.

In effect, Proverbs 5:19 is saying that every day for the rest of their lives, husbands should ensure that they are head-over-heels in love with their wives. God is implying in this Scripture that it is every man’s marital duty to find his wife’s body the sexiest on this planet. Of course, the same level of control over feelings is expected of women. Wives are not to let nature take its course in their marriage or be dictated to by their emotions. They are to make their heart skip a beat when they see their husbands. Yes, this is hard, but every married person should be working toward this degree of control. Even godless people can be good at it.

Let’s examine how people achieve this in their earthly relationships and uncover the implications for our heavenly relationship.

As men grow older they do not naturally find wrinkles and sagging bodies beautiful. In fact, their sex drive declines with age, making them even more fussy, just as a declining appetite for food makes one a finicky eater. For anyone to find his older wife physically desirable takes continual, rigorous training. I could explain the process in psychological terms, but devoted husbands do it regardless of whether they have even heard of psychology. They do not let themselves feel negatively about their wives. On the contrary, they very deliberately and repeatedly link the sight of their wives with warm feelings and excitement.

For us to have a passionate life-long relationship with God we must similarly train ourselves to get excited (in a non-sexual sense) about God.

From my university years studying psychology I recall research demonstrating that newly married women could more accurately recall their husband’s physical appearance than those who had been married for considerably longer. Other findings suggested that husbands perceived their wives as being better looking than they really were.

A man with a long marriage has the potential to dredge from this memory countless diverse images of his wife, ranging from the highly sexy to the plain disgusting. He has seen his wife as the pretty young thing, the glowing bride, the disheveled, bleary-eyed woman stumbling out of bed, the woman who couldn’t stop vomiting, the woman giving birth, and so on. Which images does he tend to recall when he thinks of his wife? I can guarantee that if he has a good relationship with his wife, it is the better images that he keeps displaying in the billboard of his mind. I would further suggest that although his wife might get annoyed that he “never notices” what she wears, this blindness to what she really looks like works greatly in her favor and is why she is often far more desirable to him than she is in her own eyes.

Likewise, any husband of several years has experienced an astounding range of feelings generated by his wife: intense pleasure, joy, comfort, pride, anger, pain, guilt, disgust, and so on. Which feelings does he habitually bring to mind when he thinks of his wife? He can choose to dwell on the highly positive, the mundane, or the negative. What he most often chooses to recall will gradually become entrenched as a mental habit. It will become his usual, automatic response when thinking of his wife and will powerfully affect his attitude toward her.

Let me underline this point: it makes no difference whether the habit is established unthinkingly or deliberately. The result is the same. The habit can be changed, but changing any habit is a prolonged and demanding process.

What is true of a successful marriage applies with equal force to our relationship with God.

Whenever you pray you are, of course, thinking of God. The feelings you choose to cultivate and dwell on each time you pray are of profound significance. Though we cannot fully control our feelings, there are always ways that we can influence them. As we proceed further we will explore some of them.

Whether we realize it or not, we are constantly training ourselves to have a particular emotional response to God. Whether we find God thrilling or dreary, fascinating or boring, warm or aloof, comforting or upsetting, depends far less on how God treats us and far more on how we train our emotions, than most of us would ever imagine. By what you choose to do and feel each time you pray, you are endlessly shaping and reshaping your habitual emotional response to God.

We reap what we sow. Deliberately sow by forcing yourself to think warmly about God – doing what you can to have joyful, loving, thankful feelings whenever you pray – and those feelings will slowly grow into habits that you will eventually end up reaping as automatic responses to the mere thought of God.

True Love

True love clashes with trashy novels, soapies and the worldly brainwashing that keeps fueling the skyrocketing divorce rate. True love – whether it be love for God or for someone else – is about excitement. It must be deliberately generated, however, by the person who is excited, not just by the other person.

When awoken by your alarm and you know you must get up despite your body screaming for more sleep, you force your body into submission and get out of bed. True love is about telling your emotions what to do, just like you tell your body what to do. This is contrary to worldly notions, but are we going to live by biblical revelation – insight coming direct from the Originator of love and the Creator of sex and marriage – and rule our emotions, or will we languish in mediocrity as slaves of our emotions?

Everyone who has ridden a bicycle knows that it is by enduring uphill stretches that you get to zoom effortlessly down the other side faster than you could possibly run. Love is a road over a thousand mountains, all of which start off frustrating and end up thrilling. Wise lovers find even the uphill parts exciting as they strain up the steep sections in anticipation of the thrills awaiting them further on.

Married couples have many occasions when they end up soaring to ecstasy together only after first struggling to overcome hurt feelings, remove distractions, focus on each other, recall their most touching times together, and deliberately arouse their own passions. For love to last a lifetime there are frequent occasions when their ride to ecstasy has to be push started. At times when they don’t feel like it, they seize the initiative for the sake of their relationship. As they keep struggling, however, their feelings suddenly burst into life and finally they find themselves roaring forward under a completely different power.

This principle applies as powerfully to our love relationship with God as it does to marriage. Scripture’s hundreds of commands to rejoice in God, delight in God, thank God, praise God, shout to God, and so on, are just that: commands. If the Lord expected us to wait until we feel like it, there would be no need for any of these Scriptures and the Bible would be much slimmer. Did Abraham wait until he felt like sacrificing his son Isaac? Did Daniel wait until he felt like being on the lion’s menu? Did Paul wait until he felt like being stoned?

Ironically, couples who enjoy the most instances of wedded bliss probably have more times than most couples when attempts at lovemaking are a disappointment. Suppose, for example, a couple never make another attempt after their first disappointment. They will certainly suffer fewer times when intimacy is disappointing but, of course, they will miss out on pleasures that other couples enjoy. Similarly, a secret to making prayer more exciting is to go through more times when prayer is boring. It is essential, however, not to settle for boredom but to keep doing what we can to stir up our feelings.

Though in such anguish that his sweat was like blood, Jesus “for the joy set before him endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2). Will we, like him, push ahead of our feelings or will we keep missing our opportunity for spiritual greatness by waiting until we feel like it?

Over and over, God has given the invitation. Now he expects us to finally make the next move and draw near to God, whipping up our feelings, warming our hearts toward him, and at the right time he will respond.

Go into Orbit

One of the insidious things about depression is that it so easily becomes self-perpetuating. Depression makes you feel as if doing anything that could help cheer you up – such as going out with friends – is just too much effort. C. S. Lewis described depression as like lying in bed, feeling too cold to sleep but too tired to get an extra blanket. Finding prayer a little dreary is similar. Initially, doing anything that could end up making prayer more enjoyable seems more effort than it is worth. As you persist, however, your prayer life and awareness of God will begin to go into orbit.

By pushing through every obstacle, determined to draw near to God despite there being no positive feelings, our emotions will eventually kick in and whisk us to heights beyond our dreams. Like surfing, no matter how experienced we are, there will always be times when we must paddle, but as we endure mundane times we’ll eventually catch a wave and end up carried effortlessly far beyond what our own efforts could ever generate.

No matter how exhilarating a wave is, even the best one eventually ends. Nevertheless, there are many more waves, if you are willing to paddle out again. There are times when the paddling stage seems endless but as you persist you’ll position yourself so that you will again know the thrill of being propelled by a power far greater than yourself. No matter how skilled and experienced you get, you will often have to paddle, but wow! is it ever worth the effort!

Some waves are tiny. They move you forward a little without you having to exert yourself for a while but they cannot be called spectacular or exhilarating. You might hear the tales of other surfers and be envious, but if the seas are rather calm it would be ridiculous to take it personally! It is important not to give in to discouragement and decide never to try again.

Keep surfing. It will develop your skills so that you can make the most of the opportunity when the big surf comes. As you keep persisting, month after month, year after year, you will be there when the waves are magnificent.

Mood Change – A Practical Tip

An impressive example of a self-induced mood change occurred when David was hiding from King Saul; exiled among people who would kill him if ever they discovered that he was secretly plundering their people and killing all witnesses.

His fervent attempt for greater acceptance among these people failed and they sent David and his men back to where they had been living with their loved ones. Rejected, they returned home, only to find their dwellings burned to the ground. A frantic search for the bodies of their wives and children revealed nothing and confirmed that all their possessions were either destroyed or stolen. Distraught, “David and his men wept aloud until they had no strength left to weep” (1 Samuel 30:4). Soon the men David had considered his loyal friends began blaming him for the catastrophe and angrily discussing stoning him. Not days later, but right then, when he was an emotional cot case, David “encouraged himself in the Lord” (1 Samuel 30:6 KJV).

We understand C. S. Lewis finding it so hard to do anything to break out of depression after the death of his wife. How did David manage this so quickly? I believe a key to his mastery is that from his youth David had been practicing cheering himself up, singing psalms, and so on, when minor things got him down. (You will recall that King Saul, not having a CD player, employed David to play his harp because music – especially when it is praise to God – is good at lifting one’s feelings.) We find David writing psalms of praise through the low points of his exile.

Daily entering into God’s presence with joy despite not always feeling like it, was just the training David needed when the biggest of crises hit. Everything hinged on the mood change and feeling positively toward God that David achieved that day. It empowered him to recover all the kidnapped loved ones and plundered goods.

Note that there was a step in David’s mood change that positive confession fanatics usually miss. David wept bitterly. He did not live in denial of his true feelings. He fully and emotionally expressed the depth of his grief, but he refused to wallow there.

So daily practice doing what you can to turn around negative emotions. It is worth all the effort, even if the mood change you achieve is only miniscule. Lifting your spirits is like lifting weights. The more you do it, the stronger you will get. Regularly doing the little you can to warm to God and rejoice in him will not just help you from day to day; the time will come when you reap rich rewards from all this practice.

Hurt Feelings

Not only could David have continued to mope over the disaster that had hit him and so lose the opportunity to recover his loved ones, he could have turned to blaming God. Had he let himself be aloof from God at that moment, the result could have been devastating. To pursue those who had kidnapped his loved ones, he needed not only emotional strength, he needed to draw upon the Lord’s strength.

If we are angry at someone we might refuse to speak with him. If the situation is less serious but on-going we will almost certainly be less inclined to speak with the person, even though talking less might not even be conscious. Feeling God has let us down, disappointments, a niggling doubt about God’s goodness, or a half-buried suspicion that God might favor some people over us deeply affect our relationship with God – probably far more than we realize. We tend to be so ashamed of such feelings that we are loath to admit even to ourselves how we feel.

Some mysteries will remain longer than we would prefer but we will benefit from taking our lead from David and the Bible’s other psalmists who had no qualms about expressing to God their fears and frustrations. Although the Bible’s psalms might take just a few verses until they have worked their way through mind-numbing concerns to heart-felt praise, each instance encapsulates an experience that was agonizingly more prolonged for the psalmists than it takes to read about it.

Jessica Reynolds Shaver discovered the joys of clearing the air with God. She wrote:

I told God I was angry, I thought He’d be surprised.
I thought I’d kept hostility quite cleverly disguised.
I told the Lord I hate Him, I told Him that I hurt.
I told Him that He isn’t fair, that He’d treated me like dirt!

I told God I was angry, but I’m the one surprised!
“What I’ve known all along,” He said, “You’ve finally realized.
At last you have admitted what’s really in your heart.
Dishonesty, not anger, was keeping us apart.

“Even when you hate Me, I don’t stop loving you.
Before you can receive that love you must confess what’s true.
In telling me the anger you genuinely feel.
It loses power over you, permitting you to heal.”

I told God I was sorry, and He’s forgiven me.
The truth that I was angry had finally set me free. ( Source )

We can’t be expected to have the intellect to always figure out God’s love and wisdom, but we can be expected to trust that everything our Lord does is compelled by love and wisdom. As I have written elsewhere:

Embraced by divine love, your life will be tinged with mystery but aglow with glory.

Tucked in the heart of Scripture sleeps a tiny psalm of precious truth (Psalm 131). The singer confessed that as a mother denies her baby access to her milk when it’s time for her darling to be weaned, so God sometimes denies us things we crave. Yet as a weaned infant lies warm and secure in its mother’s bosom, our soul can nestle into God, not knowing why we have been denied that which we have clamored for, but content to draw love and comfort from the Father’s heart.

As the heavens soar far above us, high and unreachable, so is God’s wisdom (Isaiah 55:8-9; Psalm 139:6; 147:5; Job 11:7-9; Romans 11:33-34). Our tiny minds may understand the Father’s ways no more than a babe understands its mother, yet still we can rest in Him, bathed in the certainty that when the omnipotent, omniscient Lord lets the inexplicable touch a child of His, it is a manifestation of unfathomable love. In the hands of the One who wouldn’t so much as break a damaged reed or snuff a smoking wick, you are safe (Matthew 12:20).

Lover’s Praise

Scripture captures in the Song of Solomon the communication of lovers. It is filled with praise. Lovers make love verbally by doing just two things: describing to each other how much they love each and by praising each other. They praise their beloved’s looks, intelligence, character – everything they can possibly think of. Lovers who really enjoy talking with each other have conversations that are crammed with compliments and praising each other. Most of their chats focus on each other, rather than mundane things like household expenses and who will take out the garbage. On the nosedive to communication becoming a chore, expressions like, “I love you,” “You’re beautiful,” “You’re amazing,” give way to ones like, “Do this,” “Give me that,” “I need so and so.”

A famous man of God who was admired and respected by vast numbers of people used to receive praise from countless people, but not from his wife. He questioned her about this and it turned out that she thought her praise was superfluous because he received it from so many people. He explained to her that because he loved her so deeply, her opinion meant more to him than that of all the others. Praise from someone seems so hollow when you have to ask for it but he found himself having to humble himself to beg her to praise him. God is like that. No matter how many millions of people praise him, you are so special to him that he aches for your praise. And he yearns for it so much that he has even gone to the humiliating extreme of actually asking you to praise him. Or will you hold out until God sends ten thousand angels in luminescent nighties flying in formation to spell out your name in the sky before accepting Scripture as his personal word to you?

The Almighty asking for your praise isn’t because he is egotistical; it is because he is deeply in love with you. Praise and worship are making love to God, and he does the same to us, but few of us receive it. We usually reject the Lord’s attempts to praise us and tell us how much he loves us. We dismiss his loving whispers because we don’t believe how loving he is. Our faith in our failings is stronger than our faith in his forgiveness. We feel surer of how unlovable we are, than of how loving he is. By falling into this hole, we insult and hurt not ourselves but the One who loves us.

More than just delighting the receiver, using endearing terms and verbalizing love, thanks and praise, warms the heart of the giver. It arouses the giver’s passions, causing him or her to feel more affectionate and appreciative of the loved one he or she is addressing. Indeed, it often proves yet another instance of it being more blessed to give than to receive.

Many of us have pet names that we reserve for someone we are in love with. It might be darling or honey or sweetheart, or any of a vast number of other possibilities, only a few of which will feel right to you. We also have words of praise that we would reserve for the love of our lives, such as you’re gorgeous, beautiful, exquisite. Again, preferences vary from person to person. These special names and adjectives conjure within us feelings of love, excitement, passion and romance like almost nothing else can. So using them when expressing our hearts to God can be a powerful way of arousing within us such feelings for God.

For our prayer life to have any chance of being exciting and fulfilling, a significant proportion of it should focus on adoring God and expressing our love to him.

We should certainly pray for everything we are anxious about. If, however, prayer becomes primarily a time for recounting all our worries and/or remembering our sins and failings, prayer is doomed to be dreary. Likewise, praying for people is important but we must not let prayer degenerate into little more than a grocery list of people we feel obligated to pray for. Unless we add more elements to prayer than that, cutting our toenails will be more exciting. Increasing the proportion of endearing terms and verbal expressions of love and praise to God in our prayers will do much to reverse any tendency for our relationship with God to go on a downward slide.

Even when we pray for our concerns, it should be mixed with faith and thanksgiving so that we end the session more at peace and uplifted than we began.

Philippians 4:6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. (Emphasis mine.)

The Spice of Life

Rather than provide a list of things to do or to avoid, one of my hopes is to inspire you to increase your prayer repertoire; introducing more variety into the way you pray.      Continued . . .