Prayer Warriors.  Have you heard that term before?  I see it all the time on Facebook.  I frequently read posts where someone has a problem, and they call for prayer warriors to start praying to conquer the problem.  I am not exactly sure what it means to be a prayer warrior, but I know that I am not one.  I will confess that prayer has been a weak area in my worship of God.  Studying the scriptures comes naturally to me as I am an excellent reader and student but speaking to someone usually results in my foot in my mouth or uncomfortable silence as I search desperately for words in the blankness of my brain.  However, I knew that prayer was essential for a healthy relationship with God, so for the last few years, I have been studying the subject and experimenting as I tried to comprehend the heart of prayer.  In this process, I have watched numerous sermons and read books and articles about praying, and most times, I have ended up even more confused with the information that I received than before I started.  However, I kept experimenting and persevering in my studies, and today I think I have the beginnings of an understanding of how powerful prayer can be in my own life.

Do your prayers ever seem like monologues—like you are talking to yourself?  Does it feel like your words hit the ceiling of the room you are in and stop there?  I used to feel like that, and I was frustrated because I knew there was something about prayer that I was missing. Unfortunately, the majority of sermons that I listened to resulted in more disappointment than help when it came to speaking with God.  Why was I so frustrated with the content that I was studying?  The focus of all the materials that I found was always on one of two different topics, neither of which filled my needs.  First, it seemed like everyone was talking about how to receive what you ask for from God, but I was not interested in moving mountains or pleading for something physical from God.  I did not care about how to pray for prosperity or healing.  Other sermons and books were directed at the circumstances of prayer—where you should pray, when, and how.  Those messages were a little more helpful, but still not quite what I was searching for. 

You see, I was interested in prayer as communication with God, and most people were not speaking directly to that topic.  They touched on it periodically, but never gave me satisfactory answers.  Usually, the most helpful advice was to just talk to God as you would a friend, but as a brother-in-Christ pointed out when we were discussing this topic one summer, a friend is right there in the room physically interrupting you and answering back in spoken words as you talk to him, which did not seem to be the case with God in my prayer experience up to that point.  Well, I kept experimenting and reading and listening, and I think I have found a few answers that you might be interested in.  I do not claim to be an expert, but I have found some techniques and ideas that have been useful for me and even led to God interrupting me and answering me directly just as a human friend tends to do.

Before I share my personal insights with you, I want to give you a little theoretical background on the topic of prayer.  First of all, when we say the word prayer, we are actually speaking of many different forms of communion with God.  For example, prayer could be spoken out loud or mentally inside your mind.  Prayer can be very formal or just a quick excited shout.  There are secret prayers, family prayers and prayers that are part of a worship service.  There are prayers for healing and intercessory prayers.  There are prayers to confess our sins and prayers of supplication, asking for something we need physically or spiritually.  There are also prayers of thanksgiving and praise of God.  In other words, prayer involves all kinds of communication with God in a variety of manners.  I do not have the experience to speak with authority on all of these kinds of prayer, so today I am going to limit myself to what I do know:  speaking to God one-to-one for the purpose of communication.

There are some prerequisites to prayer.  First of all, if we expect God to communicate with us in prayer, we must first believe that God is loving and that He personally cares about each of us.  After all, if He does not value you a lot, why would He want to speak with you?  We also have to believe that God has the ability and willingness to respond to us and the personal control necessary to arrange answers to prayer because if God is not in the position to move mountains for us, there is no reason to approach Him with our necessities.  To illustrate, think of calling someone on a cellphone.  You might have a great phone and the correct number, but if the person on the other end chooses not to answer, your call will not go through.  In addition, if the person on the other end has let the battery run down in his cell phone and lacks power, there will be no communication.  In short, before we start trying to improve our prayer life, we must be sure that the One on the other end of our communication efforts is both willing and able to answer us when we call on Him.  The good news is that God has both the power and desire to speak with us when we reach out to Him.

Okay, enough theory.  I want to talk about my personal journey towards more meaningful prayer.  The first helpful advice I found was the importance of having a special place and time when you can pray privately to God.  This could be a room with the door closed or a time when the house is empty or some place in nature where you can be by yourself.  As my prayer life developed, I realized how important this space and time were simply because this privacy allowed me to speak freely to God without worrying about who was overhearing what I was saying.  It is important to be honest with God and not hold anything back because you are worried about being overheard, so privacy is important.

Unfortunately, it was not always possible for me to be alone, but this situation helped me to discover another prayer technique.  I found that if I wrote out or typed my prayers, I could still accomplish the same kind of communication with God that privacy had afforded me.  I could be in a crowded noisy room yet still have the ability to pour out my heart to God without other people knowing the content of my communication.  Writing my prayers offered many advantages and solved several problems for me.  For example, I tend to be easily distracted, so mental prayer does not work for me for long prayers.  I need to either speak out loud or write to remain focused.  In addition, writing out my prayers allowed me to go back and reread them at a later date.  I had listened to several presentations that advocated having a prayer journal to maintain a record of answered prayers. I had discounted this advice because I was not worried about that aspect of prayer at the time. Don’t get me wrong.  I think that it is a good idea to have a record of how God has listened and responded to your requests, but I have learned that prayer journals are valuable for a more important reason.  As I prayed in writing, my thoughts became more focused, and I was able to have a clarity of dialogue that was not possible for me in other prayer situations.  In fact, typing and writing my prayers freed me from my blankness of mind and tendency to become bored and distracted during prayers.  It caused me to reread what I had just written and think more deeply about the words that I desired to say to God.  Writing may not have the same success for you.  That is fine.  Experiment to find your own best method of communicating with God.

The third lesson I learned was how important praising God in prayer is.  I am speaking about more than thanking God.  Yes, gratitude is part of praise, but all too often our thanks end up focusing our attention on ourselves and our own lives instead of centering our attention on God.  Praise in prayer, on the other hand, is necessary, not because God loves to hear our praise, but instead the process of praise leads us into leaving our selfishness behind and contemplating the beauty of our Creator.  This is one of the most important steps in prayer. 

There are many ways to praise God in prayer.  You could sing a song of praise to Jesus.  Maybe you could recite a poem praising God.  You might simply find the words of praise in your mind.  These are all common ways that many people use to praise God, but once again, the common method did not meet my needs to praise God in prayer.  The reason that none of these praise techniques worked for me was because they are not natural to me.  I do not burst out in song much, and I do not go around reciting poems.  Thus, I felt awkward and had no words to say every time I set out to try to praise God.  I did not give up.  Instead, I experimented. Do you know what is natural to me?  Reading and writing.  I had already discovered that I loved writing prayers, and I have been an avid reader since childhood, so I experimented with my strengths and found that if I took part of a psalm of praise from the Bible and wrote it down word by word and then tried to write a paraphrase of the psalm in my own words that something amazing happened.  Suddenly, I was writing my own praises to God freely and easily.  Whenever I ran out of praise, I would look back to the verses of the psalm I was paraphrasing and start writing about the next section of the verse.  Again, my pen would take off, and again praise to my Creator would flow out of me.

What is my point?  Praising God is an essential part of prayer, and if you are good at it already, GREAT!  But I was not, so I had to find a way to stimulate my ability to praise God.  I experimented until I found a way that was natural to me.  You need to do the same.  As I said before, your natural manner of praise might be singing or poetry or simply speaking or some other method.  Find the best way for you to sincerely praise God in prayer.  By that I mean, do not simply repeat a rote formula of praise.  The purpose of praise in prayer is to force you to contemplate the God you serve and see how worthy He is of your love and loyalty.  If your praise is only rote words and does not focus your attention on the wonder and beauty of God, then you are wasting your breath.

Why am I going on and on about the necessity to praise God in prayer?  Because I discovered that praising God transformed me.  Focusing on the beauty of my Savior, my Comforter, my Father in heaven heals the places in me that I did not even realize were broken.  The pain of being human falls away before the awe of seeing God more clearly, and the more clearly we see the beauty of God, the more we love Him. That love is part of the healing process that comes from prayer.

So far, I have discussed the need for a place where you can freely speak with God so that you can be open and honest in your prayers.  Then I explained the necessity of praising God in your prayers, not for the purpose of flattering God, but so that you can see His beauty more and more clearly.  This is part of the transformative power of prayer.  Now, I want to tell you one of the most important lessons I have learned about effective prayer.  “Shut up and listen!”

Seriously, we talk too much sometimes and do not listen at all.  This goes back to one of the prerequisites for prayer that I mentioned before.  I informed you that we have to believe that God has the ability and willingness to respond to us.  I think that we often do not expect God to speak to us, so we do not take time to listen for His response to our words.  Stop turning your back on God and walking out of the room without waiting to see if He has something to say to you.  When I was younger, this was my problem, and I did not even know it.  Since I did not expect God to communicate with me, I closed my ears and did not listen.  This time around I had an advantage.  You see, I experienced a tragedy that God turned around into a blessing.  My husband had just asked me for a divorce, and I was driving around the city crying out in pain that no one loved me.  In the middle of this pain and self-focus, I was shocked to hear a still small voice within me that impressed on my mind these three words: “I love you.”  No, there was not an auditory voice, but the words were real and unexpected.  Those words were nothing that I could or would ever have come up with out of my own subconscious mind.  The point of this experience is that I came to my study of prayer knowing that God had talked to me before, and therefore expecting that it was possible.

For this reason, when I pray, I wait afterward in silence listening for any message from God.  Many times, there is no response at that time, but sometimes a peace fills me that I know comes from my Savior.  I have even had a few of those inaudible, yet profoundly full of meaning, messages in my mind telling me what God wants from me.  No, I am not a prophet (or delusional).  These are the communications from God that any of His children can receive, but you must listen.  I have had the experience of going to God in prayer in extreme agitation and stress, and to my disappointment, my tension was not relieved as I poured out my heart to God.    Finally, I stopped speaking long enough to listen while still feeling overwhelming anxiety.  Then after several minutes of silence on my part, a feeling of peace and relief spread through me from God.  Because of this and other such experiences, my advice is to listen for more than a few seconds.  You might be worried that I am advocating for some form of eastern meditation, but it is important to remember that when a Christian meditates quietly waiting for God’s response, it is not through emptying the mind or becoming one with nature or any other pagan philosophical method.  Instead, as part of your prayer time, meditate on God’s word and/or who He is and how much He loves you and how much you love Him.  Wait in silence, but not emptiness, for God to respond.  So my fourth piece of advice is to be quiet and listen.

I do not know how God will communicate with you but expect that He will. You are different from me, and God will have a manner that is specially tailored for you.  For me, God’s response is usually delayed and comes as I am reading the Bible or another book.  On the other hand, I have also learned to recognize the Holy Spirit’s loving yet brutally honest voice speaking to me as I pray.  In addition, I have heard God responding to my prayers through other people and providential events, but the most common communication has always been through the scriptures.  Remember, God does not respond to us in only one way, but His response requires that you must be open to receive it.  Do not pray without expecting a response.

I want to give a few more pieces of quick advice before speaking about why all of this important.  First, read your Bible every day.  Or you can listen to it.  Anyway, reading the Bible and prayer go together in communicating with God, and after a while they almost blend together so that you are speaking with God as you are reading His word. Second, serving others is an important part of God answering your prayers.  When Jesus was sitting at the well after speaking to the Samaritan woman, the disciples returned with food, and Jesus informed them that He already had food to eat that they were unaware of.  When they asked each other where Jesus had gotten food, “Jesus said to them, ‘My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work’” (John 4:34).  The same is true for us.  Part of communicating with God is working hand-in-hand with Him to accomplish His work.  Finally, my most important advice is to experiment and persevere until you find out the best way for you to speak with God in prayer.

I want to end with the reason why prayer is essential for us.  Simply put, we are all broken.  As one of my favorite preachers puts it, “When you look at yourself in the mirror in the morning, you are looking into the eyes of a crazy person.”  We were never created to experience all the pain and violation that this world gives us.  We are all broken and, yes, crazy because we are living a life of pain that we were never meant to undergo.  We were created to live in love and joy and peace and giving.  Instead, we daily receive, and return, hurt and shame and cruelty and a thousand knives of pain.  We are broken and need healing.  Prayer heals you.  I am not speaking of prayer where you ask God for physical healing, and you have no more sickness like the miracles that we read of in the Bible.  My point is that prayer that connects us to heaven brings the vital mental and spiritual healing that we have no method of accessing in any other way.  I need that healing.  You need that healing also, yet we remain broken because we neglect prayer.  Even though I have known this lesson for years, all too often I neglect to take the time to connect with my Creator to let Him recreate my broken parts and strengthen my weakened mind.

I want to leave you with a verse from one of the Psalms.  I think it is good advice.  “LORD, in the morning you will hear my voice; in the morning I will pray to you, and I will watch for your answer”  (Psalm 5:3).