Saturday 27 June 2015

Too Comfortable to Pray

I have always loved Bill Hybels' book 'Too Busy Not to Pray'. The title says it all - when we are pressured and busy, we must pray in order to survive/overcome those pressures. I have often had occasions myself where my To-Do list, or the pressures of the day ahead, seem to have no room for anything but the doing ... yet I have deliberately still carved out time or at least paused to pray. Somehow the priorities or the tasks themselves then adjust to allow things to work out.

Yet I now wonder if a more relevant critique for our culture would be to have a title 'Too Comfortable to Pray'. Are we in the West simply too comfortable to make prayer together (especially calling on God with respect to His ministry and purposes) a priority? Too comfortable to make the effort, to schedule, to be there?

In our relative comfort have we lost the urgency that Paul seems to have, with his expectancy of Jesus' imminent return, the desire to pray Kingdom realities into the now,  the compelling and hope to see the Gospel breaking in to places or areas where it is absent? Have we become disconnected from God's mission imperative, and therefore ambivalent when mission opportunities seem to be blocked, threatened or unable to progress?

Of course as Christians we all pray. I also don't think we only use prayer as a crutch, when things are particularly bad. Yet when it comes to making a deliberate point of praying together, are we simply too comfortable to make that kind of effort?

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