Prayer is anything but boring

“The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.”

– James 5:16 (NLT)

Prayer.  What does that word evoke in you? For many people, prayer is perceived to be boring, stale, wooden, dusty, dead, or hollow. “Pray? Why would I want to do that when I could do something fun, exciting, or interesting?”

Let’s be honest; we’ve all been there. Maybe we still are. But that isn’t the picture painted for us in the pages of God’s Word. If anything, when we compare the biblical depiction of prayer with our commonly-held opinions, we’d have to conclude that we’ve fallen victim to the most incredible deception of all time.

Perhaps those negative tags apply when it comes to counterfeit prayer, but true prayer could never be described as boring. If that were the case, then the people of prayer in the Scriptures would be boring people who led dull and tedious lives.

Would we consider Joseph or Elijah to be boring men? Was Mary’s life boring? Was Daniel’s, or Ruth’s, or Paul’s, or David’s? How about Jesus? The fact of the matter is this: These people’s biographies were among the most adventurous and action-packed that the world has ever seen. They lived out stuff that even Hollywood couldn’t dream of. Yet prayer was consistently woven throughout their lives, showing us that prayer and adventure go hand in hand.

We need to get away from the mindset that prayer is like trudging across an endless desert of Christian catch-phrases. It’s the most enthralling experience possible on earth, because it brings us into contact with the heart of God, which is anything but boring!

Prayer is important

“The LORD is close to all who call on him.”

– Psalm 145:18 (NLT)

Why is prayer so important? It’s through prayer that our two most basic needs are met: our need to communicate and our need for God. Without prayer, we can still communicate with other people, but it will always come up lacking. There will always be a sense that something’s missing, and we may not even know what.

That’s because God created us to communicate with Him, and anything that falls short of this falls short of our ultimate purpose. This truth was echoed by the Welsh preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones when he remarked that, “[Prayer] is the highest activity of the human soul.” It’s the Mount Everest of our faith, and we’ll never find true fulfillment if we never scale its summit.

Maybe you have a lot of friends but you still feel lonely. You may even be a Christian who constantly surrounds yourself with other Christians-and yet you still sense something is missing. You love God, read His Word, share Him with others, but you know that your relationship with Him isn’t all that it should be. You may have union with Him, but not communion. He’s there, but He feels distant.

That’s because God created us to communicate with Him. If that’s not happening, then our lives won’t be fulfilling.

Pray now …and pray continually! (1 Thessalonians 5:17)