“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!