“I haven’t prayed in a while.”
I say this to myself too often. How long has it been? Sometimes a few hours, sometimes most of a day (or more). Where has my mind been? Where has my heart been?
I sense the gentle but corrective nudge of the Father. He gets my attention by implanting in my mind the same question he asked Adam in the garden: “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9). I’m then forced to ask myself, Where have I been? Why have I been prayerless?
The sudden awareness that I have wandered from the blessed presence of God and drifted into functional atheism creates in me a feeling of exposure, a shameful nakedness in the presence of God. He doesn’t remove the sting of conviction but instead assures me of his grace: “Who told you that you were naked? There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Return to me!” (Genesis 3:11; Romans 8:1). His kindness leads me into prayerfulness.
What was the mental, emotional, or spiritual path that took me away from an awareness of God’s presence, away from obedience to the command to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17)? I usually notice a combination of three things: disappointment, deviancy, and distraction.
Disappointment
Even if you’ve been a Christian for only ten days, you’ve probably experienced disappointment in your prayer life. You’ve received a “no” or “not yet” from the Father. At times, you’ve prayed marveling in his presence; at others, your prayers seem to bounce off the clouds (Lamentations 3:44). “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Psalm 13:1).
Though normal, this experience can be full of pain and grief. There is a reason a third of the psalms have a tone of lament in them: We must take our disappointment to the one who has disappointed us. Jesus encourages us to go on praying even when we aren’t given what we want:
He told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’” And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge says. And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them?” (Luke 18:1–7)
To “cry to him day and night” requires two things: disappointment and endurance. The Father wants us to be like the widow; he wants us to “not lose heart” and instead “keep bothering” him. For though he sometimes delays, he delights in the words of his children.
Deviancy
Our prayer lives are also inhibited when we are both passively and actively disobedient.
If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. (Psalm 66:18)
Husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered. (1 Peter 3:7)
If one turns away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer is an abomination. (Proverbs 28:9)
When we walk in a pattern of sin, we erect a barrier between God and ourselves. When we lust, slander, or steal, we slip into functional atheism and then seize the anarchy it gives license to. We cannot draw near to God while simultaneously pulling back from his authority.
How do I break this destructive cycle? “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).
Distraction
“I’m too busy to pray,” our defensive hearts sometimes say. But the busyness of our hearts, not the busyness of our lives, is the core issue. We live in the world of the attention economy, and savvy people spend billions of dollars every day to colonize our minds. Worldliness now caters to pings, notifications, and social-media timelines that are fundamentally unimportant.
John Piper writes, “One of the great uses of Twitter and Facebook will be to prove at the Last Day that prayerlessness was not from lack of time.” Imagine: What if half the time you spent scrolling through X, TikTok, or Instagram in the last three years you’d instead devoted to prayer? How would your heart, mind, and soul be different? How might God have moved in power in response to your prayers in the lives of your friends and loved ones?
Much prayerlessness stems from the unwillingness to set proper boundaries on the dopamine doom-loops we’ve made peace with. In this sense, prayerlessness is laziness, passivity, and abdication. We share in the sin of Adam — letting the creation exercise dominion over us instead of rightly subduing that which God has placed under us. We are complicit in our own subjugation. God has seated us with Christ in the heavenly places (Ephesians 2:6); we have the authority to reign over the distractions that lead us into prayerlessness.
Give God Your Words
When my son comes home from school, I love it when he tells me about his day. Even if I already got a report from the teacher, I love hearing it from him. “Whom did you play with? What did they teach you? What was the happiest moment of your day? How did it go with that kid who can be mean?” A father’s heart delights in the words of his child.
“To desire the help of grace is the beginning of grace,” said Augustine. The fact that you desire to combat prayerlessness suggests that God is already at work, drawing you closer to himself. Give God what he wants from you — your love, your attention, your obedience, your words, and your joy-filled delight in him above all else. He already knows all things, but he wants to hear from you. Please your Lord today by pressing through disappointment, putting away deviancy and distraction, and reciprocating his pursuit of you.
Desiring God