What Does it Mean to Struggle in Prayer?
Do you struggle in prayer, or to you struggle to pray?
Last week, we spent time looking at what it means for our culture to struggle with struggle and how that can affect our Christian walk, especially when it comes to prayer.
Today, we should see what it would mean to struggle with prayer. Let’s revisit the passage that launched this series:
Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, greets you, always struggling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God (Colossians 4:12).
So, the first thing you notice is that struggling shows that prayer is work—that is, it takes effort. In Tim Keller’s book on Prayer, he notes, “Prayer is both awe and intimacy, struggle and reality.” Later in his book, he refers to Romans 15:30 and observes, “Prayer is striving. This means sticking with prayer through the ups and downs of feelings.
Recently, I asked one of our members how I could pray for her. She asked for a stronger prayer life, for she gets so easily distracted. My response was, “Would that we all strive for that!”
A book that I highly recommend is by Tony Reinke, called 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You. At the beginning of Chapter 1, Reinke informs us of one pattern that is particularly disturbing:
We check our smartphones 81,500 times each year, or once every 4.3 minutes of our waking lives, which means that you will be tempted to check your phone three times before you finish this chapter (p. 41).
Our distractions come from our brains and our hearts just taking us where they want to go. Prayer fights these distractions and takes us where we should go—to the throne room of God! We must fight and fight against these distractions!
The second piece of this is a desire to see the church grow spiritually.
Epaphras was praying “that you may stand mature.” The struggle is for our good and for the good of those around us. In the High Priestly Prayer of John 17, Jesus prays for his disciples and all who would follow after them:
I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth (John 17:15-19, ESV).
Jesus Himself prays that we would be sanctified, set apart for His holy use. And He is still interceding for us even now (Romans 8:34). The Christian faith is a growing faith—not an apathetic, stagnant, and certainly not a dwindling one. Romans 8:29 shows that God’s will for us is to be “conformed to the image of His Son.” Prayer strives that, by the power of the Spirit, we strive for holiness “without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14b).
Do we spend time praying for our own maturity and the maturity of those around us? Do we pray for our pastors who equip those for the work of the ministry, moving toward unity and maturity (see Ephesians 4:11-16)? Do we pray before we come to church that all who would hear would grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ (see 2 Peter 3:18)?
The last is that we must have the desire to be fully assured in all the will of God. In other words, we pray that people would rest and find their blessed assurance (“Jesus is mine!”) in all that Christ ordains and commands. Now, clearly, we do not know all that God ordains, but we can give us what we need to know.
“The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”
Deuteronomy 29:29 (ESV)
R.C. Sproul in his book Essential Truths for the Christian Faith writes about the will of God in Chapter 22, which you can find extracted here. But let me pull out this one quote:
The true mark of spirituality is seen in those seeking to know the will of God that is revealed in His preceptive will. It is the godly person who meditates on God's law day and night. While we seek to be "led" by the Holy Spirit, it is vital to remember that the Holy Spirit is primarily leading us into righteousness. We are called to live our lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. It is His revealed will that is our business, indeed, the chief business of our lives.
God reveals His perceptive will in His Word, so Epaphras is praying that all would be assured of the Word that He has revealed in the Bible. Given how we are “prone to wander,” as the old hymn says, it’s no wonder that Epaphras struggled in prayer and why we must struggle in prayer for ourselves and our brothers and sisters in Christ.
Do you struggle and strive in prayer, or is prayer a struggle in the sense that you struggle to engage? May God revive our hearts to show us the beauty and the burden of prayer.