"Watch and pray, that you enter not into temptation."
- Mark 14:38
Most of us cannot quite understand how prayer can involve difficulty and anguish. Why should praying entail so much suffering? Why should our prayer life be a constantly flowing source of anguish?
If we will reflect but for a moment, we will, however, see that it really cannot be otherwise. If prayer is the central function of the new life of faith, the very heartbeat of our life in God, it is obvious that our prayer life must become the target against which Satan directs his best and most numerous darts. He understands better than we do what prayer means to ourselves and to others. That is why his chief attack is directed against our prayer life. If he can in one way or another weaken it, his prospects of stealing our life in God without us even noticing it are of the very best.
This is not only the most painless way of stealing from us our spiritual life, it is also the quietest way--the way which creates the least sensation. Satan desires above all to provide himself with servants who think that they are God's children and who are even looked upon as children of God by others. For this reason, Satan mobilizes everything that he can commandeer in order to hinder our prayer. He has an excellent confederate in our own bosom: our old Adam. Our carnal nature is, according to the Scriptures and our own bitter experience, enmity against God. It realizes that it can expect nothing but mortification every time we really approach God in prayer.
It is important for us to bear this clearly in mind. By so doing, we will, in the first place, be able to account for something which we formerly could not understand, namely, the aversion to prayer which we feel more or less strongly from time to time. Our disinclination to pray should not make us anxious or bewildered. It should merely substantiate to us the old truth that the "flesh lusts against the spirit." We shall have our carnal natures with us as long as we live here below, and we must endure the discomfort occasioned thereby.
We should deal with the unwillingness of our flesh in this respect in the same way as we deal with all the other sinful desires of our flesh. We should take it to God and lay it all before Him. And the blood of Jesus Christ will cleanse us from this sin as it does from all others.
The first and the decisive battle in connection with prayer is the conflict which arises when we are to make arrangements to be alone with God every day. If the battle is lost for any length of time at this point, the enemy has already won the first skirmish. But even though we do gain the victory at the threshold of our prayer chamber, our prayer-struggle is by no means over. Our enemies will pursue us deliberately into our very prayer rooms. And here our carnal natures and Satan will take up the battle anew, though from a somewhat different angle. Our carnal natures will be just as afraid of meeting God now as before we went into our prayer room. Now every effort will be concentrated upon making our prayer session as brief as possible, or upon distracting us so completely that we are not even now given an opportunity to be alone with God.
My friend, do you know anything about this battle? As you kneel to speak with your Lord, it seems as though everything you have to do appears vividly before your's mind's eye. You see especially how much there is to do, and how urgent it is that it be done, at least some of it. As these thoughts occur, you become more and more restless. You try to keep your thoughts collected and to speak with God, but you succeed only for a moment now and then. Your prayer hour becomes really the most restless hour of the day. To put it plainly, you feel as though the time you are spending on your knees is just that much time wasted. Then you stop praying. The enemy has won a very neat victory!
Here is where we are face-to-face with enemies who are vastly superior to us. And they will defeat us every time if we do not learn the true secret of prayer: to open our hearts to Jesus and give Him access to our needs. Prayer is for the helpless. Helplessness is not a hindrance, but an incentive to prayer. Our helplessness in connection with our restless thoughts and distracted minds will not be a hindrance to prayer when the Spirit has succeeded in teaching us the little, but important secret of prayer, that my helplessness is Jesus knocking at my heart's door desiring to enter in and employ His power to relieve my distress. He has power over my restless thoughts. He can rebuke the storm in my soul and still its raging waters.
The only way in which we can gather and keep collected our distracted minds and our roaming thoughts is to center them about Jesus Christ. By that I mean that we should let Christ lay hold of, attract, captivate and gather about Himself all our interests. Then our sessions of prayer will become real meetings with God. "And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, shall guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus."
