Prayerfulness

So Why Does It Matter?

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This week, we’ve looked at the problem of the frantic, overscheduled, overworked lives we Americans face (“When the Truth Strikes Out” and “It’s Never Enough Until Your Heart Stops Beating“). I’ve blogged on this issue many times in the past (see the end of this post for related posts), but I don’t see it getting any better. If anything, the Church and parachurch organizations act as if nothing has changed. Yet we now…

…spend more time away from home performing our jobs.

…spend record amounts of time commuting or shuttling our kids here and there.

…have more time-pressed, dual-income families than ever before.

…work harder for less money, often necessitating multiple jobs.

…have no time for social groups that help maintain the fabric of our society.

…feel more guilty than ever that we can’t mirror the perfect family that well-meaning Christians tell us we must be.

Why should any of this matter, though? Why should Christians address the underlying causes for these problems?

As someone keenly aware of the state of disciplemaking in this country, I believe it matters because all these things work to undermine the Great Commission. Dude, it's like moving! Whoa!I believe these trends and changes in our society actively work against the Gospel.

I don’t know how far we must sink before Christian leaders in America wake up to the fact that most of their charges are one exhale away from spiritual death. Our collective hypnosis must end.

With so many distractions and so much rushing to and fro, how can any of us expect to develop a truly deep walk with Christ? When dad spends twelve hours a day away from home, how can he be expected to be a true spiritual leader in his home? By the time he eats dinner and tosses a ball with Junior for fifteen minutes, the day’s over. The weekend consists of doing all the things that didn’t get done during the weeknights. Sometimes prayer goes out the window. Bible study? Forget about it. Developing a rich community of faith with others? How? Who has the time?

Folks, these are serious problems that strike at the very health and mission of Christ’s Church in this country. Yes, many of them are of our own making from long past, but now they’re entrenched in our culture, and like ticks embedded in the skin, they’re not easy to remove without an infection resulting.

Jan at The View From Her asked why Christians are demanding more and more Christian movies and TV shows. Isn’t it all just preaching to the choir?

That question fits here because I feel that our discipleship in this country is so poor we’re failing to create disciples who can stand on their own two spiritual feet. They need constant propping up in order to walk the path of Christ. So instead of developing an inner life filled with the Spirit, they surround themselves with pleasant Christian messages they believe will strengthen them.

Unfortunately, that misguided belief resembles going into battle clad in pillows rather than armor. Yet in a frenzied environment packed to the gills with this activity and that, we flop to the couch with nothing left and turn on our sweet little Christian movie before we doze off.

Folks, it ain’t workin’.

The American Church won’t shake the censers of heaven with our prayers if we toss off prayer between bites of doughnut and sips of coffee listening to Christian radio during morning rush hour. We’re not going to build strong communities if we pull in from work at 7 PM, change clothes, and wolf down dinner, only to realize it’s 8 PM already and we missed yet another church-related event. Delusional people think they can pull that off.

Perhaps that’s our problem: we’ve lost touch with reality. Or perhaps we’ve got too much reality and have lost touch with the Lord, instead. Either way, we’re in trouble if we blithely soldier on without question.

Call your pastor up some night and ask him about this. Ask him what he thinks all this bustle and overwork might be doing to his flock. Then ask why it is that no one questions it all.

If all of us do this, then some outside chance exists that some leaders will start thinking beyond the rathole issues that distract us from true discipleship. Perhaps then we’ll see important Christian voices confronting these problems.

Previous posts on these issues:

The Cornelius Factor

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At Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion of what was known as the Italian Cohort, a devout man who feared God with all his household, gave alms generously to the people, and prayed continually to God. About the ninth hour of the day he saw clearly in a vision an angel of God come in and say to him, “Cornelius.” And he stared at him in terror and said, “What is it, Lord?” And he said to him, “Your prayers and your alms have ascended as a memorial before God. And now send men to Joppa and bring one Simon who is called Peter. He is lodging with one Simon, a tanner, whose house is by the sea.” When the angel who spoke to him had departed, he called two of his servants and a devout soldier from among those who attended him, and having related everything to them, he sent them to Joppa.
—Acts 10:1-8

I don’t normally reiterate here at Cerulean Sanctum what I hear in the previous Sunday’s sermon at my church, but my pastor mentioned a passing point that struck me, so I’d like to expound on it.

In the Acts 10 passage above, the Roman centurion Cornelius receives mention. Roman Soldier by Luigi BelliThe Scriptures describe three distinctives of this soldier:

  • He feared God (as did the rest of his household).
  • He gave generously to the needy.
  • He prayed continually.

Luke goes on to write that an angel appeared to Cornelius and prepared a way for his family to go down in history as the first Gentile believers. As a result, his name is forever enshrined in the Scriptures.

Let’s concentrate on those three distinctives of Cornelius. Because he proved faithful, God looked upon him and decided to use him in a special way to forever change the course of human history. This man’s dedication and humility marked him as the perfect choice for receiving the Holy Spirit apart from any Jewish lineage. It’s not hard to align the manner in which Cornelius conducted his life with this well-known verse:

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
—Micah 6:8

Sounds like Cornelius, doesn’t it?

Note what caught the Lord’s eye about this man:

Your prayers and your alms have ascended as a memorial before God.

Prayers and giving to the needy.

I think we miss how easy it is to live out a life faithful to the Lord. We add rules and subtract others. We get sidelined in the kind of affairs that would never distract a true soldier of Christ. We can’t spend one hour in prayer. We can’t do without our wants so that others can receive their needs. We fear not keeping up with the Joneses, we fear what the neighbors might think, and we fear the wrong party will see their candidate become the next president, but we don’t truly fear God.

So we don’t receive visions. Angels don’t deliver messages to us. And perhaps God chooses to use a more faithful believer on the other side of the world to alter the course of history.

In the end, we say that visions are passe. Angels don’t come around anymore. The tongues that Cornelius and his family spoke were for another time, but not ours.

And our faith grows smaller for our dismissals.

Is it really that hard to fear God in America 2007? Or to pray continually? Or to put down the mail-order catalog long enough to meet the needs of someone dashed on the rocks by the vicissitudes of life?

Is it?

Lord, I pray that you would mold each and every person reading this into the kind of believer Cornelius was. Bless us as you did Cornelius, and use us to change the world.

Why Men Don’t Pray

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Let’s listen in on the end of a Christian men’s group meeting:

Guy 1: Great Bible study! Now who has prayer requests?

Guy 2, raising a hand: I inherited a couple thousand dollars from an aunt who died, and I need prayer to know how to best handle the money.

Guy 3: Put it in a stock index fund. Tracks the stock market and since it’s always going up over time, you win.

Guy 4: Have you looked into a 529 account? Little Joey will be going to college some day. Gotta remember that.

Guy 5: There’s the upcoming mission trip for the youth. I hear a lot of the kids don’t have enough money to go. You could write it off. Advance the Kingdom and all that.

Guy 3 to Guy 5: But if he invests it, he could make money and still turn some over in the future. Let his interest fund the mission trip five years from now.

Guy 6: This is a blessing from God. He means it to meet your needs. Your car’s not lookin’ all that hot right now. Didn’t you say the transmission needed work?

Guy 2 to Guy 6: True, but…

{Twenty minutes later…}

Guy 4: College, man. I’m telling you. It’ll cost a quarter million for four years the way things are going. Save now.

Guy 1: It’s almost 9:30, guys. Looks like we’ve pretty much shot our time, so anyone want to close in prayer?

{Guy 2 raises his hand}

Guy 1: Go for it.

Guy 2: Thank you, Lord, for this time. We pray you’d bless us and all our families. Help us to know you more. Amen.

All the Guys: Amen.

Sound familiar? I’d say that’s an eerily close script for just about every group of Christian men I’ve ever been a part of. Mention praying for each other’s needs and for the needs of the Body and you’ll hear 99 percent advice and 1 percent prayer.

I don’t remember it being that bad in my ancient past, though. And as much as it’s easy to blame men for this (to say they just aren’t spiritual enough today), I have another theory.

Consider all the changes wrought in our society in the last fifty years.

  • Companies fire men at the drop of a hat, even if they do good work.
  • Women now fight them for their jobs—and win.
  • The feminist movement questioned men’s very raison d’être, and that questioning trickled down into society as a whole.
  • TV went from Father Knows Best to showing dad routinely outsmarted by everyone, including the family dog.
  • Men aren’t reading the lay of the society’s land well. Too many changes happening too fast. Even in church on Sunday, they hear the message they’re not doing it right.

In short, I believe many men—many Christian men—struggle with feelings of incompetence. They wonder if they do anything well. GaggedThey fear that the future will somehow reveal their inadequacies, and they’ll be made a laughingstock.

I’m no psychiatrist. I’m down on psychology. But when I talk to other men, I see them struggling with these issues. It’s like watching Death of a Salesman or Glengarry Glen Ross looping in the lives of many men.

I believe this comes out in the way men approach prayer today.

A problem arises as expressed through a prayer concern. Suddenly, a chance to show competence—to let someone else know that I’ve heard what he said and I might be able to resolve it then and there, as if God had miraculously touched my mind with the answer! I can be helpful! I can make a difference!

I can be competent!

A more disturbing side exists to this, too. Intellectual competence in providing the winning solution to someone’s problem isn’t the only competence issue at stake here. Prayer becomes a comptetence issue, as well.

To many men, providing a common sense answer to a prayer need means not running the risk that prayer may not work. We prayed about Steve’s inheritance and he wound up getting taken by some shyster financial advisor. Then who’s wrong? Maybe our prayers failed the competency test. Maybe our faith failed that test, too. Maybe we’re not godly enough for God to take our prayers seriously. We’ve botched everything else, so why not this, too?

That fear of being shown incompetent doesn’t afflict women as much as men. I think the main competence issue women struggle with concerns raising their kids. Yes, that’s a leaden weight, too, but I think men tend to struggle with competence in every aspect of their lives. It’s why shows of bravado empower men. To be king of the hill carries some meaning.

Now we can inject all sorts of spiritual advice into this. We can talk about dying to self. We can talk about grace. But men simply aren’t experiencing those in their lives because what they get from the church on Sunday doesn’t have enough steam to get them past the gauntlet of potential incompetence they must run through the rest of the week. The car breaks down, and it’s so complex they can’t fix it. When their kids ask for help on algebra, they can’t do it. They can’t work enough hours in the week to avoid the offshoring due to hit their company. They can’t meet all the requirements the parachurch ministry says they must meet to be a Christian husband. They don’t even know where to start in prayer to address all these lacks. So they don’t even try.

And that’s my take on why men today don’t pray.