Oh. Were you looking for top ten permissions not to pray? Sorry. Wrong blog. Try here.*
Top ten excuses for not praying? That’s too easy. Here. My first ten today: (10) Bad night. (9) Need coffee. (8) Talk to spouse. (7) Feed daughter. (6) Get daughter dressed. (5) Reheat coffee. (4) Pet cat. (3) Read emails. (2) Check facebook. And my number one excuse for not praying yet today is: (1) Write blog on prayer.
Perhaps you were hoping for a better title?
Top Ten Reasons Why Beings Designed to Commune with God Don’t
9. C’mon. God can take care of things without me. Perhaps, maybe, if no one else has a word with him, I’ll think about it. Anyway, things are fine. Can you bring me a beer?
8. Does it involve four scoops of espresso mocha chip with extra walnuts, fudge sauce, and whipped cream? Psalm 34 says “taste and see that the Lord is good.” But what if God isn’t enough to satisfy me?
7. Absolutely! We should have a prayer meeting. Invite everyone. Especially Zoe. She’s such a blast. Have you gone to Zumba with her? Hey, we should throw a dance party. I’ll sign out the rec room.
6. Look. What does God want from me? If he would just tell me straight, I’d do it. James says “you have not because you ask not,” but can you really trust God for a direct correlation? Really? You go first.
5. I’m not sure I have enough information yet to do this properly. But I own every book on prayer I could find and I’ve mapped out my course of study. Have you read Ten Ways to Pray? What did you think?
4. I am not praying the way they did it in my church growing up. Gag! What a heap of dead, formulaic mumbling. I am not jabbering like everyone else does. It’s not me.
3. You need to make prayer more fun if you want everyone to do it. And put an ad on the web. Nobody reads print anymore. It’s inefficient. Anyway, prayer’s a tough sell. It’s not really something you can succeed at.
2. Why doesn’t anyone pray for me? My husband should try it. I’m going to give him a copy of the book. It could help him at work. And my kids. Maybe I can help their dad teach them how to pray.
1. This is all a little melodramatic. What we need is a unified system that everyone can follow. Jesus gives us the perfect prayer—Matthew 6:9–13, Luke 11:2–4. Let’s just do that.
And the very first, ground zero reason why human beings, who were designed specifically for communion with God (Rev 4:11; 21:3), don’t:
0. Yahweh God called to the human, “Where are you?” And Adam said, “I heard your sound in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.”—Genesis 3:9–10
Can you guess which one is my besetting reason? Which reason(s) do you discover when you peer behind your own excuses?
*That was a joke, people.
Ten Ways to Pray 