How To Sabotage Your Prayer Life

"My dear Wormwood," writes the senior demon in The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, as he broaches "the painful subject of prayer.... The best thing, where it is possible, is to keep the patient from the serious intention of praying altogether.... If this fails, you must fall back on a subtler misdirection of his intention. Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him and toward themselves" (pp. 19-23).

In keeping with the model of Screwtape, allow me to offer fourteen ways to divert, distract, disconnect, and otherwise sabotage your prayer life:

1. Pray only when you feel like it. Disregard any biblical talk of praying "day and night" or "without ceasing."
2. Try to impress God with pious prayer performances to win maximum spiritual points.
3. Pray publicly in order to exhibit your "spiritual maturity" for others to admire.
4. Let your prayers degenerate into mindless repetitions. Recycle those same old phrases even when your mind is far away.
5. Imagine that it taxes God's abilities to meet your needs and respond in the best possible way to your prayers.
6. Convince yourself that God doesn't really care about you and your silly little struggles and trials and tears.
7. Pretend that God doesn't like to be bothered, and that he's "put out" by your numerous cries and appeals.
8. Think of prayer as a way of putting God's arm behind his back: prayer as leverage.
9. Demand instant results. Dismiss the idea that God would have you persevere in prayer.
10. Imagine that prayer won't make any difference anyhow.
11. Reduce prayer to and equate it with asking. So when you pray, bypass all that extraneous praise, confession, and thanksgiving and go straight to important stuff: requests.
12. Reserve the worst hours of your day for prayer. This way you can give to God what has the least value to you.
13. Think of prayer as doing God a favor.
14. Reduce prayer to a kind of mental exercise, a kind of self-therapy to put the mind at ease, and in this way remove God from the picture entirely. Imagine that, prayer without God!

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