- Pray only when you feel like it. Disregard any fanatic ideas of praying “day and night” or “without ceasing.”
- Try to impress God with pious prayer performances so that you can win maximum spiritual credit.
- Pray publicly with an eye to exhibiting your “spiritual maturity” for others to admire.
- Let your prayers degenerate into mindless repetitions. Recycle the same old phrases even when your mind is far away.
- Imagine that it taxes God’s ability to meet your needs and respond in the best possible way to your prayers.
- Convince yourself that God doesn’t really care about you and your silly little struggles and trials and tears anyhow.
- Pretend that God doesn’t like to be bothered, and that he’s “put out” by your numerous cries and appeals.
- View prayer as a way of putting God’s arm behind his back.
- Demand instant results. Dismiss the idea that God would have you persevere in prayer, or that your loving Heavenly Father might be free to answer, “No.”
- Imagine that prayer won’t make any difference anyhow.
- Shrink prayer by equating it with asking. So bypass all that fluff (like praise, confession, thanksgiving) and go straight to the real thing: your requests.
- Reserve the worst hours of your day for prayer. This way you can give to God what has the least value to you.
- Think of prayer as doing God a favor.
- Reduce prayer to a mental exercise, a sort of self-therapy to put the mind at ease, and in this way remove God from the picture entirely. How about that, prayer without God!
A collection of thoughts, questions, and challenges for the journey of spiritual life with Jesus Christ. * * * Posted by Peter K. Nelson
Monday, January 05, 2015
14 Ways to Sabotage Your Prayer Life
Labels:
maturity,
prayer,
spiritual formation,
spiritual growth
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