In the prophecy of Zechariah, God talks about pouring out a spirit of grace and supplication. That suggests that God gives freely the help needed to pray. When Jesus taught on prayer in Luke 11, He says our Heavenly Father will not refuse to give us the Holy Spirit if we ask Him. That’s great because we need divine aid to pray as we should.
Feed Faith
As I noted, when people are taught about prayer they respond. By His Spirit, God has given us a taste for fellowship with Him. So when we are taught about prayer it delights our souls. The thing is, just like we need to keep feeding our bodies, we need to keep feeding our faith about prayer. It’s okay to need renewal. I wrote a 32-page booklet on prayer that is basically a primer on prayer. It gives a broad overview of the Bible’s teaching about prayer and gets into the practice of prayer. But one of the biggest takeaways is seeing how God has ordained our prayers as His means for His ends. Whenever I teach using the booklet that truth not only instructs, it motivates. People get excited.
That’s the way it works with helping our praying to stick. We need to keep feeding our faith. All of us need that constant reminding. I recently came across a 1896 edition of Andrew Murray’s book, Lord, Teach Us to Pray, and slowly read all 32 pages of it. It was like a box of chocolates, filled with savory morsels. His constant examination and exhortation got me all worked up to pray. We need that constant appeal to God’s Word about prayer, no matter how much we know or how long we’ve been at it.
Use Props
God knows we are taciturn. When my kids would come home from high school, we would ask them about their day. “Fine” would be the answer more often than not. The school could have burned down but we wouldn’t know it from them. We can be like that with God, partly because of the effort we’d have to make to talk it out with Him and partly because we are oblivious to life around us.
