Those who pray regularly do so because they see God as generous, a great Gift-giver who delights in blessing his children. A virtuous cycle then gets going. We pray to know God’s heart better, and as we come to know his heart toward us, we find ourselves praying more.

Talk to Christians about why they don’t pray as much as they want or think they should, and you’ll hear a familiar set of reasons.

• Busyness and distraction. Our schedules crowd out prayer.
• Then there’s guilt and inadequacy: I don’t know how to pray well, so I guess I’m not very good at it.
• Spiritual dryness and the absence of immediate payoff: I don’t feel closer to God when I pray, and many of my prayers seem to go unanswered.
• And, of course, self-sufficiency. We don’t pray because we don’t feel we need God’s help in our daily endeavors.

All these explanations have some truth to them. But I suspect there’s an understated reason for our prayerlessness, one that often sits beneath the others and may even supersede them.

If You Knew Me, You Would Ask

In John 4, Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. When she arrives to draw water, Jesus asks her for a drink. Startled, she questions why a Jewish man would ask such a thing of a Samaritan woman. And Jesus replies, “If you knew the gift of God, and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would ask him, and he would give you living water” (v. 10).

In other words: If you knew me, you would ask me.

Applied to prayer, two realities come into view: the power of Jesus and the heart of Jesus. If you knew his power, you would ask, confident he can act. If you knew his heart, you would ask, confident he wants to.

Most Christians I know have little trouble affirming God’s power. We believe he can answer prayer. We confess his omnipotence. We trust his ability.

What we struggle with more is God’s disposition toward us. Does God want to respond? Does he delight to hear from us? Is his heart inclined toward generosity or stinginess?

Father Who Gives Good Gifts

Jesus addresses this question in the Sermon on the Mount.

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