5- Duty to Delight

I can think of nothing great that is easy, and prayer is one of the greatest things, so it must be one of the toughest. It is ok. Admit that prayer is very hard, you are not alone.

“When your prayer life finally begins to flourish, the effects can be remarkable. You may be filled with self-pity, and be justifying resentment and anger. Then you sit down to pray and the reorientation that comes before God’s face reveals the pettiness of your feelings in an instant. All your self-justifying excuses fall to the ground in pieces. Or you may be filled with anxiety, and during prayer you come to wonder what you were so worried about. You laugh at yourself and thank God for who he is and what he’s done. It can be that dramatix. It is the bracing clarity of a new perspective. Eventually, this can be the normal experience, but that is never how the prayer life starts. In the beginning the feeling of poverty and absence usually dominates, but the best guides for this phase urge us not to turn back but rather to endure and pray in a disciplined way, until, as Packer and Nystrom say, we get through duty to delight.”

Whether it is here with Keller, or with Packer, Nystrom, Luther, Calvin, or Augustine, all agree that prayer is not easy for almost anyone in the beginning. It is a chore. They all also agree that if one can commit his or herself to getting through Duty, they will always, eventually, arrive at Delight. At Delight, prayer becomes just that; it gets to the point that you long for your time of prayer, when you need prayer to feel right for the day more than you even need your morning coffee. You will enjoy it. You will find it delightful and easy. You will find it consistently day and life altering. BUT . . . IT NEVER BEGINS LIKE THAT.

You must decide if getting to Delight and obeying God is worth your forging on through the mire that often is Duty. No one can make you pray. You must sit down with a chisel and stone and commit yourself to praying, knowing that it will be tough.

The Duty stage can last indefinitely, but it will not last forever. And it is really not just steps from Duty to Delight as we all will return back to stages of dryness even after reaching Delight; but Delight always returns.

When I first talked about this to my youth and college students, one raised his hand and asked, “I mean, is it ok for me to set an alarm on my phone to remind me?” ABSOLUTELY! We have dropped ourselves into this well of misconception that if your prayers are on a schedule or if they are orderly or if you’re doing anything short of speaking with God in a fiery bush then it is not really the way it is supposed to work. This is a great mistake.

We all know the story of Daniel, that he was thrown into a den of lions precisely because he insisted on praying the 3 set times a day as he had always done. MAY WE BE SO CONSISTENT AND FAITHFUL!

Commit to praying. Set an alarm on your phone. Sit down and rest in God, talk to God. Confess your sins. Let your mind go to the areas of your life that you don’t want God to bring up. Read scripture, respond in prayer.

You will worry that you aren’t doing it right or good enough; you aren’t, no one is. Do it anyway.

Deuteronomy 4:7

What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the LORD our God is near us whenever we pray to him?