Our Flimsy Excuses for Not Praying

(A Conclusion to a Series on Prayer)

As we come to the conclusion on this several session series on prayer let’s look at our flimsy excuses for not praying. Now this format is a little different than my normal method of going verse by verse through a passage of Scripture. But let us be aware of the ways that we can deceive ourselves into not praying as we should. Also note that the negative side of a topical message like this is that it is not exhaustive. I am only touching on a few of the excuses that people use for not praying. And I don’t want it to be a discouragement to you but perhaps a means of awakening you to see how all of us can justify the fact why we are not carrying out God’s will.

I want you to recognize that we are either Christians who play or Christians who pray. We are either giving this whole thing lip service or we are serious about it. Either we want to serve Christ in the way that He wants us to or we are simply calling ourselves Christians with no real teeth behind it. Prayer is one of the disciplines of the Christian life that separates the fakers from those who are genuine.

E. M. Bounds said, "Little praying or no praying, of these two evils perhaps little praying is worse. It acts as a salve for the conscience, a kind of make believe, a farce and delusion."

Key idea: Let us not play at Christianity with excuses for not praying but let us come boldly to throne of grace that God might truly make a difference in our lives.

1. I am too busy

I want to outline 5 excuses this morning for not praying. The first excuse that I hear people give for not praying is, "I am too busy." Also under this category follow such as, "I am too tired, my schedule doesn’t allow for it, I have too much work in taking care of my children, I am too busy studying for exams," etc."

But what does the Scripture say? Jesus was so busy in ministering to those around Him that He fell asleep in the disciples’ boat in the midst of a storm, yet He continued to get up early and stay up late to pray. You may say "That was Jesus, the Son of God, of course He was going to pray." But can’t you hear your own justification? If Jesus spent so much time in prayer, if He understood His need to pray and seek the help of the Father in His life, do you think that you can carry out God’s will without praying? Especially when you are so busy and in need of so much help. How much more so do we need to pray when we are busy?

What we tend to forget, as history covers the tracks of those who have gone before us, is that those who did any real lasting work for God have been people of prayer.

There was Martin Luther who said that as he came to a day that would be busier than usual it necessitated him to get up earlier and to pray longer. Here is a man who brought multitudes into the light of faith and translated the Bible into the German language that is still used as a standard today. He did a great work for God. George Mueller, the man who founded an orphanage in London with the intent of seeing the children come to Christ, often prayed all night long for God to provide the needs of those orphans. Count Zinzindorf, one of the leaders in the modern missionary movement and founder of the Moravian brethren, started an ongoing prayer meeting (or prayer chain) in his estate (or home) that lasted for 100 years. These Moravian missionaries, who went out under the support of this prayer meeting had a direct influence on the conversion of John Wesley, whom God used mightily in the great awakening of the 18^th century.

These men, greatly used of God, devoted large portions of their time to prayer. And yet, they were probably more productive and influential in the cause of Christ than you or I will ever be (unless, of course, we discover the necessity of much prayer). Too often today we have it backwards. We think, "I have a lot to do, therefore I must slack off on how much time I spend in prayer today. In our "productive" society we tend to see prayer as a waste of time but instead we see our effort as what causes us to prosper. Why then do our churches see less people soundly converted and find that we lack the power to live righteous holy lives because we would rather spend hours entertaining ourselves watching a movie than two hours in the presence of the King of kings and Lord of lords!

If we would only see that our resulting eternal fruit is completely dependent on how much we seek the Lord. If we could only understand that it is only by asking God to pour out His grace into our lives that can we truly overcome sin. The greater we see our need, the more we are going to cry out to Him and the less we will seek to make excuses for not praying.

Daniel, as one of the most important men in the great kingdom of Babylon, was extremely busy. He was in charge of much of the ruling decisions for the nation. The Scripture says that Daniel was one of three commissioners in charge of the 120 governors who ruled throughout the kingdom of Babylon. I am sure that his days were jammed packed with meetings and inspections and other assorted tasks over which he was assigned. Yet the Scripture says that Daniel did not fail to pray three times a day to God. And how did God use Daniel? He chose Him to write one of the prophetic books that clearly detailed the coming of the Messiah. Let us not fail to do the most important and productive work of our Christian life on our knees.

Please don’t miss your opportunity to produce lasting fruit for Christ by failing to persevere in prayer with the excuse that you are too busy.

2. I pray as I go through out my day

The next excuse that I have heard in my years as a Christian is "I pray as I go through out my day." I'm glad you do. So do I. But if that is your excuse for not having a set time to pray, which I have heard over and over through out the years, then all you are really saying is that you will pray when you find it convenient because you won’t tie yourself down to make time for that which you do not perceive as important.

Please do not misunderstand me. I am all for spontaneity in prayer. For spontaneity, praying as we go through out our day, shows evidence of a sincere and active spiritual life. It shows that the Spirit is at work in us as we obey the Scripture by praying without ceasing. But when it becomes an excuse to neglect time that we should be setting aside to make our requests known to Him, it marks the start of a decline in our spiritual lives.

Let me explain why. Prayer is one of the necessary disciplines of the Christian life. Throughout Scripture we see where prayer is both planned and involves specific requests. It requires a time set aside specifically for seeking the Lord.

The whole temple sacrificial system described the need for a regular time to worship and pray to the Lord. God set up for Israel specific times of prayer through the daily offerings at the temple. The offerings were akin to the act of prayer itself. The book of Revelation makes this clear because it says that the incense that was offered up in heaven were the prayers of the saints. So there is a very close connection to the regularly scheduled offerings in the temple and to the prayer of the people of God. There is the necessity for us to offer up regularly our prayer before God.

In Psalm 5, David says, "In the morning, O Lord, You will hear my voice; in the morning I will order my prayer to You and eagerly watch." So we see that in King David’s life he had a set time to come before the Lord. And notice, he would order his prayer. I doubt that he had a piece of paper with his prayer list but this word, "order" means to arrange or set. David was carefully thinking about His prayer requests. He placed them in order so as not to forget that for which he needed to pray.

Beside all these biblical reasons, as if that weren't enough, it is clear from human nature that if we desire to continue something as a habit we must make time for it. How many of us, who desire to spend time working out to be healthy say, "I don’t have a set time to workout, I just workout throughout the day." How silly is that? When I think about it in my office, I do a pushup or two. When I have a free moment I sprint from my chair to the bathroom. How reckless for us to say that we could stay in shape without setting blocks of time aside to workout. It is similarly foolish and ignorant for us to say that we can maintain any type of spiritual growth without disciplining ourselves to set time aside from our schedule to pray. We are deceiving ourselves and seeking our own spiritual shipwreck if we fail to follow through in this spiritual discipline of prayer. Do not let "I pray as I go through out my day" become an excuse for not seeking to set aside a regular daily time to pray.

The reason I mark this excuse so strongly is because this excuse allows us to drift from the Lord without our noticing it. I had a friend in college who gave me this very excuse. And though he had a wonderful testimony for the Lord he drifted away because he refused to spend quantity (as well as quality) time with Him.

3. Why should I pray? God doesn’t seem to answer my prayers anyway

The third excuse I have heard is, "Why should I pray? God doesn’t seem to answer my prayers anyway." This excuse is a little more subtle than the others because it relies on our experience but really shows a lack of a complete understanding of the purpose for prayer. Some people think that prayer is simply a hot line that we access when we are in trouble or need something. They see it as a sanctified rubbing of a genie’s lamp to give us what we want. And if God doesn’t give us what we want then we think, "He failed us" or we believe that we didn’t have enough faith or suppose that God isn’t real.

It is true that we are to lay all our cares and needs before the Lord. It is true that God says He will meet every one of our needs. But the Scripture also says that there are many ways in which we set ourselves for God not to answer our prayer. James says that sometimes when we pray we ask for the wrong things or ask with the wrong motives. God sometimes wants to use our prayer to redirect our lives because He knows what is best for us. If God doesn’t answer our prayer then that may actually be the best for us.

Other times God doesn’t answer what we want because He desires us to learn persistence in prayer. God wants to see if we really desire His best in what we are asking.

Perhaps it is because we are not spending the time that we should in fellowship with Him or because there is sin in our lives of which we refuse to repent.

I remember a story that I heard Larry Burkett share many years ago about a man that he had discipled. He had taught this man that he should spend at least 15 minutes a day reading God’s Word and praying. Some time later Larry saw him. He asked how his Christian life was going and the man told him that he had given up on God. Larry asked why and the man said that one day he really needed to make it to an important appointment that he couldn’t miss and car wouldn’t start. So he asked God to allow him to get his car going. He wasn’t able to and he missed that appointment and now he had given up on God because God had failed him.

Larry then asked him if he had been spending at least 15 minutes a day with the Lord like they had talked about. The man said, "Ah, no." Larry asked, "At least 10?" Again he said, "No." "5?" "No." "I know what happened," Larry said, "You asked God to start your car and because he didn’t recognize your voice he started someone else’s."

If God is not answering your prayer in manner or time or way in which you think He should the problem is not with God but with you. Let Him be God. He does know what is best.

4. I don’t feel like praying

A fourth excuse is, "I don’t feel like praying" or "I feel too spiritually dry to pray." This excuse seems to gives indication that whether or not my prayer is acceptable to God is based on how I pray. Isn’t this merely legalism? Doesn’t this say that it is based on the works I do that make this prayer acceptable? If I'm doing well in my Christian walk then I can pray and be heard but if my spiritual life is suffering and suffocating then I really can’t expect to be heard by God. Why does God hear us at all? It is only by the sacrifice of Christ on the cross that gives us access to God and if we are coming through any other means then we are going to be rejected.

If we are struggling in our Christian life and dry, don’t we truly have need to come to God? Isn’t it here where God can actually lift us out of our self-pity and self-love and self-focus?

Also by using this excuse, we give the indication that our lack of feeling toward prayer relieves us of, or lessens, our responsibility to pray. It is as if because we don’t feel like praying that somehow God says, "Its OK. You don’t have to pray today." The Old Testament prophet Samuel spoke to the nation of Israel and said, "Far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord in ceasing to pray for you" (1 Sam. 12:23). Samuel recognized that he had an obligation to pray for others and that to neglect this obligation was to sin.

You might say, "Am I breaking a command by not praying?" In the New Testament alone, I quickly found 20 commands for the believer to pray. And I’m sure if I would have looked for other words related to prayer I would have found more. Some of them say that we are to continue to pray and not to quit. This gives us no regard as to how we feel. I think the assumption is that as we feel worse we should pray more.

Also from the book of Psalms we see that many of the Psalms were written out of the depths of their poverty of soul. They felt very dry spiritually but they knew that the water source for their souls was in God. And as the Psalmists, being spiritually dry, began to call out to God, God began to answer by pouring out a glimpse of Himself to them. And at the end of the Psalm they were filled with praise to God.

You may say well that my feelings and attitudes don’t change as fast as did the Psalmists. Do you think that their attitude changed in a matter of 12 verses? It may seem that way from reading the Psalms. But they were merely writing of their experience. Perhaps, it took them hours, or days, or weeks of continually crying out to God to have a renewed attitude toward Him. We are in a society of instant everything. Instant messaging, instant loan approval, instant credit checks, instant oatmeal. If we have to wait on the phone we get anxious. We think that if we throw up one carefully constructed sentence before God that He should hear and answer before we have to run off to work because we don’t want to have to go to work without having everything resolved before we get there. How ridiculous! God’s program is change us through circumstances and time. He works in us as we learn to trust Him while we are waiting. He works in us as we continue to pray to Him though there seems to be no answer in the near future. And whether we feel like praying or not we must diligently be committed to it because God tells us to do so. And He promises that as we continue to do so (Not in the IM version) but for the long haul He will show us great and mighty things that we know not. Are you ready to receive these great and mighty things from God? Then you must be ready to keep praying whether you feel like it or not.

5. I am too sinful to pray

The last excuse that we are going to look at is, "I am too sinful to pray." Satan loves to have us use this excuse because Satan is the accuser of the brethren. His goal is to keep us from praying and so he will make every effort to do it. And one of the means that he uses is accusation. I have felt this way before. When I mess up it is almost like Satan seems to be saying, "You’re finished." Why should God listen to you? Again we have to ask the question, "On what basis do we have access to God, anyway?"

What does God's Word say about it? In Romans 8, Paul discusses this very thing. He notes that there is one who accuses us. But the accusations will not stick because there is one who intercedes for us and has already washed away our sin. We see this in Romans 8:31-34. "What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? (Here it is) Who will bring a charge (accusation) against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies; who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us."

What do we have in these verses? Paul asks the question, "Who can really bring a charge against God’s elect that will hold up?" The answer is, "No one." Why is that? Paul goes on to say that Jesus Christ was the one who died and rose again for our sin and now He is even sitting right next to the Father so that the accusations cannot get to God but our prayer can. Why is this? Jesus Himself is interceding on our behalf.

So when we have sinned and confessed to Him concerning our sin we do not have to worry about our access being denied. We do not need to think that God will now not let us into His presence. It is just at this time that we need to come to Him most and not allow our feelings to hinder our prayer life.

Otherwise when could we ever really come before God? When could we say that our hands and hearts are ever clean enough? The only hope that we have for access to God is through the perfect sacrifice of His Son Jesus Christ. If we are not completely relying on Him to get our requests to God then we are simply trusting our own effort to get to Him. And that is legalism.

When we sin we need to cling to 1 John 1:9 and believe it. "If we confess our sin, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." We aren’t able to come to God because of our righteousness but Christ’s. If we feel too sinful to pray it could be for a few different reasons.

First, you may feel too sinful to pray if you do not wish to repent of your sin. In this case the Scripture says that it is true that God will not hear us. You must first agree with God concerning that sin of which God is convicting you.

Second, you may feel too sinful to pray if you have not found forgiveness through Christ. If you have not received forgiveness through Jesus Christ you rightfully have a weight of sin upon you. And sometimes that sin is palpable. And it is only because of God’s mercy that you have not already perished. At this point God is under no obligation to hear your prayer. He may answer out of His very great mercy towards you. But you need you your sin forgiven through the grace offered to you in Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.

Thirdly, you may feel too sinful to pray if you are not believing God’s Word about your forgiveness. When we tend to be led by our feelings instead of God’s Word we are headed for a fall. It is precisely because God has not given feelings as our primary motivator for action. And Satan knows that if he can get our focus off God’s Word and onto our feelings he will have us stymied.

Let me close with an encouragement from the Word of God to continue to pray. Though all of us, you and I, fail to persevere in prayer as we should, though we are not continually carrying out the command to pray our goal should be to develop such a close walk with God that prayer becomes a natural outgrowth of our lives.

We should seek to develop a growing prayer life. And it can only happen by continually redirecting our focus back onto Jesus Christ. As Paul says, we must set our mind on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God because He is our life.

Satan knows that if he can break our link between the Father and us then we suffer the loss of the joy in our relationship with Him and the power that is promised to us who rely on Him for our strength.

So let me encourage you, spend time in God’s Word, spend time praying God’s Word back to Him and allow your petitions to continually rise to the throne of God so that He will be glorified as He answers them according to His will and time and as He guards your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

And let me also encourage you to rediscover the delight in prayer. The experience and understanding that we are meeting with God Himself, that we are actually carrying out the work of God while on our knees. Let us remember what one famous preacher of over a century ago said, "What a person is alone on their knees before God, that they are, and no more." Everything else is delusion.