"The Necessity of Prayer"

I told the Wisconsinite months ago, “I want to be a man of prayer.” When I think about my “walk with God” (or whatever you want to call it), I imagine it being characterized, through-and-through, by a life of prayer. I’ve been carving out time to pray and meditate, and as the days of deliberate, intentional prayer mount, I’m finding my focus reoriented, I’m hearing God’s voice, and I’m growing in my faith. The sadness isn’t erased but infused with God’s presence and peace. Faith without prayer is as fruitless as prayer without faith, and I’ve been convicted over the last year of the decline in my prayer. When life is hard, when God seems distant, when your prayers go unanswered, it really can be difficult to set aside time for prayer; you feel like you’re talking to an immovable wall, you feel like you’re wasting your time, and prayer itself becomes a sort of down-on-your-knees begging for God’s attention, for him to break the stalemate, for him to get up and do something when he seems so absent. Prayer itself is multifaceted, and I’ve found that those days in which I take out a serious block of time to pray and meditate, those days are marked by more peace and joy, growing confidence and trust in God, and the felt presence of the Spirit. The highlight of my day really is sacred time in prayer, and I’m rediscovering the joys of prayer.

I remember in high school, I took a month to “live like a monk”: this boiled down, really, to nothing more than carving out three blocks of time a day (morning, afternoon, and night) when I would pray and meditate. I can’t begin to describe to you the joy I felt, how I could hear God stirring my soul, how reading those sacred texts was like sitting down at the feet of God and hearing him speak. Life got busy, and those times of prayer and meditation fell by the wayside, and so too did the quality of my life. I’m slowly returning to such diligence in prayer, because it’s something I genuinely want for my life, and I’m asking myself, “Why did I ever let myself drift away from such a determined practice?” I’m not saying that every prayer is emotionally charged, or that I can hear God’s voice audibly in my ear, for that’s not the case; but as I pray, there’s joy and peace trickling out to my day, and I find as my stresses mount, my recourse isn’t some sort of escapism but prayer.

In lieu of all this, I took the time to read a little book written decades ago by a man named E.M. Bounds. His little book, The Necessity of Prayer, is about, well, the necessity of prayer in the Christian life. I plan on reading some more “modern” books (I’m thinking about revisiting some Richard Foster and Dallas Willard, if I can scrounge up those books from my parents’ crawlspace), but as a “beginning book,” this one wasn’t too shabby. For those two people who read this blog who might be interested in some snippets and quotes from the book, here are my notes below:

The Necessity of Prayer