Spiritual Survival Guide
6: Keeping It Going: Moving Beyond Survival Mode
will almost certainly be times when nothing in your prayer life seems to work. Your prayers will sound hollow and feel empty and pointless. It will feel as if God is deaf or distant. You’ll just hit a wall that you can’t go around or over or under. You’ll be stuck and will start wondering if it’ll ever get better. You’ll find yourself drawn to prayers like Psalm 13, where it says, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” And now here’s the good news: It won’t be forever. It does get better. Dry spells end. But it takes patience to work through them. And for most of us, it takes the prayers of other people to get us through. So when you’re in a spiritual dry spell, ask other people to pray for you. When your own words seem dry and lifeless, lean on the prayers other people have written. Think about how when a soldier is badly wounded, his buddies don’t ig- nore him or make him rescue himself. They’ll risk their own lives to pick him up and carry him to safety. That’s how spiritual warfare is, too. When you’re feeling spiritually wounded, ask your spiritual buddies to carry you in prayer. If they’re willing, ask them to pray out loud for you so that you can feel the power of their words. Don’t worry: one day God will let you return the favor for someone else. 9. Be confident and hopeful. The scary thing about prayer is that it quickly exposes two things about us—who we really are, and what we really think about God. The way we talk to God shows whether we think God is a cosmic bellhop, an angry judge, an impersonal, uncaring distant force, or an active, mighty and loving Father. Some guys pray as if God were a spiritual vending machine: insert two prayers and out pops what you asked for. Some guys swing to the other extreme and treat God like he’s a miser who enjoys nothing better than teasing and disappointing his creatures. Other guys have a sense that prayer can actually change things—but only other people’s prayer, not their own. They feel like God wouldn’t actually listen to them, so why
should they even bother. They’ve lost hope and have really low expecta- tions. They might ask God for something, but in their heart they don’t really believe that God would love to give it to them.
But that’s just not true. Again and again Jesus taught us that God is eager to help us and show us love. Again and again he taught us not to worry or be anxious. And that’s
because he knew that our heav- enly Father loves us like crazy, and because he can and will use us for something good, true, and significant. We’re convinced that it’s only when we finally grasp, deep down in our bones, the essential truth that God himself loves us like crazy and that he’s going to do something important in us and through us, that true hope is born. Here’s how the Bible puts it: “Let us there- fore approach the throne of [God’s] grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in our time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). God wants us to live confidently, expectantly, and boldly. Dare to hope! 10. Remember Jesus. When it comes to a life of prayer, there’s no better teacher and role model than Jesus himself. He didn’t just talk about it, he lived it. The Bible describes how he make it his habit to go off and pray. He prayed for guidance. He prayed for strength. He prayed for be- ing centered on God’s will. He prayed in order to be prepared for times of testing and rejection. He didn’t pray in order to escape from the world; he prayed in order to be ready to change the world. When Jesus’ original followers saw how powerful his prayer life was, they wanted to be like him and pray like him. So they came and asked him to teach them to pray. You can check out the story in Luke 11:1- 13. Jesus told them some of the same things we’ve been saying (don’t be
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