'We Ought to Pray' Even when we have no desire to pray

'The deeper the desire, the stronger the prayer. Without desire, prayer is a meaningless mumble of words. Such perfunctory, formal praying, with no heart, no feeling, no real desire accompanying it, is to be shunned like a pestilence. Its exercise is a waste of precious time, and from it, no real blessing accrues.

And yet even if it be discovered that desire is honestly absent, we should pray, anyway.

We ought to pray.

The "ought" comes in, in order that both desire and expression be cultivated. God's Word commands it. Our judgment tells us we ought to pray -- to pray whether we feel like it or not -- and not to allow our feelings to determine our habits of prayer. In such circumstance, we ought to pray for the desire to pray; for such a desire is God-given and heaven-born. We should pray for desire; then, when desire has been given, we should pray according to its dictates. Lack of spiritual desire should grieve us, and lead us to lament its absence, to seek earnestly for its bestowal, so that our praying, henceforth, should be an expression of "the soul's sincere desire."

A sense of need creates or should create, earnest desire. The stronger the sense of need,
before God, the greater should be the desire, the more earnest the praying. The "poor in
spirit" are eminently competent to pray.

Hunger is an active sense of physical need. It prompts the request for bread. In like manner, the inward consciousness of spiritual need creates desire, and desire breaks forth in prayer. Desire is an inward longing for something of which we are not possessed, of which we stand in need -- something which God has promised, and which may be secured by an earnest supplication of His throne of grace.'

Quoted from- 'THE NECESSITY OF PRAYER  By E.M. BOUNDS' (Excerpt 13)

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Truly our adversary, the devil, will do all he can to keep us from praying! The belief that we must feel like praying to pray is one of those tricks he uses to keep us from communicating with our Father God.  The knowledge that we should pray regardless of our feelings is what we need embedded in us.  We most definitely shouldn't wait till we are trouble to turn to God in prayer, yet that's exactly what a lot of people do. Waiting until they have a need for help, not realizing that we have a desperate need of prayer daily. We need daily spiritual bread as well as daily physical bread.  Only one of those two things are within our power of enacting. We cannot always supply daily physical bread but we can daily supply spiritual bread because that spiritual bread is just a prayer away from us. We can open the lines of communication in our happiest and our most desperate of hours. There is never a time we are forbidden to pray because prayer is so incredibly important and special. We can pray in complete silence without anyone knowing, or we can choose to be outspoken and loud in our prayer.  If we choose to be outspoken and loud we may be asked to stop, but even if we do stop the noise of our prayer, inwardly no one can stop us from praying - not a single person. Spiritual sustenance is extremely necessary. We no more can keep living without physical food than we can keep spiritually alive without prayer.

Here, E.M. Bounds speaks of desire and lack of desire in prayer. When our hearts are sometimes at their lowest point and life has tormented us with it's evils, the slicing arrows of satan cutting us to the quick, the poison tipped barbs infuse us with a desire to turn from God, not towards Him, it is then we need to take that lack of desire to pray and pray even harder!

We will not be left to a life filled with wondrous and constant joy despite life's hardships, not if Satan has anything to say about it, and truly...not if God has anything to do with it as well.  We are being refined! Our patience is being perfected! These awful trials and tribulations are ripping our hearts out and wringing the evil from them by the grace of our GOD.  Satan would turn that grace into disease, wanting us to shun it at all cost, but our God is greater than the evil one!

Please, LORD, please SAVIOR, please HEAVENLY FATHER live in us and us in You!  We need You more than anything else! We need YOU!

Job was tortured physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually tortured as Satan tried his best to rip him from God's love.  All by God's grace that wasn't possible! Please, LORD, keep us in YOU, in YOUR grace no matter what. We don't want pain and heartache, we don't want to be tortured in any way at all, our desire is to be kept in YOU free from all that, but we know that this world is filled with pain and heartache that You cannot keep us from, but You can keep us from EVIL that would destroy us by wresting us permanently from You! Please, we pray the desperate prayer to be kept from EVIL! Deliver us, LORD, deliver us from evil, lead us not into temptation, not into despair!  You have the POWER, You have the GLORY, Yours is the KINGDOM forever and ever.  All in YOU in YOUR grace, YOUR mercy, YOUR love… we PRAY.

Faith knows there are delays in answering prayers...

THE NECESSITY OF PRAYER  By E.M. BOUNDS (Excerpts)

"Faith in Christ's ability to do and to do greatly, is the faith which prays greatly."

Mat_9:28  And when he was come into the house, the blind men came to him: and Jesus saith unto them, Believe ye that I am able to do this? They said unto him, Yea, Lord.

"It was to inspire faith in His ability to do that Jesus left behind Him, that last, great
statement, which, in the final analysis, is a ringing challenge to faith. "All power," He
declared, "is given unto Me in heaven and in earth."  (Mat_28:18)

"Yet faith is called upon, and that right often to wait in patience before God, and is
prepared for God's seeming delays in answering prayer. Faith does not grow
disheartened because prayer is not immediately honoured; it takes God at His Word,
and lets Him take what time He chooses in fulfilling His purposes, and in carrying on
His work. There is bound to be much delay and long days of waiting for true faith, but
faith accepts the conditions -- knows there will be delays in answering prayer, and
regards such delays as times of testing, in the which, it is privileged to show its mettle,
and the stern stuff of which it is made."

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My thoughts-

Truly our doubting God is revealing a lack of faith. When things go bad in our lives we are always tempted to cry out- 'Why, God?! Why?' And that is a cry of despair, of questioning, of doubting.  People will quickly tell you it's fine to doubt God, and yet that doubt chips away at the faith we have. If we aren't careful the chips at our faith which we allow will eventually destroy all our faith.  It's not fine to doubt God. When we doubt we need to ask forgiveness for that doubting, not tell ourselves it's perfectly fine, perfectly normal. We will doubt, that's in our flesh nature, but our spirit nature counters that with the realization it is wrong to doubt. We must repent of our doubting and seek forgiveness. We must BELIEVE, we must have FAITH, and we must PRAY.  Some will find that while they are busy questioning God, and holding fast to their doubt that it becomes harder and harder to pray.

I've known people who have left a very rich prayer life because of their anger and doubt at God because their lives took a tragic turn. Would I do the same? It's very possible, I'm not trying to get the speck out of their eye while ignoring the beam in my own. I could very well react the same given the same circumstance and by God's grace alone, may I never be tested in such a way.

Prayer can strengthen our faith, and it's through faith we pray. We believe and so we pray, we doubt and our prayers suffer.

Bounds writes that, "There is bound to be much delay and long days of waiting for true faith, but faith accepts the conditions and knows there will be delays in answering prayer, and regards such delays as times of testing…"

This is truth.

We ask for things in prayers and all too often expect immediate replies because our request is for a situation requiring immediacy.  Yet, some things we asked for are not given because we ultimately pray for God's will to be done, meaning God who sees the end from the beginning knows how all things work together for good, we cannot know that. We can see Point A and how is might connect to Point B but we would find it hard to comprehend where Point X fits in when it is so many points away from Point A.

One person's tragedy could be another's blessing- we find this often in organ transplants. One person's faith rewarded while another is crushed.  I say crushed but what it really is being called to do is to be TESTED, not crushed. The test can be horrifically painful but we are to be tried and tested, we are called to endure much suffering, we were never told it would be painless. We are told it is endurable all through CHRIST, through believing that our Savior is.  

Yes, believing that our Savior is. That He exists and is able to do all that He's promised this is faith, this is prayer.

By YOUR grace LORD, by YOUR GRACE!