The Lord Is Present When You Pray - The Truth About Prayer

The LORD is close to all who call on him, yes, to all who call on him in truth.

FOR MOST OF MY CHRISTIAN LIFE, I DIDN’T REALIZE HOW MUCH I WAS WRESTLING WITH MYSELF IN PRAYER. When I failed to “pray well” by my standards, I turned against myself to try harder, to be better, and to prove to God that I was faithful. But I was trying to generate faithful prayer in my flesh, rather than discovering the truth of what God had done for me. Deep down I didn’t believe that God wanted the truth.

In Psalm 145:18 we hear the opposite: “The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth” (NIV). While many of us know that we can bring God into our struggles, our sin, and our joys, let me suggest that many of us are still failing to bring God into our prayers. We pray at God, rather than knowing him in the midst of our praying (or our failure in prayer). In past moments when my mind wandered in prayer, I never stopped to consider that God was with me in this, inviting me to bring this to him. When I fell asleep, I would apologize for not being able to stay awake, but I never talked to God about my fatigue.

It was my mentor who first told me that prayer was not a place to be good but a place to be honest. It was then that prayer came alive because I discovered that God actually wanted to meet me in my deepest desires, my struggles, and the tension I felt in my relationship with him. Instead of being barriers, these things, these were invitations to know his presence and to receive his mercy, right where I needed it.

I realized that a lot of my prayers were not true, because I was trying to pray like I imagined a faithful Christian would. So my prayer life became a life of pretending, hoping that if I pretended long enough, I would eventually just become better at it. But that led nowhere. In fact, it led me to stop praying. When I discovered God’s invitation to know his love, and to know his presence in truth, I discovered what it meant that he was really with me in these places. Once again, these are not merely truths to affirm, but truths to live into.

Are there struggles you have in prayer that you have never talked to God about? What desires and longings are being used by God to invite you into in his presence? What would it look like to share those with the Lord? Can you really believe, all the way down, that God is with you in these places, or are you still keeping parts of your heart for yourself?