One of my favourite books on prayer is Michael Reeves’ Enjoy Your Prayer Life. I like its honesty, its directness and particularly the fact that it is short. The last thing you need when you are struggling to pray is a doorstop of a book. It’s the kind of thing you can read in half and hour. Each chapter is a page and a half. Simple, easy and accessible.
One of my favourite bits – perhaps it resonates because I’ve heard exactly this many times – is in the chapter titled, We’re All Sinners. Let me share a section with you:
I find, particularly when I’m thinking of prayer as an abstract exercise, it’s so easy to forget that basic dynamic of the gospel and then wonder what it is I’m missing in prayer. This is where I think we can be unmanned by those fearsome stories of ‘the great prayers’. Have you heard, for example, that apocryphal story of Martin Luther? Apparently he was asked one evening what he’d be doing the next day and he replied, ‘Work, work from early till late. In fact I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer. Tales like this turn our bones to jelly because we know we’re not like that.
So to prove we are all sinners, and therefore naturally awful at prayer, here’s a real quote from Luther that will comfort you. At perhaps the busiest time of his busy life he wrote to his friend Philipp Melanchthon:
You extol me so much … Your high opinion of me shames and tortures me, since – unfortunately-I sit here like a fool and hardened in leisure, pray little, do not sigh for the church of God… In short I should be ardent in spirit, but I am ardent in the flesh, in lust, laziness, leisure, and sleepiness … Already eight days have passed in which I have written nothing, in which I have not prayed or studied; this is partly because of temptations of the flesh, partly because I am tortured by other burdens.¹
Even Luther, a man who valued prayer very highly, was a real person, a real sinner. We’re all sinners.
Even Luther struggled with prayer. Which makes me feel better. Now, to prayer!