Struggling to Pray? Start Here.

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Lord, Teach Us to Pray

Kevin DeYoung talks about our common struggle to pray and how the Lord's Prayer—the prayer that Jesus offered as a model for our prayers—can help us to pray to God day in and day out.

00:51 - Discouragement in Prayer

Matt Tully
Kevin, thank you so much for joining me on The Crossway Podcast.

Kevin DeYoung
It’s great to be here.

Matt Tully
You open your new book on the Lord’s Prayer with a rhetorical question: Is there any activity more essential to the Christian life, and yet more discouraging in the Christian’s life, than prayer? Do you often feel like you’re struggling in your prayer life?

Kevin DeYoung
I often feel like I’m struggling in my prayer life, and I daresay most of the people in my church feel like they’re struggling in their prayer life. I think that there are a few things in the Christian life that we know we’re supposed to do, and we constantly feel like we’re failing. I think evangelism is one, generosity might be another, parenting—but certainly, prayer could be at the top of the list. How many of us think—and I’m sure I’ve said this as a pastor—You never get to the end of your life at the hospital bed and say, “I wish I had prayed less.” No, you always wish you had prayed more. That’s true, and so we want to be inspired and motivated to pray. We know that prayer is important for the Christian, and yet I feel like even the days where I’m knocking it out and I’m doing it, then you miss your devotional time or it’s gone stale. You hear the stories of Martin Luther and on a busy day he had to pray for four hours before he went to bed. I know an older pastor brother who really did pray for four hours a day. That’s not my story, at least not yet in my life, so it’s easy to be discouraged, and yet we know we should pray.

Matt Tully
When you stop and think about prayer, it’s this amazing, mind-blowing privilege that we have. We all know that, and yet we still struggle to actually do it consistently. Maybe going beyond just the obvious answer that it’s because of indwelling sin and we still struggle with all kinds of things, have you diagnosed any specific issues in maybe how we think about prayer or how we’re wired? In all your years as a pastor and as a teacher, can you help us understand why we struggle like that so often?

Kevin DeYoung
I forget who said it (I’m sure lots of people have), but prayerlessness is unbelief. I think we tend to go at prayer and talk about the will. I must do more prayer. The will is certainly involved and prayer is a spiritual discipline. There’s a reason it’s called a discipline, because just like you don’t always wake up and feel like going to the gym or going on a run, but you do it because you know that it’s good for you. Spiritual disciplines can feel a little bit like that. But if we just focus on the will—I must do this more—we’re missing the more important part, which is the element of faith. I say prayerlessness is unbelief because when we don’t pray—and let me personalize it—when I don’t pray, it is an expression 1) that I don’t believe that God is powerful enough to really help me, or 2) I don’t believe he’s really good enough to care—or both of those things. My kids ask me for things all the time. They need rides to their friends' houses, they want to go out to eat, they want a pony, they want all sorts of things. I’m sinful, so I get annoyed by it. They’re sinful, so they ask selfish things sometimes.

Matt Tully
And just for the record in case someone didn’t hear our last conversation, you have nine children.

Kevin DeYoung
I have nine children.

Matt Tully
So, that’s lots of requests.

Kevin DeYoung
That’s lots of requests. I have zero ponies, but we do have a hamster, two cats, and recently a chicken for some reason. So, I must say yes to some things. But the fact that they ask me means they think their dad can get them things. They must think that sometimes I say yes to their requests. I’m not an ogre. As much as it could be frustrating with all the requests, it does say something good about what they believe about me. When I don’t come to my heavenly Father and pray, it says something about what I’m struggling to believe. Prayer is, as much as anything, it is the fight of faith, to believe that when we pray we’re not just exercising nice little spiritual soliloquies. I can feel like that sometimes: Oh, it’s just a nice, spiritual speech.

Matt Tully
It’s almost like you have to perform for God.

Kevin DeYoung
That’s right. Or for other people, if you’re praying in a context with other people and you need to know how to pray and you’re nervous about it (that God is judging our prayers). Rather than, the first thing Jesus teaches us in the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father.” I’m talking to my Father, and he loves to hear from me.

Matt Tully
In the book you recall a time early in your pastoral ministry where you read another famous book on prayer, and you found it a little bit encouraging at first, but then you say that it ironically had this demotivating effect on you and your prayer life as you finished it. Can you explain what happened?

Kevin DeYoung
I’ll just say it was E. M. Bounds on Prayer, and he’s got a lot of books on prayer. I’m not telling you not to read E. M. Bounds on Prayer. I don’t think I mention in the book who it was, but I had somebody else when I was preaching through the sermons who said, Were you talking about E. M. Bounds? They’re great little books in one sense about how important prayer is. It’s that hammering on the will and feeling like, Yes, I should pray. Great Christians pray. How can I not pray? But, at least for me, it didn’t last for very long. I say in the book that there are some books, sermons, or messages that make you feel like you ought to pray, and then the better ones make you feel, I can pray. Not just I need to pray or must pray, but I want to pray. I’m not saying that I’ve necessarily written that book, but I know that that’s what I resonate with is a sense of, Oh, I could do this. God wants to hear from me. This isn’t as complicated as maybe I thought. God is more gracious than I’ve remembered. Sometimes we just need to be convicted: You’re not praying! Okay, that’s true. But if the books on prayer just hammer page after page, You ought to pray, we already know that. That is short-lived because when it comes down to it, we need to really want to do it.

08:07 - Why the Lord’s Prayer?

Matt Tully
You’ve put yourself out there now in writing this book on prayer, so I guess history will show how people feel about this. What is it about the Lord’s Prayer in particular as the focus of this book that you think will go a long way towards helping us want to pray?

Kevin DeYoung
I hope it will, and I hope it will be salutary in my own life. Backing up for a minute, when Jesus talks about prayer, the number one command he gives us relative to prayer is ask. Ask, seek, knock. Ask. Yes, we can pray in bad ways, but Jesus wants us to hear loud and clear, Would you come to your heavenly Father? Would you ask him for things? We don’t want to picture God as hat in hand, desperate, lonely. Of course he’s not. But he is a good heavenly Father and he’s eager to hear from us. The Lord’s Prayer in particular is really instructive because think of what Jesus didn’t say. The disciples want to know how they should pray.

Matt Tully
They say, Teach us to pray.

Kevin DeYoung
Yes. Teach us to pray. Jesus didn’t say, Here’s the position: you pray towards Jerusalem. Here’s your posture: you have to be on your knees, your hands are uplifted. He didn’t say that. He didn’t say, Here’s how many minutes each day or You ought to do it at this time of day. If you don’t do it before the sun’s up, you’re not a real Christian. No one’s going to write about you. He says, Let me tell you how to pray. He starts by reminding us what we’ve just been talking about: our Father. The first thing you need to remember is you’re talking to the God of the universe who is your Father. That’s the enticement to pray. Of course my Father has good things for me and I want to talk to him about it.

10:05 - “Our Father in Heaven”

Matt Tully
We all know that God the Father doesn’t have a biological gender. He’s Spirit. He doesn’t have a body like we do and like Jesus does. And yet, Jesus calls him—and directs us to call him—Father. Should we assign any significance to that? Is there something going on there that is important or revealing about God?

Kevin DeYoung
It’s very important that, first of all, our Triune God reveals himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. What you say about each person distinctly is that the Father is the one who begat the Son, the Son is eternally begotten from the Father, and the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. That theological language, those subsistences. The language of “father” is significant. People sometimes say, Well, doesn’t the Bible in a few places use female imagery?

Matt Tully
Maternal imagery.

Kevin DeYoung
Maternal imagery: a hen with her chicks or tender as a nursing mother. Yes, there are a handful. We’re not opposed to what the Bible says. And yet, when it names God and when it gives titles to God—not metaphors and different images that point to different characteristics—but God has so chosen to name himself as King and not queen, as husband and not wife, as Father and not mother. That is important. There are people who have all sorts of bad experiences with their father, but what we must do is not interpret God according to our experiences, but learn to reinterpret our experiences according to who God is.

Matt Tully
I wanted to ask about that because it’s easy for you to say that and it’s easy to hear that, but what about the person who’s listening who would say, *I get that intellectually, but emotionally when I approach this passage and approach Christian theology and hear God is my Father . . . * there is just so much painful—and maybe even abusive—baggage that comes with that. How would you counsel that person if you were their pastor?

Kevin DeYoung
First you listen, then you ask questions, and you sympathize that that’s real. Those of us who had good earthly fathers benefit from that, and many people didn’t have a father, or had very bad fathers—all the way to really abusive fathers. We need to take seriously that it’s really hard. It may be for people that it takes a lot of teaching and it takes time to get there, but I would want them to see what are we missing about how God has chosen to reveal himself? How can we try to reinterpret even your story, that the father you had—who was so unlike the heavenly Father? Maybe we need to throw that in relief to see what true fatherhood looks like. Maybe we can get to a point to gently challenge and say, With all of the ways that your father sinned against you and all of the things that he did to you that still have hard effects in your life, let’s not add to that that his sin against you now means that you can’t relate to God. That’s giving to our earthly parents the sort of power that they shouldn’t have. I know that’s very hard to overcome, but we want to say your sinful dad should not have that ability to reimagine what God is because of his sin. God has chosen to reveal himself. Many of the bad fathers were bad in some ways because they were abusive in their authority, whether that’s actual physical abuse or just some other levels of it. And yet, if we lose the image of a father and God so naming as a father, we lose that God means to communicate that he comes to us with the right kind of authority. Jesus, at the end of the Great Commission, says that all authority in heaven and in earth has been given to me. We live in a very anti-authoritarian age, sometimes for made up reasons and sometimes for very painful, real personal reasons, but God is a God of authority and if we don’t relate to him as one of authority, we’re not relating to God as he truly is.

Matt Tully
It’s amazing that in that single word, Father, is wrapped up the two poles, or the two complementary dynamics, of authority and love.

Kevin DeYoung
Yes, of care and of authority. There is a reason that the Scripture says, “Fathers, do not exasperate your children” because that’s what fathers can be prone to. And there’s a reason that the fathers are given the instruction to discipline. Paul, in 1 Timothy, on the one hand he relates we were tender among you like a nursing mother. There’s something about tenderness that, of course, we’re all supposed to be tender, but it’s distinctive and it’s especially captured by a nursing mother. And then when Paul says, “I exhorted you, Thessalonians, like a father,” because there’s something particularly paternal about exhortation, about instructions, and about discipline. We need to relate to God as one who disciplines those he loves.

15:46 - “Hallowed Be Your Name”

Matt Tully
Let’s look at another phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, that phrase “hallowed be your name.” That word “hallowed” means honored and revered and respected and glorified. It’s kind of this appeal that God would do that for himself. I was once talking to a younger Christian who was learning about God’s desire and his passion for his own glory, to borrow a Piper term. I remember him asking, Why is God so concerned about his own glory? Why does he care so much about what we feeble creatures think about him? How would you respond to that question? We see that baked right into Jesus’s prayer for us.

Kevin DeYoung
That’s right. And to realize that’s not an ascription. It’s the first petition. It’s the petition that overarches all the other petitions. God, in everything else that I’m about to pray, make your name great. To use a Piper illustration that is so helpful, he says we are praying for God to glorify his name not as a microscope makes small things look bigger, but as a telescope brings unimaginably large things to view. So, we’re not saying, God, hallow your name because you need a PR agent and you need some rebranding. No, we’re saying God is the Andromeda Galaxy and if we get the Hubble Telescope we can see something of it. Piper’s most famous saying is that God is most glorified when we are most satisfied in him. God pursuing his own glory is not antithetical to our joy. To see God for who he really is, to understand him, and to delight in who God really is is to work for what is our good. So, he’s not an ego maniac, he’s not a megalomaniac deity who is up there like, I need everyone to worship me. He’s deserving of worship, and in the worship of this God and the delight of this God, we will find the reason that we were put on this earth.

18:08 - “Lead Us Not into Temptation”

Matt Tully
One final phrase from the Lord’s Prayer to look at together: “Lead us not into temptation.” Why do we need to pray this? Is this suggesting or implying that if we don’t ask God of this that he might lead us into temptation?

Kevin DeYoung
There is lots of commentary on this. Does God sometimes, then, lead us into temptation? Temptation is an interesting word in the Bible. Sometimes the same Greek word is translated temptation, other times it’s trials—and that’s in James 1 in particular. But James says very clearly: God does not tempt anyone. If we think of trials, we may mean, God, deliver me from suffering. If we’re thinking about enticements to sin, that’s not what God ever does. And yet, we pray Lead us not into temptation as a euphemistic way of saying the next thing: Deliver us from evil. They are getting at the same sort of thing: God, don’t be the God who brings me into trouble. Be the God who brings me out of trouble. That’s what we’re essentially asking. I am often convicted by that petition in particular because I think how many days do I live where I don’t pray that? I think we’re meant to connect it with, “Give us this day our daily bread . . . Lead us not into temptation . . . Deliver us from the evil one”—that just as we pray daily for bread, I think we’re supposed to pray daily for this deliverance because there’s never a day where I’m not going to face temptation. There’s never a day where the devil is not at war with God’s people. If we just go into every day and think, Yeah, I’m safe. I’m okay. No, every day, whether we see it or not, there are landmines. There is a battlefield. There are dangerous precipices. Every day we need to say, God, help me! Just the simple act of praying that is part of the answer itself. It’s God reminding us, You can’t go through this alone. You need me for food, you need me for sustenance, you need me for protection, you need me for everything. You’re needier and you’re in more trouble than you think.

Matt Tully
One other passage that came to mind as I was thinking about this petition is Matthew 4 where we have the story of Jesus being tempted in the desert by Satan. The language in Matthew 4:1 is very interesting: “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” Do you think there’s any connection there? I feel like there is similar language. Is there a connection there where Jesus is led by God, in a sense, to be tempted so that we don’t need to be facing that and we can be protected from that? Do you see anything there?

Kevin DeYoung
That’s really good. He’s led up to be tempted. It’s not God enticing him with sin, but there is a lot of rich, biblical theology going on there. One is you have in Matthew’s Gospel all of this Moses typology. Just as there was a king who was jealous and who was after the boys and Moses had to flee, so Herod is after Jesus. Just as Moses led the people through the Red Sea, Jesus is the new Moses through the waters of baptism. Moses goes and is in the wilderness for forty years, and Jesus goes into the wilderness for forty days and forty nights. But there is also Adam typology, and that really gets to your point. There’s the Moses typology because what happens after he comes through the forty days in the wilderness? He goes up on a mountain and he gives the law. He gives the Sermon on the Mount just like Moses. But there’s also that Christ is meant to recapitulate Adam. Adam was given the probationary tree, and he failed. Now we are all in Adam. So, Christ is going to succeed where the first Adam failed. So, there is a real sense. Yes, we are tempted in our lives and so we need to continue to pray about that. The devil is at work and our own sin entices us in a way that, of course, Christ doesn’t have a sin nature. But insofar as Christ was the second Adam to succeed where the first Adam failed, then our fleeing of temptation and being delivered from the evil one is not in our own strength, but is in accord with Christ accomplishing this victory for us.

23:10 - Wandering Prayer

Matt Tully
Maybe a couple of final questions. What advice would you give to the person who struggles to pay attention in prayer? That’s one of those common experiences that we all have in prayer. We’ve set aside the time, we’ve sat down in our favorite chair, the house is quiet (maybe it’s early in the morning), we try to start praying, and then we find our minds wandering all over the place. Do you have any strategies that you have found are helpful in that?

Kevin DeYoung
There’s a book I read years ago by David Hansen called Long Wandering Prayer. I remember that he talks about the different kinds of prayer. There’s a place for wandering prayer. One of the passages that I think he talks about is Psalm 55, which goes in and out of first person and second person. Sometimes prayer is thinking our thoughts towards God. I think there’s a daily cadence that requires some discipline—whether it’s prayer cards or reading prayers—some discipline of praying. And then there are times that allow for that long wandering prayer. Very practically, I find if I can speak out loud that helps. I find that you need to prepare. Think about it this way: How many of us can get out of bed and ten minutes later, even if you got coffee, and if somebody said, Okay, I want you for twenty minutes to just go. Talk meaningfully about something? Hardly any of us are going to do that. You need preparation. So that means some prayer cards—I have certain things assigned to each day. Every Monday I pray for these couple of things—

Matt Tully
Are these written on 3x5 cards?

Kevin DeYoung
Yeah. Sometimes 3x5 cards or a little Moleskin book that you open up and see this is the day I pray for the church, this is the day I pray for my elders, etc. Or, pray through the Psalms. I’ve done that before. I just try to put a psalm into my own language. Ben Patterson—I got this from him—he gave three R’s of praying Scripture: repent, rejoice, request. You can open up any part of Scripture—the psalms are probably the easiest—and you can find something to repent of (for you or others), to rejoice in what God has done, and to request and ask something. So, there are lots of little things like that that just help you. And then, understand you are going to wander, and that’s the human finite nature. I go on walks and that helps me not to sleep. It means that if I go out fifteen minutes, I’ve got to come back fifteen minutes. A lot of that is wandering time. I try to set aside time where I’m going to write down ten things I haven’t had time to really just wander around about for an hour, or in a day, and go and do it. When God brings you back, don’t say, Oh! I’m so stupid!

Matt Tully
How do you fight that discouragement and that sense of, I failed. I didn’t do a good job here. My mind wandered or I haven’t really prayed intentionally for four days!—how do you deal with that?

Kevin DeYoung
I think of the story in Joshua 7 with the sin of Achan and they have to find out who stole the stuff. They were defeated, and then Joshua finds out who stole it. Achan is on the ground and he’s graveling. I love the way that God tells him: Get up. Make it right. God is not interested in you graveling. Okay, you didn’t pray like you wanted to. You missed a week of prayer. God’s interested in repenting, for sure. God, I’m sorry. Or, God, help me to do better. He’s not interested in you graveling. Sometimes, if we’re honest, we can feel like, Well, if I feel really bad about it for long enough, that must be somehow earning me something with God. No, get up. So, the illustration I’ve given before, and I won’t do my Southern accent, but do you know the movie Gettysburg? Jeb Stuart (and this probably didn’t happen, I don’t know) comes back to General Lee and he’s let them down because he was gone, and General Lee says to Jeb Stuart, You are the eyes and the ears of this army. It’s a bad Southern accent in the movie too. Jeb Stuart is trying to hand in his sword and saying, I’ve let you down. I’ve failed. Martin Sheen, who is playing General Lee, says, I have no time for this! You’re one of my best generals. Put back your sword. Get in the fight. And I think we’re like that as Christians: Oh, I failed! Here’s my sword. God is like, No, no, stop! I don’t have time for that. You need to take this like a man. You messed up. Now get back in the fight.

Matt Tully
Kevin, thank you so much for taking the time today to talk to us about prayer, generally, and the Lord’s Prayer in particular, and I think encouraging all of us to get back in the fight—to jump back on that horse, so to speak. I’m mixing all kinds of Civil War metaphors here.

Kevin DeYoung
Lots of good metaphors here. I need help in my prayer life like everyone else. Hopefully this book can help, and even if it just gets us thinking and praying the Lord’s Prayer that would be a blessing.

Matt Tully
Thanks, Kevin.