How do you feel about your prayer life?
Michael Reeve’s book, Enjoy Your Prayer Life, starts with the assumption that most of us, if we’re honest, struggle in our prayer lives at times. It can be hard to find the time to sit down and pray, and there are so many distractions. Reeves sees this difficulty as part of the reality of living in a fallen world, which is set up to prevent us from carrying out the most important expression of our faith.
‘Prayer is the primary way that true faith expresses itself.’ Paraphrased from John Calvin.
Most of us have heard advice on how to pray better and more frequently: set aside a specific time every morning, try a prayer app, etc. According to Reeves these sorts of tips are good, but they run the danger of treating prayer as an abstract activity; a ritual in which we rattle off a list of requests. We need to focus not just on how we pray, but on why we pray, and on what prayer fundamentally is.
