Why Pray for Yourself?

Here’s this week’s entry from Pray Big for Your Life. Click here to purchase the book from Guideposts.

I need prayer, and lots of it. Think about it: There is no other person in my life with a greater capacity to impact the work of God in my life than me. The same is true for you.

This is a critical point, so let me say it very clearly: The person in your life with the greatest capacity to help or hinder God’s work in you is you. You need to be praying for you—your heart, your attitudes, your habits, your relationships, your resources, your temptations and your ministry—because no other person can or will impact God’s Kingdom processes in your life as much as you will. For that reason alone, you need to pray every day for yourself.

I’m still amazed when I meet Christ-followers who don’t pray for themselves. Somehow they’ve gotten the idea that it’s selfish or self-centered to pray for their own needs. But what they don’t realize is that by not praying for themselves, they’re choosing to live a life of Christian mediocrity and they’re greatly limiting the degree to which they can experience the abundant life that Jesus offered (see John 10:10).

Christians who don’t pray for themselves aren’t being humble or selfless. Rather, they’re choosing to greatly limit their spiritual impact. Christians who don’t pray over their own needs and lives are the spiritual equivalent of a football player who takes the field without any protective pads; or worse, a soldier who runs into battle completely unarmed. They’re just totally set up to fail.

Bless Me Indeed

Let me offer you three great reasons to become a self-intercessor. There are certainly more reasons than just these three, some of which we’ll touch on later. But these three reasons make up a good theological foundation for why it is necessary to pray for ourselves.

First of all, we need to pray for ourselves because Jesus prayed for himself. You’ve got to figure that if Jesus felt the need to pray for himself, and he was the perfect, sinless, Son of God, then it’s reasonable to conclude that we need to pray for our lives as well. We can actually take that reasoning one step further: Maybe Jesus was able to live such an anointed life because he was a man of prayer. Surely Jesus’s ability to resist temptation, speak with authority, heal the sick and always choose wisely was due in part to the unbroken communion he felt with God through his unceasing prayers.

In the next chapter, we’ll take a close look at why prayer was so important to Jesus. For our purposes here, let’s just acknowledge that Jesus found prayer to be his main means of maintaining unbroken fellowship with his Father. Remember, humanity was a new experience for Jesus. He had existed for all eternity in perfect, spiritual communion with God. And then, wham-o, he wakes up as a crying baby in a manger. He had to learn to relate to God on an entirely new level.

I think Jesus found prayer to be helpful and comforting because it reminded him of his home. There is something to the sweetness and intimacy of prayer that reminded Jesus of heaven. Meaningful moments with God in prayer are one of the ways we can get closest to a heavenly reality on earth. That’s why Jesus liked it and made it such a priority in his life.

Doesn’t it seem rather obvious then, that if God’s holy Son, the world’s only perfect human, felt the need to pray for himself, then we who are far less than perfect need it as well? Doesn’t it make sense that if Jesus’s perfect soul still needed the comfort that prayer could bring, then our wounded and needy souls need it even more?  And doesn’t it make sense that if Jesus built his life on the discipline of personal prayer, then we should too?

Jesus was the world’s only expert human. More than any other person in history, Jesus showed us what humanity was meant to be—and he did so against the backdrop of prayer. If we learn anything from Jesus’s amazing life, it’s that we as humans need to pray.

Second, we need to pray for ourselves because the Holy Spirit is trying to make us holy.  In Philippians 1:6, Paul wrote that God would continue the work of making us pure and holy until we reached heaven. Jesus prayed that we would be sanctified (made holy) by his Word (see John 17:17). In short, Jesus is making us holy for our eternal home. He promised to present us as his perfect bride to our Heavenly Father; but before he can, he has to complete the process of our purification. Prayer is one of the main things we can do to help that process along.

When you pray, especially for yourself, you soften the soil of your heart and make your will more pliable in God’s hands. Prayer paves the way for God’s Spirit to move and work without hindrance in the deep recesses of your heart. Your personal prayers grant the Spirit permission to mold and reshape you into the image of Jesus.

Isaiah the prophet predicted that there would be a forerunner to Jesus. He said that a messenger would come who would call the nation of Israel to prepare a way for the coming king and to clear a straight path for him. John the Baptist was that messenger (see Luke 3:1-6). He told expectant Hebrews to get their hearts ready for repentance and the baptism of God’s Holy Spirit.

Prayer does that too. It prepares the way for the king and makes you ready for the cleansing changes he wants to bring to your life. It’s like rolling out the red carpet for the Holy Spirit to walk right into your heart.

To be prayerless, or at least to not pray for yourself, is to keep your heart hard and calloused toward the work of God in you. It creates a spiritual environment in your soul that’s less conducive to the sanctifying work of God’s Spirit in you. It might mean that God has to use a sledge hammer or a two-by-four, rather than his gentle hand, to soften your heart and begin to bring about the changes that he wants to make in you. In the biblical imagery of the potter and clay, prayer simply makes it easier for God to mold you without breaking you in the process. To me, that’s a great reason to pray.

Finally, we need to pray for ourselves because the life that God calls us to live is impossible without it. Go read the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). Review Jesus’s call for us to live Kingdom-focused lives: to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek, to not worry about provision, to not have lustful thoughts and to never judge others inappropriately. Hear Jesus’s command for us to be perfect as his Father is perfect, and then know that the life Jesus challenged us to live is absolutely impossible for any human. Without the anointing and equipping of God’s Spirit, we can never live, love, serve and give as God expects us to.

The religious elite of Jesus’s day had turned rule-keeping and religious duty into a finely-tuned science. If the God-pleasing life could be reached through human effort, then these guys certainly would have been voted Most Likely to Succeed in Kingdom things. But Jesus rebuked them for their empty religiosity. He actually said that to live a true Kingdom life, our righteousness had to exceed that of the religious elite (see Matthew 5:20). Jesus’s point was that Kingdom living is about living a received life, not an achieved one. And the life that he wants for us is one that we receive through prayer.

In John 6:63, Jesus taught that his Spirit alone gives life (Kingdom life); the flesh (our best efforts) profits nothing. If you are serious about living the biblical and godly life that God calls you to, then you’ve got to live it by the power of his Spirit. And the best way to become a Spirit-drenched person is through regular, focused prayer.

In John 15:8, Jesus challenged his disciples to bear much fruit for his glory. He also told them how to live fruit-bearing lives: by abiding in him (John 15:4-5). Prayer tethers you to God. It drives the tent pegs of your heart and soul deep into the soil of God’s holy ground. Prayer connects you to God so that the life-giving power of his Spirit can flow through you and cause you to bear fruit and glorify his name. Jesus never envisioned his disciples living Kingdom lives without significant personal prayer.

 

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