I am self-conscious about how my own prayers sound. Sometimes I mess up and stutter in prayer, and I start over because I feel bad. I want to know if it is something that just comes to you naturally, or… what? Like, I listen to the prayers that my pastor gives and mine just pale in comparison. Every night I usually have my husband lead us in grace before dinner, because I feel I’d sound dumb or say something dumb and have to start over.

First of all, there is the issue of how long a person has been a Christian, as compared to how long you have been one. The relevance here is the extent of their experience with the language of the faith. Obviously the Christian community has a unique language for expressing the faith, and the longer that a person is a Christian the more familiar, knowledgeable, and comfortable he or she becomes with that language. That lends to an appearance of eloquence that is difficult to imitate for someone who is perhaps not quite as familiar with the breadth of the language; e.g., it is not difficult to imagine how grandiose and eloquent the prayer of a career pastor must seem to someone who has been a Christian for only a month.

But there is no formal ritual to praying, so it is impossible for you to “mess up” in your prayer. Try to keep in mind what prayer is, fundamentally: it is you spending quality time with God, reverent moments of fellowship with your Father in heaven. You don’t have to be someone you are not, saying these right things to pray in those right ways. In fact, most of my own prayers never escape my lips. I communicate with God from the quiet sanctuary of my soul, that sacred place indwelt by his Spirit, unfettered by the complications of finding the right words or following the right formula, etc. There are times when I have to verbalize, mind you, because there are times when I have too many thoughts competing simultaneously. But verbalizing prayer is not mandatory.

And remember that God is not uninformed about who you are. He knows very well that you are uncomfortable with spoken prayer. He knows you are unfamiliar with the eloquent avenues of the language of faith, he knows that sometimes you stutter and feel like you’re messing it up. And he loves that about you—because it is the authentic and genuine you. So don’t ever hesitate to be yourself when you come to God in prayer, because it’s you he has opened his arms to. If you are struggling to find the right words, go ahead and freely admit to God, right then and there, that you are struggling to find the right words. If you stutter during a prayer, go ahead and stutter. Smile sheepishly and admit to God, “I’ll get better at this”—and then carry on. The best remedy against feeling self-conscious is to be yourself honestly and openly, since feeling self-conscious usually stems from how we fear others might be assessing our performance. Be candid. Be real. Be yourself. Reverently, but honestly. Remember, he is your Father in heaven and, however clumsy you might feel, you are his child.

Is prayer available for someone who does not believe in God? I have a family member who is desperately sick and needs healing but isn’t open to the faith God asks us to have. Would God answer a prayer from such a person? And if not, would he heal them if I prayed, or should I be praying instead for them to know God? They need healing fast, as time seems to be running out.

The first thing that immediately jumps to mind is the subtle, implicit paganism found in the way so many Christians view prayer, as if it’s a means by which we manipulate or get the attention of the gods, rubbing the belly of some great cosmic Buddha to get what we want. “We have confused God with Santa Claus,” notes rabbi Harold Kushner, in that we think prayer is about giving God a list of things we want, assuring him that we have been or will be good boys and girls, and looking metaphorically under the tree for our things. For too long in my own spiritual infancy I certainly treated God as a sort of cosmic supermarket and my prayers as a shopping cart. “When we turn to religion as a way of getting God to give us what we want,” Kushner goes on to say, “be it health, love, riches or whatever, we run the risk of being disappointed—not because we are unworthy of being loved or being rich, and not because God is stubborn or spiteful or incapable of helping us, but because that is not what religion does [...] Once we get over the Santa Claus mentality, prayer  can be that kind of discipline; not an inventory of what we lack but a series of reminders of what we have, and what we might so easily take for granted and forget to be grateful for." God is not a supermarket, and prayer is not a shopping cart.

Prayer is a form of worship, one of the most fundamental and intimate moments in the life of the spiritual person which perhaps reveals the most about how we perceive God, our relationship to him, and how we approach the faith. Prayer is about experiencing the presence of God—and often it need not even involve words. Prayer is that nexus or intersection where the human meets the divine, the finite meets the infinite, where we drop the shackles of the everyday world and reach beyond ourselves to become richly immersed in the presence of God. The cares, worries, and distractions that surround us are set aside for a time while in prayer we come to encounter God. Prayer is also a sort of reminder about our priorities, keeping God and his will at the forefront of our mind, lest we should forsake him and pursue our own desire and will—which is its own form of idolatry—and reminds us to rely on him, to submit to him and his will, for we know how easy it is to think that we’re fine on our own. And it’s about keeping mindful of our blessings; rather than coming to God about what we lack and feel we want or should have, we come to God overwhelmed with gratitude for all that we already do have, thankful for his gracious blessings, for his providence and mercy—and even grateful for his chastisements and disciplines (Heb. 12:5-11). It is perhaps one of the most vital ways by which we glorify God in our lives. It is not about following a scripted template or formulaic petition. It is about you, very simply, talking to God, spending quality time with your Sovereign in heaven. You can say a whole lot of things, if you have a lot to say, or you can say nothing at all, enjoying a quiet moment of reverent fellowship with God in the precious name of his Son Jesus Christ.

Can prayers help someone who does not believe in God? Can an unbeliever receive healing from a God that he or she wants nothing to do with? The question practically answers itself. So can a Christian pray that God heals a desperately ill unbeliever? Certainly. However, I would encourage that Christian to focus a little more clearly on what, exactly, he is praying for. Healing, obviously, but for what reason? Because that person is in pain and you don’t want them to be anymore? Perhaps because you think a miraculous healing of this desperate illness might compel that person to an awareness of God and perhaps repentance and faith? To put it another way, whose will is being sought? Is the prayer human-centered or God-centered? I would say to that Christian, “Take what you are truly praying for, deep down, and lay it at the feet of God. Tell him what and how you are feeling. Pour out your heart and concerns to him. But at the same time acknowledge that, ultimately, it is his will you are seeking, asking him to help your unbelief if unknowingly your prayer was centered on your will more than his.” Even the Son of God, facing the agonizing suffering before him, prayed to his Father, “If you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” There is nothing wrong with talking to God on a personal level, talking to him about what your hopes and desires are, your hurts and heartaches, who you care for and would love to see in the Kingdom. But then all such sentiment should be ultimately subservient to whatever God’s will happens to be, with the fullest of confidence and trust that God is righteous and just and rich in grace.

Sometimes it feels like when I pray I’m just talking to myself. Not that I don’t believe in God. I do believe in him. But sometimes I feel like he’s not listening to me anymore, because I wonder if I am like the hypocrites in the Bible, or someone God hasn’t really chosen to be saved. I don’t know. When I asked to be saved, my husband was also praying to be saved; I didn’t feel anything but he was really emotional. I still felt like me, not like crying.

This falls under what you believe the nature of ‘conversion’ to be. Sometimes people are taught that conversion consists of this in-rushing of the Holy Spirit that is somewhat akin to a kind of euphoria, so that if they don’t experience that quasi-euphoric feeling after reciting some formulaic sinner’s prayer then they question whether or not they actually had a conversion experience, whether or not they are actually saved.

But what if conversion doesn’t necessarily consist of that feeling? Is it possible that some people are being needlessly misled, having experienced an authentic conversion but being made to feel as though they might not have? What if conversion is characterized as a concert of authentic repentance and faith, being comprised of a genuine awareness of their sin and culpability before God, a Spirit-wrought consciousness of one’s utterly lost condition? What if conversion is turning away from our manifold sin that offends God’s character and breaks his law, turning away from every attempt at justifying ourselves before God by appealing to what we think are good deeds and turning instead toward Jesus Christ as fully our Lord and Savior, by a personal conviction that Christ is the only means of justification, of pardon, of right-standing before God, and the only provision for the forgiveness of sins, the only source of moral power in effecting reform in our desires, thoughts, motives, behaviors, words? And what if this conversion, this repentance of sin and faith in Christ, can be actualized with a humble and sober heart in full recognition of the majestic sovereignty of a holy God? What if conversion is not about tingly feelings but about the Rock on which we stand before God, his Son Jesus Christ, to whom we cling from that day until glory and before whose feet every saint will throw his crown and sing, “Worthy is the Lamb!”

Maybe you didn’t feel a rush of euphoric feelings when in prayer you turned to God in repentance of sin and faith in Christ, but maybe conversion isn’t about tingly feelings in the first place. Some people experience that sort of thing. Others don’t. Nevertheless, the test of conversion is not euphoria at any rate, but rather repentance of sin and faith in Christ Jesus. If repentance and faith is what characterized your conversion, then you are indeed a child of God, adopted into his family for Christ’s sake, and he certainly does hear your prayers. Moreover, the Son of God himself always lives to intercede for those who come to God through him, as does the Holy Spirit with language that can’t be expressed by words.

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