How to Pray to God and Improve Your Prayer Life

Are there some people in your life that you find hard to talk to, for whatever reason? Perhaps it’s because they are far away, and you prefer talking face to face with them than over the phone. Perhaps it’s because you’ve had a fractious relationship with them, or maybe even because you never developed what felt like the right language with which to address them and connect with them.

Sometimes, our prayer life can feel like talking with a distant relative we struggle to connect with meaningfully. You can feel like you’re meant to talk to them, but you can never quite think of what to say once you’re on the line. Praying to God is meant to be a liberating, enjoyable, and rich part of a person’s life, but it can often feel like a chore that you have to make your body do that needs to be avoided altogether or done quickly to simply say it’s been done.

Your prayer life doesn’t have to be like this. It can be vibrant, and play a role in your overall well-being. Having an ongoing and functioning prayer life increases the activation of certain regions of the brain: The insula, where feelings of connectedness occur, and the cingulate cortex where emotional regulation happens. In addition, prayer enhances functioning in the brain areas that involve empathy and emotional processing. Sweeton (2020)

What is prayer?

If you get a dozen disciples of Jesus in one room and ask them to pray, you may find that they each have a different way of doing this thing called “prayer”. Some will use formal or flowery language as they do so, some will do so quietly or wait for their turn, and others will do so loudly and pray at the same time as others.

Not only that, but you may find some asking for things, while others are praising God or confessing the ways they may have fallen short of God’s best for them. Some will do this while standing up, others will lay face down on the floor; some will have their eyes shut tightly, while still others will have their eyes wide open. All of these are attempts at the same thing called prayer.

In essence, what these different things have in common is that these are all different ways of talking with God. People talk with God for a variety of reasons, and their way of talking with Him will be influenced by many factors including their culture and upbringing, how they read the Bible, and the denomination they are part of with its unique emphases. The remarkable thing in all this is the underlying belief that God in heaven hears the words we speak.

In his work titled The World’s Last Night and Other Essays, author C.S. Lewis wrote a lot about prayer, among other things. One of the things he wrote was that “prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course, He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them.”

Prayer is about a lot of things, including making requests of God. Through the Psalms and many other parts of the Bible, we see examples of prayer. One of the main examples of prayer is the prayer that Jesus taught His disciples; the prayer is often called the “Our Father” or “The Lord’s prayer” from Matthew 6:9-13. This prayer can help to shape our understanding of what prayer is as a conversation with God that does many things such as praise, confess, and make requests.

Obstacles to a Healthy Prayer Life

One of the main challenges to a healthy prayer life is that we are often preoccupied with the question of the efficacy of prayer. That is one of the issues Lewis attempted to answer in The World’s Last Night. His response deserves to be quoted at length:

The very question “Does prayer work?” puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset. “Work”: as if it were magic, or a machine – something that functions automatically. Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person. Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine. In it God shows Himself to us. That He answers prayers is a corollary – not necessarily the most important one – from that revelation. What He does is learned from what He is – C.S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night and Other Essays

Prayer is more than just about asking God for things, though it certainly includes that. Jesus did tell His disciples to “ask, seek, and knock” (Matthew 7:7-12). As Lewis notes, however, prayer is also about us bearing our (already open) souls before God, to praise and enjoy Him, and for Him to show Himself to us. Prayer isn’t like using a vending machine; you are talking to God, our wise Father who grants our prayers or refuses them according to that wisdom.

God’s purposes in the world are realized in different ways through actions, and that includes the prayers, of creatures such as us. It’s through us that God can work to meet the needs of others. Prayer also helps us to be open to change and to God’s direction in our lives. We can struggle with prayer because prayer threatens to change us to make us more into the people that God desires us to be.

We can also struggle with prayer because we can complicate it for ourselves. Jesus warned us about making our prayers elaborate and long, especially if we’re trying to show off in front of other people (Matthew 6:5-8). We are to humbly, and with quiet confidence, approach God knowing that He knows what we need before we even ask Him. We don’t have to use many words, take up a particular posture, or use special words to pray. Keep it simple.

Another obstacle to prayer is the thought that we can’t bring certain things before God in prayer, or that we can’t come before God on our own. Feelings of guilt and shame that ride around on a merry-go-round in our brain never-stopping, negatively reinforce that those same feelings will resurface more often!

Feelings of guilt and shame over activate the nucleus accumbens region (pleasure and reward center of the brain) causing a looping in the thought patterns often associated with an addict’s thinking. Reading the Psalms and books like Lamentations shows us that we can bring our grief, anger, pain, disappointment, and more before God.

We can bring our abject failures, confessing our worst excesses before Him with the knowledge that He is faithful to forgive and cleanse us (Psalm 51, 1 John 1:8-10). After all, Jesus himself cried out to His Lord and Father in Heaven while hanging from the cross, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”. (NKJV)

Lastly, an obstacle to prayer might be your own relationship with God. You may feel as though you don’t know God well enough. Or you may feel as though God has hurt or disappointed you in some way. All these things – your uncertainties, your pain, your sheer frustration with God – can be brought to Him in prayer. God is great enough to handle whatever it is you’re feeling. Run to Him with it all and lay it at His feet.

How to Pray to God and Cultivate a Healthy Prayer Life

Praying to God doesn’t have to be a complicated thing that only certain people can do. Anyone can pray to God, even if it’s a ‘simple’ prayer like, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13, NIV). You can pray to God and cultivate a healthy prayer life in the following ways:

Just get started Simply getting on and doing it is a win. You don’t have to set a specific time for it or get too fancy with it. Just get started and do it wherever you are. You can pray by yourself, and you can also pray in community. You can pray at a specific time if that’ll help you be consistent; just pray.

Learn from others It can be helpful to learn about prayer from others. you don’t need to copy someone’s style of prayer if that’s something that feels uncomfortable. Listen to how others pray; pay attention to how the people in Scripture pray and use those prayers like a set of training wheels for your own prayers.

Learning how to pray from Scripture is helpful because it can help to expand your horizons. Prayer can become repetitious, but seeing the many varied examples of prayer in Scripture can help you see the rich variety of what prayer is and can be.

Keep going There will be obstacles to your prayer life. Some days the words will stick to the roof of your tongue. Other days they may seem empty. Sometimes it’ll feel like no one is listening. This is all normal, and a quick glance at Scripture will confirm that these are common experiences for people of faith. Keep going, keep praying, and seek out that connection with God. Prayer, at the heart of it, is about a relationship with God.

It may be that you need guidance in that relationship, or you’re struggling and need to unpack certain aspects of how you relate to God. Maybe you have experienced trauma or past relational hurts that are hindering your body’s ability to connect or feel connected to your Lord and Savior?

Whatever it may be He is faithful to meet you where you are at! I have found Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) highly effective in treating clients that feel a disconnect from their Christian faith.

You can speak to a mental health professional such as a Christian counselor to walk with you in cultivating a vibrant prayer life that can help support your mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Let us schedule an appointment for you today.