Before my wife and I were married, we dated long distance for over a year. We would drive eight hours to see each other around every two weeks, but of course we wanted to connect more than that. Phone conversations were the next best thing.
Looking back, perhaps one of the best foundations to our marriage was that year of dating where we were forced to connect with one another through conversation. As humans, having conversations is essential to building deep relationships. The same is true with our walk with God.
As Christians, we all know we should pray more than we do and talk with God as his word instructs us to. But how can we pray more? Being disciplined and just deciding in your heart to pray more is certainly not the worst thing you can do. But perhaps there’s a better way.
The Bible explains that before we will truly have the desire to seek God we must ask God for that desire. To have a passionate prayer life, we must pray to God for a passionate pray life.
God Must Change Our Spiritual Taste Buds
Prayer is not our natural desire because of our sinfulness. Our spiritual taste buds, untouched by Jesus, no longer naturally crave the flavors of our Lord. From the start, God must change that about us. He must open our eyes so we can see that he is more beautiful and desirable than our old life. Our journey with God not only started that way, it must continue on in that way.
We must be humble enough to know that we are not humble apart from God. We must be submitted enough to know that we are not naturally submissive to God. We must be honest enough to know that we are not naturally honest. Therefore, we must also recognize that in our own strength, we will never be able to muster up enough excitement and energy to pursue God as he commands us to pursue him. Our only hope to love God as we must is for God to empower us to love him as he deserves.
God Loves When You Ask for His Help to Love Him
A human marriage would suffer if the wife told the husband that she needs his help loving him, or vice versa. But God is so different in that respect. He truly delights to answer the prayer, “Increase my love for you God. Give me a passion for you above everything else.”
The Bible is full of this type of counsel. Throughout the Psalms there are all types of prayers about prayers, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight” (Psalm 19:14). The Bible says that we are to pray at all times (1 Thessalonians 5:17) and about all things (Philippians 4:6), therefore we should pray even when we don’t feel like praying. The most obvious thing to pray about if you don’t feel like praying is your lack of desire for prayer.
If we can only seek God by his grace, and grace is a gift, the only thing we can do is ask for this gift. It sounds odd, but if we truly want a passionate prayer life, we must pray for it.