God will not cooperate with prayers of mere self-interest, or
prayers that come from impure motives. The Christian who
clings to sin closes the ear of God. Least of all will God
tolerate unbelief, the chief of sins. ‘Anyone who comes to Him
must believe...’ (Hebrews 11:6). In our prayers the paramount
motive is the glory of God.^20
We naively think that the more we grow as Christians, the
easier it will be to discern the will of God. But the opposite is
often the case. God treats the mature leader as a mature adult,
leaving more and more to his or her spiritual discernment
and giving fewer bits of tangible guidance than in earlier
years. The resulting perplexity adds inevitably to a leader’s
pressure.^21
The Desert Fathers spoke of ‘busyness as moral laziness.’
He writes that ‘busyness acts to repress our inner fears and
personal anxieties, as we scramble to achieve an enviable image
to display to others. We become ‘outward people’ obsessed with
how we appear, rather than ‘inward people,’ reflecting on
the meaning of our lives...We define ourselves by what we
do, rather than by any quality of what we are inside...Since
prayer belongs to the relational side of human life to ‘who I
am’ rather than to ‘what I do’, it is inevitable that prayer will
have a very low priority, at the very best, for people who live
busy lives. None of us is too busy for the things that we
regard as priorities.^22
The Spirit’s help in prayer is mentioned in the Bible more
frequently than any other help He gives us. All true praying
comes from the Spirit’s activity in our souls. Both Paul and
Jude teach that effective prayer is ‘praying in the Spirit.’
That phrase means that we pray along the same lines, about
the same things, in the same name, as the Holy Spirit. True
prayer rises in the spirit of the Christian from the Spirit who
indwells us.^23
CHARACTER:
If we are to do God’s work God’s way, we must start with
character...^24
