Books

Prayer is spiritual work; and human nature does not like taxing, spiritual work. Human nature wants to sail to heaven under a favoring breeze, a full, smooth sea. Prayer is humbling work. It abases intellect and pride, crucifies vainglory, and signs our spiritual bankruptcy, and all these are hard for flesh and blood to bear. It is easier…

I've been reading a book simply called Prayer (originally published 1662/1692; Banner of Truth, 2012), by John Bunyan, the puritan pastor who also wrote The Pilgrim's Progress. It's been very helpful for ordering my heart and my thoughts toward God. Bunyan goes to great lengths to humble his readers with the awareness of their own sin and weakness. He brings you low under the weight of your guilt and depravity, and for good reason. Here's his explanation of why:

Here is the life of prayer, when in or with the [Holy] Spirit, a man being made sensible of sin, and how to come to the Lord for mercy, he comes, I say, in the strength of the Spirit, and cries "Father" [Romans 8:15]. That one word spoken in faith is better than a thousand prayers, as men call them, written and read in a formal, cold, luke-warm way.

O how far short are the people of being sensible of this, who count it enough to teach themselves and children to say the Lord's prayer, the [Apostles'] creed, with other sayings; when, as God knows, they are senseless of themselves, their misery, or what it is to be brought to God through Christ! Ah, poor soul! study your misery, and cry to God to show you your confused blindness and ignorance, before you be too ready in calling God your Father, or teaching your children so to say. And know that to say God is your Father, in a way of prayer or conference, without any experiment [experience] of the work of grace on your souls, it is to say you are Jews and are not, and so do lie [Revelation 3:9]. You say, "Our Father"; God says, "You blaspheme!" (28)