00:00:02 Speaker 1: Life Audio. 00:00:05 Speaker 2: Teach Us to Praise brought to you by Life Audio and is a part of our Faith Toolkit series. For more inspirational faith affirming podcasts, visit lifeaudio dot com. 00:00:21 Speaker 3: Sometimes prayer can be easy and comforting. Other times prayer can feel like. 00:00:27 Speaker 1: Talking to a brick wall. 00:00:31 Speaker 3: Why is it that sometimes it's easier to pray than others. I'm going to be answering that question in today's episode and how to overcome the challenges that make praying so hard sometimes. 00:00:44 Speaker 1: Stay tuned, Welcome back, friend. 00:00:55 Speaker 3: You are listening to the Teacher Us to Pray podcast, where we teach believers practical and real life tips on how to grow your faith and relationship with. 00:01:03 Speaker 1: God through the power of prayer. 00:01:06 Speaker 3: I'm Christina Patterson, host of the Teach Just to Prayer podcast and founder of Beloved Women, where I have the honor to encourage, equip and empower women all over the world in the love of Jesus Christ and the. 00:01:17 Speaker 1: Truth of God's Word. 00:01:19 Speaker 3: Sometimes I will have these seasons where I just thoroughly enjoy praying, and honestly, this is most of the time because it is the one time during the day where I can just cast my cares on God and know that he hears me. 00:01:36 Speaker 1: I'm reminded that I'm not alone. 00:01:39 Speaker 3: And it's then that prayer brings much comfort and healing and restoration to my soul, which is much of the purpose of prayer for us to connect with God, to refill our souls with Him. But if I'm honest with you, there are times where prayer isn't that easy, where it feels like a real struggle. It can cause me anxiety sometimes when I go through these seasons and I just don't feel like God's there, or I don't feel like I'm praying right and it just doesn't feel the same. I wonder if you've ever experienced that before, or maybe you're experiencing that right now in your own prayer life. Prayer is such a gift for believers to connect with the God of the universe, the God that created us. 00:02:38 Speaker 1: However, I have. 00:02:39 Speaker 3: Experienced firsthand that prayer isn't always easy, and so I want to chat with you about a few reasons why you may be finding prayer to be particularly hard in this season of your life, and how to overcome those challenges. First, we have to understand that prayer is a practice and This is why it's not always easy to do. It's something that has to be learned. We aren't just born with this innate gift to pray, not most of us, not me at least, and so it's something. 00:03:17 Speaker 1: That we have to get used to doing. 00:03:20 Speaker 3: If you are new to the faith or you are new to the practice of prayer, it's not gonna always be smooth, especially when you are just getting started. And if you think about it, that goes for any practice that you try to learn or implement in your life. If you're just learning how to play basketball, you're not gonna automatically know how to dribble. You're gonna need someone to teach you how to do it. And then guess what you're gonna have to do. You are going to have to practice. 00:03:48 Speaker 1: I love that. 00:03:49 Speaker 3: In the Book of Philippians, the apostle Paul tells the church in Philippi to instead of worrying. 00:03:54 Speaker 1: To pray. 00:03:55 Speaker 3: He tells him to pray about everything. But then at the end of his letter, know what he says. He says, put these things into practice. What that means is he didn't expect them to get everything right off of the first try. He's saying I just want you to keep trying and keep practicing, because that is how you get better. So sometimes prayer is challenging just because we don't do it. Often it's challenging because we're just getting started, and I know that that can be so frustrating. I deal with this with my kids oftentimes, whenever they are learning something new, they just want to be experts at it from the get go. They want to automatically know how to do something well. And I find myself constantly reminding them, listen, you're just learning this. You're gonna make mistakes. It's gonna be challenging if there are gonna be some bumps in the road, and that's how this is supposed to go, so that you can learn from those mistakes so that you can then get better. Your prayer life with God is going to be similar. It's going to take practice. It takes practice to know how to pray and what things that you feel comfortable saying and what things you can say. And it takes practice to also hear from God and know that He hears you when you pray. That's one of the reasons why we have this entire podcast. If you are new to the podcast, I want to encourage you to go back and listen to some previous episodes, because we have some great episodes where we teach you not only how to pray, but different prayer practice, how to hear from God, and all of these things that you can implement as you put into practice prayer. The second challenge that we often face when it comes to praying and why we feel like prayer can be such a struggle and so hard sometimes is that we don't like silence. 00:05:57 Speaker 1: That's right. 00:05:57 Speaker 3: I know that I've said many times on this podcast that prayer is our conversation. 00:06:03 Speaker 1: With God, and it very much is. Now. 00:06:08 Speaker 3: When we think of conversation, we think of one person talking and then another person talking, and it is this continuous flow of back and forth conversation. Even if you think about it, when you're talking to someone and then there's a moment of silence where neither of you has anything to say, it can feel kind of awkward, can it. Sometimes we feel that same awkwardness in our prayer life with God when it feels like things are silent, and honestly, it might just be a natural pause in the conversation to hold the moment, to remember the last thing that he spoke to you again. I have another episode, it's episode thirty six to be exact, that teaches you how to pray when you feel like God is silent, because it is natural to feel that way sometimes and to understand that that doesn't mean that God's not there. It doesn't mean that he doesn't hear you. So it's a natural thing for God to sometimes feel silent or actually be silent in our prayer lives. This is challenging for us, however, because we're not comfortable with silence. We let our minds run and we assume the worst when there're this moment of silence as something's bad, or God's mad at us, or and it's none of that. 00:07:27 Speaker 1: It's none of that. Sometimes many times we need that silence. 00:07:33 Speaker 3: In my interview with Patrice Burrell, she talked about practicing moments of silent prayer and this practice of sitting before the Lord in silence and not talking, not necessarily expecting to hear anything, but just truly embracing and enjoying his presence, because that is also a prayer practice, to just be still. We live in such a loud society. There is noise everywhere, and one thing that we don't often realize is that our souls desperately need moments of stillness and silence. And I believe that sometimes that's why when we come to God to pray, we don't hear anything. It's not because he's mad at us. It's because he's giving our souls something that our souls rarely receive, the beauty of resting in silence and solitude. There's something about being still and silence that fills our souls like nothing else. And I think that God calls us to those moments sometimes, but we become afraid, and so then we start talking and moving and making something up to do because we're uncomfortable. But we should really embrace those moments. Think about Psalm twenty three, where the psalmist says that the Lord leads him beside still waters to what to then restore his soul. Prayer is hard because sometimes it feels uncomfortable, but it's in those uncomfortable moments we need to rest in God's presence and know that He's just trying. 00:09:26 Speaker 1: To restore our souls. 00:09:29 Speaker 3: The third reason why sometimes prayer can be so challenging and hard is we might have some sin in our lives. And this is where prayer comes in really helpful, because then we can repent of that sin in our prayer life, we can turn from it and then approach the Lord with confidence. And I want to note here that repentance is a process, a gift that we have, not to demn us and make us to feel bad, but it is a freeing practice that we can participate in when we pray to God to release our sin to him, to confess our sin to him so that we can receive his forgiveness, so that we can then come to Him confidently. This is the entire reason why Jesus died on the cross for our sins, not for us to sit back and just feel bad about all the wrong that we've done and feel like we can't come to God. 00:10:30 Speaker 1: Jesus died so that we could come to God. 00:10:35 Speaker 3: If there is sin in your life, that is what Jesus came to save you from. It does not have to separate you from God anymore if we would have hearts to come to God in prayer and repentance and let him turn our lives around. The next reason why prayer can be so hard sometimes is because the enemy will strategically attack us in our prayer lives. He does this because he knows that prayer is the way that we can defeat him. It is a spiritual practice that gives us spiritual victory. Ephesian six tells us that our battle isn't against flesh and blood. It's a very much a spiritual battle that we're all in. And guess what prayer is. It's spiritual. It is a spiritual weapon that the Lord has given us. So one thing that the enemy is going to do to us is attack us in our prayer lives. Whenever you think of any kind of battle between two enemies, one thing that your enemy is going to want to do is cut lines of communication with your allies, because then you can call for help. The enemy of our souls thinks very much like this. If he can stop us from praying, he can cut off the source of our victory against him. Maybe he's attacking you with distracting thoughts. Maybe you feel anxious when you start to pray. Maybe you start thinking about past mistakes and all these bad thoughts come into your mind, or you just can't focus, or you keep falling asleep. 00:12:17 Speaker 1: Whatever it is, whatever tactic. 00:12:19 Speaker 3: The enemy is using this stop you from praying. I want you to pray about that too. When you start to pray, say Lord, I feel like I'm under attack. Please clear my mind so that I can connect with you in this moment. 00:12:34 Speaker 1: Pray about your prayer. 00:12:35 Speaker 3: The Bible tells us to pray about everything, so we should pray about anything, even when it comes to how we pray to God. 00:12:45 Speaker 1: That we need help even in our prayers. 00:12:48 Speaker 3: Please believe this is something that God desperately wants to help us with. He wants us to pray to him. He's opened the door for us to pray to him, so He's surely going to help us in this area as well, so that we can be victoria in all areas of our lives. Did you know that God made us all beautifully different, even in the way that we pray. 00:13:10 Speaker 1: That's right. 00:13:11 Speaker 3: Your prayer personality is the unique way you are most likely to communicate with God, and knowing which of the three prayer personality types you have can equip you to hear from God more clearly and overcome any obstacles to your communication with Him. I invite you to take my prayer personality quiz to learn how you best hear from God, how you most likely connect with Him in prayer, and just to have a little fun, take the quiz now at prayquiz dot com or find the link in the show notes. 00:13:38 Speaker 1: For today's show. 00:13:39 Speaker 3: It is my hope that today's episode has provided you with insightful and helpful tips on how you can pray. 00:13:46 Speaker 1: We have so much more to talk about when it comes to prayer. 00:13:49 Speaker 3: So I hope that if you were encouraged by today's episode, you will share it with a friend and subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes of the Teach Us to Pray podcast, where we will continue to learn how just breathing prayer can become a natural, consistent, and life giving part of our everyday lives. Until then, be sure to connect with me at Belovedwomen dot org and join me on the Beloved Women at for unlimited videos to grow your faith, learn God's word, and encourage your soul. Available now in the Apple and Google play stores or at Beloved Women dot tv. Thank you so much for taking time to listen today. God bless you and I'll talk to you in the next episode. Teach Us to Pray is a production of Life audio and Salem Media. If you like what you heard today, please take a second to rate and review this podcast in your favorite podcast staff so that more listeners like you can find the show. For more faith filled, inspirational podcasts, visit us at lifeaudio dot com.