The Secret to Prayer

31 Days to a More Intimate Relationship with God

Kyle DiRoberts

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781087740454
• eBook ISBN: 9781087740461
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Everyone wants to know how to talk to God and get answers to their prayers. Yet most people are skeptical of prayer, or convinced they’re doing it wrong.
 
Is there a secret to talking with God?
 
God is more concerned about the condition of our hearts than the words we use. He cares more about the posture of our hearts than the posture of our bodies. And what is the right heart posture? Humility. 
 
The Secret to Prayer will take readers on a 31-day journey, examining the heart and actions of biblical characters whose prayers were answered. On the other side of the journey, readers will have a more vibrant prayer life, and a more intimate relationship with the God to whom we pray.
 

PART I

THEO-TALK

There can be no substitute for prayer. Here we speak not merely of times set apart when we fold hands and bow heads, but also of a way of being.

—Kelly Kapic

Introduction to Part I

How do we pray from a humble heart?

Good question.

It’s hard.

It would be far easier to write about what humble prayers sound like or look like because, then, they could be copied or adapted by each person. But correct words are not necessarily indicators of a humble heart. That just means you know how to sound humble. Proper posture does not indicate a humble heart either. It simply means you know how to look the part.

In order to embrace a humble heart in prayer, we have to believe some specific theological truths about God. That’s what we are going to explore in this part of the book.

Unfortunately, I can’t present humility in a systematized way. Humility isn’t that easy. Humility isn’t that structured. It’s more of an art.

I’d rather us envision these humble truths about the divine–human relationship in prayer as a mosaic, with the hope that in the end we will see individually and collectively something beautiful.

As this part of the book (“Theo-Talk”) draws upon God’s conversational relationship with us, an important relationship of mine continues to resurface over and over again. Unique to “Theo-Talk” are various stories about my two boys. Hidden in them are images of some of the ways we comprehend our relationship with God. In a way, my sons pray to me all the time.

CHAPTER 1

Swing Your Swing

Human beings are created in the image of God (imago dei), which means you are not just something, but someone.

A unique someone.

With a unique language.

Our mind, our emotions, our heritage, our experiences all help shape who we are long before the words we choose to speak take form.

It would be boring if we all expressed ourselves the same way.

The beauty (and difficulty) of a relationship is that we have to know who we are talking to if we really want to understand what the other person is saying. The words we choose to employ in a conversation could be the same words another might use, but what sets words apart is that they come from a certain person with a unique personality, heart, and mind.

Dictionaries are helpful in that they provide the meaning of a word, but dictionaries are useless when it comes to understanding the person using those words.

To have a relationship with another person is a humbling experience, because each person can’t participate in that relationship with the assumption that he or she knows everything. Or even a little. The pitfall of assumptions is that the one assuming is self-reliant in the relationship and not dependent on the other person.

It is also difficult to maintain a relationship with a person who thinks he or she knows everything. To be a friend, one must observe, listen, be present, and ask questions.

When you first meet someone, you have no shared vocabulary. Even when you’re on friendly terms, you might not grasp the meaning of his or her words because you haven’t spent the time or effort to get to know him or her. Once you begin to understand another person, his or her words begin to make more sense. In other words, the more I get to know someone, the more he or she makes sense to me.

This means we need to listen to our friends, family, and neighbors as though we have never heard the words they’re speaking before. Because we haven’t, and who knows if we will ever hear them spoken like that again?

God knows us this way.

He not only knows the words we are choosing to communicate, He also knows the experiences causing us to choose those specific words. God celebrates our uniqueness, yet often in prayer, we desire to fit in to some common mold as if there is just one way to pray. It’s as though we think we have to have a prayer language that is totally different from how we speak to anyone else.

At first glance, this makes sense. In prayer, we aren’t talking to just anyone. We are talking to God.

But what if our prayer language came from the same words we speak on a daily basis?

The same words we speak to our children. Our spouse. Our friends. Our coworkers. Our baristas. Our . . .

What if it isn’t necessary to use a whole new set of words that we only use when we speak to God?

Instead, why not use the words we are most familiar with? If I’m honest, if you really want me to “pray constantly” (1 Thess. 5:17), it would be much easier for me to attempt this if I could just use the words I speak most often.

Part of what makes prayer so uncomfortable is that we are so accustomed to speaking to our friends without any concern about the content of our heart. Then, in prayer, it’s hard to make the transition to communicating to God, even to the point that something doesn’t feel right as we speak to God.

I wonder if that discomfort is due to a heartfelt reality that we know we can’t speak to God with the same words we use when speaking to others.

Maybe we avoid the internal dilemma, and we just dodge speaking to God altogether. Or we get creative, and we speak to God with humble words but from a prideful heart.

So what do we do? Maybe we need to address the root of the problem and not the symptom. Maybe we need to treat the illness rather than the cough. Maybe we need God to change our hearts.

Psalm 139 describes what God knows about you.

He knows when you sit down. When you stand up. When you lie down. Thoughts before you think them. All this led the psalmist to proclaim: “I have been remarkably and wondrously made” (Ps. 139:14).

The psalmist did add one other aspect of God’s knowledge: “Before a word is on my tongue, you know all about it, Lord” (Ps. 139:4).

This means there is diversity and creativity in the way you and I speak to God. He knows my words, your words, her words, his words. God knows our words altogether. Even though we all speak different words. That is what amazed the psalmist—that God would have that kind of knowledge about us.

Moreover, in Psalm 139, God’s knowledge is such that He knows thoughts before we speak them. This is beautiful on a number of levels, but one reason is that God knows our personalities, experiences, presuppositions, and biases long before we get to the point of speaking.

God receives prayer from a humble heart.

Jesus picked up on this in the stories we read about Him in the Gospels. He didn’t praise someone for the words they spoke and then model those words over and over again to the disciples, as if the words were the rubric to effective prayer. Rather, he puts before us a diverse range of individuals to learn from—like a...

Table of contents

• Introduction: The Illness of Prayer
• Part I: Theo-Talk
• Part II: Prayers of Humble Kings
• Part III: Sin Makes You Holy
• Part IV: Confess Your Sins to One Another
• Part V: Keep Praying, God Isn’t Annoyed
• Part VI: Unanswered Prayer