Tired of ‘Doing All the Things’ When You Pray? Try This Instead by MARTI PIEPER for Charisma News
When it comes to prayer, Ashley Driscoll Chase says, we have a choice to make.
Jesus laid those choices out for us right before he shared what we call the Lord’s Prayer—when he called out the hypocrites for their meaningless repetition.
“You don’t need to wear a prayer shawl and drink oolong tea and say, ‘Om,’ and face east and all these things,” Chase says, quoting her dad and co-author of Pray Like Jesus, Pastor Mark Driscoll.
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“You don’t have to do all the things, and you don’t have to have the right words,” Chase tells Dr. Steve Greene on a recent episode of the Greenelines podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network. “You just need to come to Him like a child … and really have that childlike faith.”
Chase says that in their book, she and her father discuss categories of religion and rebellion in prayer. “Some people tend toward religion and feeling like they have to do a lot of things to earn God’s favor, to please Him. When in reality, He loves us like kids, and He’s not impressed with our works most of the time or our words, and He just wants to talk to us.
“And we also don’t want to be rebellious, where we just decide that religion is not for us or prayer’s too hard, that we just don’t want to do it, or the Bible is just old and outdated so we just don’t apply it to our lives,” she adds.
In between those two choices, Chase says, “There’s a childlike relationship with Him as Father.” And that relationship is critical to understanding the heart behind the Lord’s Prayer.
