Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko: https://www.pexels.com/photo/grayscale-photo-of-a-person-reading-a-bible-5206050/
Doing and praying aren’t opposites—Jesus showed us how they go hand in hand.
One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.”
Luke 11: 1
We’re meant to spend our lives “doing.”
That might sound like I’m saying that “doing” is more important than “being,” that your identity should be wrapped up in what you do, but that’s not what I mean. What I mean is that part of your identity is that you are a human made by God in his image, and he’s given you work to do. Your work is not menial—it’s integral to who you are. It will take up most of your life, as much as raising a family or the time you spend with your spouse.
I bring this up because there’s much teaching in the church right now about rest, sabbath, and not burning yourself out, which is good. I’d say that American evangelicals are particularly prone to placing their identity in their job and becoming work-aholics. Looking at the recent scandals in the church, if they’re not sexual in nature, they almost exclusively come down to an unhealthy work ethic being forced on wildly underpaid staff. A lot of us need to calm down about work and focus more on our inner life and spirituality.
Work is part of who you are—anchor it in prayer, and a little will go a long way.
But that doesn’t mean we’re called to be monks, either. God is not calling us to walk into a prayer closet for eight hours a day, seven days a week.
So what might a healthy balance of prayer and work look like, then?
From what I can see in the life of Jesus, it doesn’t look like a balance at all. The Gospel of Luke gives us the most detailed look at the prayer life of Jesus, and while we see that he certainly prayed often, sometimes all night, prayer was not what he was doing most of the time. Most of the time, he was teaching, eating with people he loved, or walking from one city to the next. He spent the vast majority of his hours doing the work of his calling, and then he book-ended his work with prayer.
The life of Jesus clues us into a simple rule for a life of prayer: a little goes a long way.
In fact, when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, he responded with an ancient prayer that he slightly modified and told them to just pray it, what we now know as “The Lord’s Prayer” or the “Our Father.” It’s barely a few sentences long. Some teachers have tried to create it into an outline for much longer prayers, but in a nearby chapter of Matthew, Jesus specifically said that we shouldn’t expect God to hear our prayers simply because we make them long.
Work with purpose, pray with intention—a little goes a long way.
It looks like Jesus prayed almost every day, and sometimes he spent many hours in prayer. But he spent most of his time pouring himself out in love, and found that he was energized by that work, finding meat to eat that most people didn’t know about.
Production leader, most of your job is doing, and that’s good. Bookend it with prayer. A little will go a long way.
