In this video, Dr. Sinclair Ferguson offers practical counsel for seasons when prayer feels cold, showing that the surest way to a warmer heart is simply to pray.
In seasons when prayer feels cold, how do I warm my heart? I think the first level answer to that is pray. When you don’t feel like praying, then the thing you are likely to do is not pray. And you never grow in praying or want to pray by not praying. So, I think the first thing to do is to say, “Pray.”
I think almost all my Christian life, I have relied on the promise that we get in the letter of James, “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.” And if we don’t actually draw near to Him, then we don’t have that promise. So, taking hold of a promise of God like that and saying, “I’m going to put that promise into operation and trust it and trust also that as I do that, I will actually grow in prayer and that my heart will be warmed.”
I think the second help that I would suggest to other people is find somebody to pray with. And the fact that they pray with you may, it would be like strengthening a muscle by strengthening everything that was around that muscle. And I think I’ve found that helpful. And then not only that, but to have the discipline of going to the occasions when your church prays. So, at that level, the answer, what do you do when you don’t really feel like praying? The answer is pray.
Then I think another way of coming to that is, and this was Martin Luther’s way to say, “Well, Jesus has given us a start in the Lord’s Prayer.” Start with that. And as you do so, as you pray each petition, just unfold that petition a little more and you’ll find yourself progressively experiencing the warming of your heart.
And then I guess a third thing that I’ve found helpful is to know what books do that to me—I mean, apart from Scripture. Also, what sections of Scripture do that to you? And to return to them. And there are some books that I’ve found over my Christian life. Often they are biographies where I read about the ways of God with someone else and that has the effect of wanting me to seek God for myself.
So I think there are different strategies if you wanted to use that word, but at the end of the day, you pray by praying. You grow in prayer by praying and your heart is warmed in prayer by praying. So pray.