Spiritual Aerobics: Don’t Hold Your Breath; Breathe!

Exercises! You either love them or loathe them. Regardless of where your emotions lie when the subject is mentioned, we all agree that they are good for us. That is if we want to be healthy and fit!

For some time now, my family has adopted the practice of going on a 3 – 5 kilometres run at least once a week. Even though we all agreed we need to do this to stay fit, getting the foot out of the door is always an upward hill to climb! Somehow, exercise feels like a punishment before you actually do it. But you can’t beat the benefits, nor can you have them any other way. You’ve got to do it, or else you lose the benefits.

Prayer is like exercise; it yields the benefit of a healthy Christian life. Believers have long referred to prayer as a spiritual discipline, along with other practices such as the intake of God’s word, fasting, evangelism, stewardship, giving, worship, learning, silence and solitude. The phrase “spiritual disciplines“ is one that the Bible itself commends to us in 2 Timothy 4:7, when it says to “…discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness.“

I have met believers who resent the phraseology “spiritual disciplines“, since in their view, it connotes a feeling of a chore which must be endured. Nothing could be farther from the truth! Somehow, the lethargic feelings physical exercise elicits in many of us have unconsciously, and I must add, erroneously induced an apprehension of spiritual disciplines such as prayer and the intake of God’s word.

I would like to suggest a paradigm shift in our thinking. Far from being a drudge or unpleasant necessity one must merely endure, the spiritual disciplines are but an invitation to enjoy God! To use an analogy, which of us would resent a standing invitation to enjoy our favourite meal at a five-star restaurant of our choice free of charge for all time? Such is prayer. Of course, this analogy is an imperfect one because the joy that is ours when we spend time communing with God in prayer or His Word is infinitely more significant and far more rewarding than the ephemeral pleasure we could derive from a delicious meal well-enjoyed.

In prayer, we are offered an open invitation to the throne room of the King of the whole universe, who is also our Father; and he gives us all His attention whenever we call on Him (Hebrews 4:16; Isaiah 65:24; Psalms 34:15). We commune as children with a dear father who loves to lavish on us and rub off his glory on us, thereby making us more like Him (2 Corinthians 3:18; Psalms 34:5). In whose presence there is fulness of joy; at whose right hand are pleasures forevermore (Psalms 16:11).

Each time we open the pages of Scripture, we hear the sweet promises of our Father. God speaks to us the clearest through His Word. We read about all He has done to redeem us to Himself in it. There we see Jesus, in all His glory, the effulgence of which is the exact representation of the portrait of our Father (John 14:9; Colossians 1:15-19). Thus, each time we come to the Bible, we partake of a varied menu of the richest diet – one that proves delicious to the soul, as Jeremiah testifies

“Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart.“ (Jeremiah 15:16):

JUST BREATHE

Perhaps, another reason so many believers are wary of prayer is that they fail to see the simplicity of prayer. We tend to complicate even the simplest of things as humans. Take, for example, God’s offer of salvation as a gift devoid of any works or payment on our part. It insults the pride of fallen man to accept something he did not work for. Thus, to borrow Paul’s words, we seek to establish a righteousness of our own (Romans 10:3). In the book of Galatians, we see that this was a bone of contention between the Jewish Christians and the converts from Galatia. Some Jews who had converted to Christianity insisted that unless their gentile brethren performed the ritual of circumcision prescribed by Moses, their Christianity wouldn’t be complete.

If prayer were a complicated task requiring extraordinary mastery to practice, Jesus would have left it for an elite few of his followers to do it. However, he expected that his followers would be in constant communion with their Father in heaven; he himself modelled this during his life on earth (Matthew 14:23; Mark 1:35 Luke 5:16; 6:12; 9:28).

The apostles also taught that our lives should be saturated by prayer. Paul said to “pray without ceasing“ (1 Thessalonians 5:17), “Keep on praying at all times with all kinds of prayers“ (Ephesians 6:18) and to “be devoted to prayer, watching in it with thanksgiving.“ It would be unfair of our Lord or the apostles to expect us to pray so often if it required special skills. So, let’s demystify prayer.

As the Word of God is the food we eat to grow(Matthew 4:4; Luke 4:4), so is prayer like the air we breathe in order to live.

Thomas Watson, the Puritan preacher, writes, “A godly man cannot live without prayer. A man cannot live unless he takes his breath, nor can the soul, unless it breathes forth its desires to God.“Matthew Henry, the great puritan commentator, agrees when he notes: “It is taken for granted that all who are disciples of Christ pray. You may as soon find a living man that does not breathe, as a living Christian that does not pray. If prayerless, then graceless.“

John MacArthur provides a beneficial illustration. He notes:

“You exist when you come into the world in an atmosphere. And one of the things that the atmosphere does is put pressure on your lungs, and from the very beginning you breathe. And the reason you breathe is because of the air pressure that is exerted against your lungs; it forces your lungs to take air in. That’s why it’s much more difficult to hold your breath than it is to breathe. You hold your breath for about a minute, and you turn purple, and your heart starts pounding, and you get sweaty because you’re resisting the normal pressure against your lungs. Well, prayer is like that. When you’re born into the family of God, when you’re born again, when you become a child of God, and you enter into God’s world, there is a sphere in which you live. The atmosphere of God’s presence and grace exerts pressure on your life, and the normal thing is to breathe, and we just say that’s prayer – responding to God’s pressure and presence in your life. Prayer is as normal to the Christian as breathing is to the human. You live in an atmosphere, and you respond to that atmosphere of the presence of God by receiving that presence of God and by taking it in and putting it back out again in response to Him.“

I believe MacArthur is right. Romans 8:23 points to the fact that one of the signs of the new birth in the believer is that the Holy Spirit in them cries, Abba! Father! This is a tender communication of a newborn baby to a loving daddy. And thus, the regenerated soul cannot but constantly breathe out its desires to God.

Just as we are uncomfortable when we hold our breath, so is the new man restless if it exists without prayer. That is why the Bible urges us to pray without ceasing – by which it means being in a constant communion with our Father.

In my secondary school days, the Scripture Union had a poster which read, “One week without prayer makes one weak“. Rightly so. The believer who does not pray is suffocating spiritually, panting for breath and on the verge of fainting. That is why Jesus taught in Luke 18:1 that we should always pray and not faint. The antidote to not fainting in our spiritual life is to abide in a constant state of prayer. So, don’t hold your breath, breathe!