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Seasons of Apathy
Many Christians experience seasons of spiritual apathy when the heart seems miles behind what we know to be true in our minds. We might love the Lord with our minds but struggle with disconnected hearts. Sometimes these droughts of the soul are the result of neglected spiritual nourishment, but sometimes they seem to arrive without explanation. Praying is especially difficult when your heart feels disinterested, distracted, or devoid of emotion. It can feel awkward to pray for the desire to pray, but the Lord knows our hearts better than we do, and he knows what we need. When your heart feels cold toward the Lord, praying about prayer can be the kindling of the fire that warms your affections for Christ again.

Pray for the Lord to reveal any sin that is keeping you from prayer.
At times our hearts are resistant to prayer because we are holding on to sinful habits. We can’t walk in obedience to Christ or intimacy with him if we are clinging to pet sins or ignoring behaviors in opposition to following Jesus. If you know that your resistance to prayer stems from disobedience, pray to love him more than your sin. Because you have been set free from sin, you are no longer a slave to it. You are free! Ask the Lord to help you be who you really are in Christ, not who you used to be. And then walk in obedience.

When our hearts feel apathetic, it can be difficult to rightly see our sin. Perhaps you’re not sure if there is any sin inhibiting prayer. David prayed that the Lord would reveal any wicked ways in his heart, and we can do the same. “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous ways in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” (Ps. 139:23–24) Because our hearts are deceptive, a regular examination helps us see ourselves as we really are, to see God as he really is, and to remember what Jesus did at the cross to reconcile us to a holy God. Pray for the Lord to reveal areas of sin you might be hardened or blind to. As he does, confess them and repent.

Pray for the Lord to stir your affections for him.
It’s not uncommon to have days when you feel dull towards the Lord. You might even feel embarrassed to confess that you cannot muster any affection towards the Lord. These feelings aren’t unique; we see them in the Psalms. Asaph wrote, “I was brutish and ignorant; I was like a beast toward you” (Ps. 73:22). But the Lord knows our weaknesses, and he has given us everything we need for life and godliness. The gift of prayer is that we can come boldly before the Lord, even when we don’t know what to say or how to feel. The Holy Spirit intercedes for us and Jesus is ever praying for us (see Rom. 8:26–27, Heb. 7:25).

Knowing that you aren’t praying alone, ask the Lord to awaken your heart to joy, love, and contentment in him. And then take steps to engage your heart with the beauty and kindness of the Lord. Preach the gospel to yourself, focus on God’s character in the word, meditate on a passage of Scripture so that it takes root deep down in your heart. Fix your gaze on Christ until you remember how much he loves you. Don’t be discouraged if there’s not an overnight change. The cumulative effects of looking to Christ in Scripture will change the way you think about the Lord. Fixing your gaze on Jesus may be a hard-won practice, but the Lord will work good from your efforts at renewing your mind.

Pray for and seek accountability.
Your prayers are never a solitary activity. The Spirit and the Son are interceding on your behalf as you pray to the Father. The Godhead is invested in your prayer life! Additionally, the church can be a gift to us when we struggle to engage with the Lord in prayer. If spiritual dryness or apathy are keeping you from regular, intentional prayer, ask the Lord to help you find a fellow church member who will both hold you accountable and pray for you.

Each week I meet with a friend from church. She asks questions about my spiritual disciplines and prays for me throughout the week in the areas where I’m lazy or weak. Prayerlessness has long been a topic of discussion; knowing that my friend is actually praying about my prayer life exhorts me to seek the Lord daily. I’m not the only one invested in my prayers! Praying with someone about your struggle to pray could revive your disinterested soul and remind you what a privilege it is to come before the Lord at any time.

Pray for an obedient heart.
When it comes down to it, how we feel matters less than obedience. Prayer is an act of both obedience and gratitude. Jesus tells us how to pray in the Lord’s prayer and begins with the assumption that we will pray. He said, “And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites,” and “when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do” (Matt. 6:5,7 emphasis added). He also demonstrated the need for prayer by slipping away from the crowds and disciples to pray (see Matt. 14:23, Mark 1:35, John 17). The apostle Paul called believers to unceasing prayer many times in his epistles (see Eph. 6:18, Phil. 4:6–7, Col. 4:2, 1 Thess. 5:17–19). Jesus’s half-brother addressed several specific reasons for prayer in James 5:13–18. Believers are expected to pray, and believers must pray in obedience to Scripture. But the motivation behind this obedience isn’t duty; it’s gratitude.

The author of Hebrews charges believers to draw near to God the Father because of Jesus’s sacrifice at the cross. “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh. . . let us draw near. . . ” (Heb. 10:19–20, 22). Prior to Christ’s coming, the people of God could only seek him through a Levitical priest at the tabernacle and later the temple. A curtain separated the people from God’s holy presence. But when Christ died for us at the cross, he bought us direct access to the Father. We must take advantage of such a gift and draw near to God in prayer because we can. We pray when we don’t feel like it because Jesus made it possible.

Pray for perseverance and practice it.
Our flesh would have us believe that we should give up when prayer feels hard. Surely a break is what we need! But it is more likely that abandoning prayer will extend a season of disaffection rather than shorten it. Disengaging from prayer isn’t the right answer. Perseverance is. Pressing forward in prayer is how we learn to really pray. Perseverance is how we get past the brick-wall feeling and walk with delight in the nearness of God.

Don Carson wrote that we should “pray long enough and honestly enough, at a single session, to get past the feeling of formalism and unreality that attends not a little praying. We are especially prone to such feelings when we pray for only a few minutes, rushing to be done with a mere duty. To enter the spirit of prayer we must stick to it for a while.” In other words, we must do as the Puritans encouraged and “pray until you pray.”

The cure for praying with a cold, apathetic heart is prayer itself. We pray for God to help us obey, to persevere, to abandon sins that entangle and distract, and to stir our affections for Christ anew. We obey by practicing prayer. We recite what is true about God and Jesus and our new status as heirs—not because God needs to be reminded but because we do. Over time, the ice will thaw, the heart will warm, and we will delight in the presence and love of God. All the hours of practicing prayer when our hearts are cold are never wasted. They are the path we travel to renewed love for conversation with the Lord.

* * *

Glenna Marshall is the author of Everyday Faithfulness: The Beauty of Ordinary Perseverance in a Demanding World.

Crossway. How to Pray When Your Heart Feels Cold. Glenna Marshall. June 9, 2020.

https://www.crossway.org/articles/how-to-pray-when-your-heart-feels-cold/

There seems to be something embedded within our sinful human nature that makes us quicker to see evil than good. There is something that draws our attention more naturally to sin than to righteousness, more easily to what is ugly in other people than what is beautiful. No wonder, then, that one of the qualifications for an elder is that he must “a lover of good”, a man who takes delight in the things that delight the heart of God, a man who is not known primarily for the evils he despises but for the good he loves (Titus 1:8).

In that vein, what do you suppose comes more readily to the mind of God when he considers us—the evil we have done or the good? The evidences of remaining sin or the evidences of new grace? The ways in which we have defied his will or the ways in which we have submitted to it? I hope and expect the answer is obvious. While God sees and knows all things, surely what he most readily and eagerly sees in us is all the ways in which we are becoming like him—the godly character, the acts of love, the deeds of faith. He is a proud Father.

But I wonder about you. I wonder what is in your mind and what fills your heart when you consider Christian leaders or personalities, when you consider members of your local church, when you consider your own husband or wife or children? When it comes to other Christians in the widest circle or the narrowest, are you more likely to consider their strengths or their weaknesses, their virtues or their vices?

When someone mentions that Christian leader, do you think first about his flaws or about his graces? Is the first thing that comes to your mind the position he holds that irritates you or the deed he committed that bothers you? Or is it the way the Lord has shaped him and raised him to a position of prominence and used him there to bless others? Is it his failures, however obvious they may be, or his successes?

When someone asks you about that member of your church, could you more easily recount evidences of sinfulness in her life or evidences of grace? Is what naturally pours out of your mouth a list of proofs of the old woman or the new woman? Of what she was or what she is and will be?

When you pray for your husband, are your first words to the Lord words of praise and gratitude for the way God has been working within him and doing such good through him? Or are your first words related to his flaws and your hope that God will finally correct them? Do you more naturally see what’s wrong with him or what’s right? Do you more naturally offer the Lord praise or petition when you consider him?

Does your heart more readily identify what is lovely or what is abhorrent, what pleases God or what grieves him?

When it comes to your spouse, when it comes to your children, when it comes to the members of your church, when it comes to other Christians of any kind, are you more skilled at identifying good or evil, sinfulness or virtue? Does your heart more readily identify what is lovely or what is abhorrent, what pleases God or what grieves him? Is the instinct of your tongue to praise God for the work he has done or to lament the work he has not yet done? I ask you to consider: Are you, like God, a true lover of good, a true searcher for good, and a truly committed identifier of good?

Challies. Are You a Lover of Good? September 4, 2023. Tim Challies.

https://www.challies.com/articles/are-you-a-lover-of-good/

Read
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

Reflect
Early in the morning, I wake and quietly make my way to the gray wing chair in my home office. I’m determined to be productive in these precious predawn hours.

Only a few minutes into my routine, however, the door next to me slowly opens and my 4-year-old son walks in, bleary-eyed. All he wants to do is crawl into my lap and put a tired head on my shoulder. My plans for this moment are spoiled, but I couldn’t care less. Why? Because I’m this boy’s father, and he’s my son, and that’s enough to make me welcome his intrusion with joy.

One of the reasons we miss drinking more deeply of God’s love is that we forget to think of him as Father. We may know it’s true because we’ve read our Bibles, but our intuitions still imagine God as a more distant figure. This isn’t merely a shortcoming in our thinking; it’s a tragic distortion of our view of God.

“Father” isn’t a random nickname for God. It’s who God fundamentally is. He is Father. God the Father has eternally begotten God the Son. Jesus taught us to pray, “Our Father.” Why? Theologian Michael Reeves puts it like this: “This is who God has revealed himself to be: not first and foremost Creator or Ruler, but Father.”

Not all of us have fathers who loved and protected us. For many, the word “father” is a pain, not a comfort. God sees this pain. He is the perfect Father, the One our hearts were made to know.

Understanding the perfect, fatherly character of God awakens the love of God in us. Jesus reminded us: if even sinful human fathers can genuinely love their children, our heavenly Father is infinitely more eager to shower unfathomable riches of love on us (Matt. 7:11). We’re not tolerated employees or hired hands but adopted sons of the Father (Rom. 8:15).

God’s love for his people isn’t something he was manipulated or forced into feeling. God the Father, in his perfect, insurmountable fatherly compassion, sent his only begotten Son to the world to die so that dying spiritual orphans, enslaved to sin, could become his children and hear their Father singing over them (Zeph. 3:17). Savor your position in the household of God—he delights in you, he loves you, and he welcomes you into his presence.

When we look at the Christmas manger, we need to see more than a baby. We need to see a heavenly Father, the One who gave his only Son to us so we might become adopted sons and daughters. Could a Father this good, who gave this much, be anything but perfect for our weary, sinful, broken hearts?

Respond
How does knowing God as Father change how you feel toward him? How does it change what you think he feels toward you?

Rejoice

Of the Father’s love begotten,
Ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega,
He the source, the ending he,
Of the things that are and have been,
And that future years shall see,
Evermore and evermore.

– Prudentius (trans. J. M. Neale), “Of the Father’s Love Begotten”

Editors’ note: This meditation appears in The Weary World Rejoices: Daily Devotions for Advent edited by Melissa Kruger (TGC, November 2021).

TheGospelCoalition. Advent Meditation: Behold the Father's Love. Samuel James. December 6, 2023. 

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/advent-meditation-fathers-love/

Read
Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift! (2 Cor. 9:15)

Reflect
It’s the season of gift giving. I love considering just the right gifts for neighbors, friends, and family. Each person’s name under the tree is special to me in some way. The part of gift giving I enjoy has little to do with money and everything to do with expression. Each type of gift communicates some­thing from the giver to the receiver:

A gift that fulfills a need says, “I notice and care about you.”

A gift that’s a complete surprise says, “I know what you need, even if you didn’t know you needed it.”

A gift that can be enjoyed for years to come says, “I want to bless you with future joy.”

A gift that comes with personal sacrifice says, “I love you more than I love myself.”

Even though I love gift giving, as I face the hustle and bustle of shopping and see the materialism abounding in our culture, I find myself questioning, “What does any of this have to do with Jesus?” Is the way we celebrate Christmas just an excuse to overspend, overindulge, and focus too much on earthly treasures? Should I run from the stores, remove the presents from the tree, and find other ways to celebrate?

As I discussed my internal struggle with my husband, he kindly reminded me that gift giving is not just a reflection of worldly materialism (although it can be), but it’s also a reflec­tion of our Creator, who delights to give gifts to his people. Our conversation prompted me to ponder anew the gift giv­en in Bethlehem.

Truly special gifts usually involve preparation and wait­ing. From the exit of Eden, a promise of redemption and a hope were given. The divine whisper continued speaking through all the prophets: Something special is coming. Wait for it. Watch for it. Hope in it.

And then, at just the right moment in time, God sent angels and a star in the heavens to declare: “The gift is here.” Glory wrapped in flesh made his dwelling among us in the form of a baby.

It was unexpected. It was surprising. It was exactly what we needed.

The second Adam, born of a virgin, born far from the paradise of Eden, came and lived a sinless life. He resisted temptation. He wept. He rejoiced. He went to weddings. He made intimate friendships. He experienced betrayal. He healed. He taught. He loved. He lived a perfect life and died a sacrificial death. His people wanted an earthly kingdom, but he ushered in a heavenly one.

All of it was part of the gift.

When I consider all the reasons I love giving and receiv­ing gifts, I realize that in Christ, God fulfills them all. In Je­sus, God communicates:

I knew what you needed, even when you didn’t know you needed it. (Rom. 5:15–19)

You are fully known and fully loved by me. (1 Cor. 13:1–12)

I want to give you future joy. (Rev. 21:1–4)

I love you more than I love myself. (John 15:13)

Christ is the one gift needed. He never wears out or loses shape. Like a treasure chest, deeply laden with all sorts of riches, new delights await, ready to be uncovered.

Respond
Consider this past year. How has your faith in Jesus given you joy? When you think of Jesus, what are you thankful for?

Rejoice

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as, the curse is found.

– Isaac Watts, “Joy to the World”

Editors’ note: This meditation appears in The Weary World Rejoices: Daily Devotions for Advent edited by Melissa Kruger (TGC, Nov. 2021).

TheGospelCoalition. Advent Meditation: Joy in Giving. Melissa Kruger. December 15, 2021.

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/joy-in-giving/

Read
For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this. (Isa. 9:6–7)

Reflect
Peace, as an idea, is immensely popular. We love talking about it, posting about it, dreaming about it, planning for it.

But it sure can be elusive, can’t it?

Despite its universally beloved status, peace doesn’t mark our world—and I don’t simply mean unsettling headlines from distant lands. Peace eludes those in the securest neighborhoods, the richest professions, the most advanced nations. Peace eludes us even when we’ve arrived.

In his 2009 NBA Hall of Fame speech, Michael Jordan called the game of basketball his “refuge.” He said, “[It’s the] place I’ve gone when I needed to find comfort and peace.” A few years later, on the occasion of his 50th birthday, the restlessness remained. In a candid interview with ESPN’s Wright Thompson, Jordan pondered aloud, “How can I enjoy the next 20 years without so much of this consuming me? How can I find peace away from the game of basketball?”

The answer, it turns out—both for Jordan and for us—is found in an ancient scroll.

Seven centuries before the Messiah’s birth, Isaiah the prophet issued a divine forecast. Addressing the Israelites, who were about to be exiled for their rebellion and idolatry, he pointed them to a future time when a solution—an undeserved remedy—would descend from God himself. He even hinted the remedy would be God himself.

This coming gift is cosmic in proportion and yet intensely personal. Notice the recipient: “to us” (v. 6). Israel’s name is on the label. And the contents are divine: the promised child will be none less than the “Mighty God.” Moreover, it’s a gift tied to the very thing that eludes us. The promised child will also be called the “Prince of Peace”—a fitting title because, for his people, there will be no end to “the increase of his government and of peace.” No exceptions, no elusiveness, no expiration date.

And the reason this promise will hold is because the gospel is bigger than a nativity scene. The incarnation of Jesus Christ was an invasion, both a dawning of peace and a declaration of war. The baby in the manger didn’t stay there, after all—he grew up and obeyed his Father to the point of death, even death on a cross. Suspended on Roman wood, he made peace between God and man (Eph. 2:14–17).

No other religion teaches anything like this. Each one insists, in some form or another, that you must achieve the peace of God, some semblance of transcendental tranquility—which is also why it never happens. How could it? As a sinner, you’re the problem in this equation, not the solution. In Christianity, however, you can

• receive the peace of God, through trusting Jesus;
• enjoy the peace of God, through following Jesus; and
• spread the peace of God, through proclaiming Jesus.

Friend, if you want to experience the peace of God, you must know the God of peace. And if you want to know the God of peace, you must embrace his only begotten Son.

Real peace isn’t found in a basketball arena or a Hall of Fame ceremony. It’s not found in a successful job or a secure neighborhood. It’s not found in food or exercise or travel or holiday cheer. It’s not even found in a loving family or a vibrant ministry. In the final analysis, peace is only found in the Prince of it.

Respond
In what created thing has your heart been seeking peace? How might the gospel of grace liberate you from that exhausting pursuit—reordering your loves and redirecting your allegiance to the Prince of Peace?

Rejoice

Hail the heaven-born Prince of Peace!
Hail the Sun of righteousness!
Light and life to all he brings
Risen with healing in his wings

– Charles Wesley, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”

Editors’ note: This meditation appears in The Weary World Rejoices: Daily Devotions for Advent edited by Melissa Kruger (TGC, November 2021).

TheGospelCoalition. Advent Meditation: The (Only) Place to Find Peace. Matt Smethurst. December 4, 2023. 

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/advent-meditation-find-peace/